by J.M. Landon

This week we have a review of Fog City by Claire M. Johnson, along with an interesting interview with Claire. Details at the end of this post on how to enter to win an ebook copy of the book and a link to purchase the book from Amazon.

Fog City By Claire M. Johnson
Review by J.M. Landon

Fog City is the perfect noir mystery with a few extra twists and turns. After the Great War (WWI), it is set in San Francisco. You can picture the classic black and white presentation of this story as you eagerly turn the pages. Maggie Laurent is the typical girl next door right down to the Irish heritage with a good Catholic upbringing. Somehow, she ends up as a typist for a private detective, Nick Moore. When he goes on a drunken bender over a dame, Maggie steps up and keeps things running, more to keep her paycheck than for the sake of the agency. She takes on a missing adult child case for one of the city’s richest families. She’s confident she can find the runaway son when his father becomes a murder victim. So just like that, the case turns from a missing persons case to a murder case.

Knowing she’s in over her head, she enlists the help of her bosses’ connections and manages to stumble on one body after another. Just when you think she solves the case, another wrench gets thrown in the cog.
Even though the characters are archetypical for a noir mystery, they are full of surprises. Maggie has a brother who is a former vet and the two of them live with her mother who demands daily phone calls and their presence at Sunday dinner. Dickie, a columnist, but more of a gangster type, is big, burly, and has his fist on the pulse of the city. He tends to wear wild color combinations, like a lime green shirt with a pink polka-dot tie, and is seldom far from his mother. Charlie works for Hurst out of New York and comes across as the Bogart romancer, but is he really a good guy? This is a fun read with enough puzzles in the mystery to keep the reader guessing.

Claire M. Johnson is the author of several award-winning books and can certainly craft a noir mystery with a flourish. She has recently signed a three-book deal for the Fog City Noir series, so we can expect more excellent noir from her pen.

J.M. Landon is retired and blissfully at work on the ‘great American novel.’ She’s worn many hats through her career including: wife, mother, piano teacher, middle school teacher, university professor, painter, jewelry maker, and dragon tamer. She has eight published short stories.

Interview with Claire M. Johnson:

KRL: How long have you been writing?

Claire: I started writing a little over twenty-five years ago. I’d just moved to the suburbs and felt a tremendous sense of loss of self. I’d always lived in a city, and to say that I felt like a fish out of water is an understatement. I joined the California Writers Club, hoping to find my tribe. I’ve always loved mysteries and thought I’d try my hand at writing one.

KRL: When did your first novel come out, what was it called, and would you tell us a little about it?

Claire: My first book came out in 1999 titled, Beat Until Stiff. I’d been a pastry chef for several years and thought that the drama inherent in the food business would be a great setting for a murder. The food scene in San Francisco during those years was truly amazing. Some of the greatest chefs in the country came out of San Francisco kitchens.

Claire M. Johnson

KRL: That sounds interesting! Have you always written mysteries/suspense and if not, what else have you written?

Claire: My first two books – Beat Until Stiff and Roux Morgue – were mysteries, but I’ve written a couple of Jane Austen pastiches, Pen and Prejudice and Resolution and a YA thriller, Swim Town, that I self-published. The first book in the Fog City Noir series – Fog City – is your classic P.I. noir novel, as are the sequels, City of Lights and Crookedest Street in the World.

KRL: What brought you to choose the setting and characters in your latest book/series?

Claire: San Francisco has a rough and tumble history, starting with the Gold Rush in 1848, the 1906 earthquake, the general strike in 1934, and up through the Summer of Love in 1967. It had a vibrant immigrant population, as well as being a bastion of great wealth evidenced by the mansions on Nob Hill. Despite the attempts at cleaning up the Barbary Coast area of the city, you still had a significant amount of underground crime in bootlegging and gambling. Sounds like a recipe for a mystery, doesn’t it?

KRL: Do you write to entertain or is there something more you want the readers to experience from your work?

Claire: I would say I write for both. In my pastry chef mysteries, I used the plight of the Latinx population and how they were often abused in the restaurant industry because of their undocumented status. I also wanted to burst the bubble of what a lot of people saw as the glamorous life of a chef. In my current P.I. novels, I write about the rising labor unrest that would see its apogee in the general strike of 1934. In the latest books, I’ve done a lot of research into the rise of labor and unions in response to corporate crackdowns. The strikes up and down the West Coast were broken up by city police forces, so the state was complicit in the political beatdowns of the labor movement.

KRL: Do you have a schedule for your writing or just work whenever you can?

Claire: I’m retired now, so I can write whenever I want. I wrote my first two books when my kids were finally in bed for the night. I was exhausted all the time. I try to write a good two hours a day. A wonderful way to get you in your chair and at your keyboard is to participate in NaNoWriMo, where you try to write 50,000 in the month of November. That’s roughly 1800 words/day. Some days that’s more than doable, some days less, but if you manage to write that many words in a month, that’s a first draft right there.

KRL: What is your ideal time to write?

Claire: I’m freshest in the morning. There are fewer distractions and I often think about my next chapter before I fall asleep at night, so I’m ready to go in the morning to see if the idea has “legs.”

KRL: Do you outline? If not, do you have some other interesting way that you keep track of what’s going on, or what needs to happen in your book when you are writing it?

Claire: I don’t outline, but I always start a novel with a firm idea of the beginning, the middle, and the end. I have NEVER changed the ending of a book yet. The middle slides a bit, but it’s a great goal post so that I never get off track, writing something that is shiny and fun but does nothing to move the story forward. Beginnings are very difficult for me, and I often change and always rewrite the beginning a million times.

KRL: Did you find it difficult to get published in the beginning?

Claire: Yes. I was lucky that Poisoned Pen Press was accepting un-agented manuscripts. I had won the Malice Domestic Grant sponsored by St. Martin’s Press, but I still had a difficult time getting an agent and also getting published.

KRL: Do you have a great rejection/critique or acceptance story you’d like to share?

Claire: I would say this wasn’t a great acceptance story but it was a very realistic one, and something that all writers need to take into consideration. When Rob Rosenwald at Poisoned Pen called me to tell me that they had accepted my manuscript, the second thing he said to me was, “Don’t quit your day job.” The reality is that most authors don’t sell more than a thousand books. We write because we love to write. Very few of us can make a living at it. It was true then and it’s even more true now. I think the medium income for most writers in the U.S. was something like $12,000 last year.

KRL: Most interesting book signing story-in a bookstore or other venue?

Claire: I attended the Left Coast Crime convention one year when my second book had just come out. After the panel discussion, there are always signings. I sat at a table with Mary Higgins Clark to my left. Her book signing line was out the door of the hotel. I didn’t sell a single book. She was, by the way, absolutely gracious and very friendly.

KRL: I met her too, she was so nice! What are your future writing goals?

Claire: I want to keep pushing myself to be a better writer. Every book should be better than the last.

KRL: Who are your writing heroes?

Claire: I’m old school. I’d say my favorites are Dorothy L. Sayers, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett. In the more modern era, I love James Lee Burke and there is no one more adept at writing moral ambiguity than John Le Carre.

KRL: What kind of research do you do?

Claire: I do a lot of Google research. It’s amazing—and a little horrifying—what is online. I recently spent an afternoon in the Princeton Special Collections Library reading the letters Ring Lardner wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald to get the hang of then-current slang. Lardner was a sportswriter and his letters were just wonderful. Sassy, irreverent, sweet, it was a great way to get a sense of how people spoke and interacted with each other.

KRL: What do you like to read?

Claire: I was a history major, so I read a lot of history. I was chair of the Edgar Committee last year for the Best Paperback Original, so I read pretty much EVERYTHING that came out in paperback last year. I like books with an unusual voice. I feel that you can always change plot and embellish character arcs, but you can’t change voice.

KRL: What are your favorite TV shows or movies?

Claire: I’m not a big television watcher. Occasionally my husband and I will watch crime documentaries. The two we recently finished were documentaries on the Murdaugh murders and the second installment of The Jinx (the conviction of Robert Durst). Pretty chilling stuff.

KRL: Have you any advice for aspiring or beginning writers?

Claire: Keep writing. Keep trying to become a better writer. Read books by authors you admire and pick apart when they introduce tension, humor, violence, and sex. These factors are what make a book a page turner. Try to keep abreast of the changing landscape of publishing. And finally, do not be afraid of technology. I’m older and I struggle every day with technology, but I keep struggling with it because if you don’t, then someone with a manuscript that isn’t nearly as well written as your manuscript might get a second look because they formatted their manuscript properly and you didn’t. Sometimes it’s as simple as that.

KRL: What is something people would be surprised to know about you?

Claire: That I was a pastry chef for ten years.

KRL: Do you have any pets?

Claire: We have two cats, a lumbering grey monster who has us laughing at his antics every day, and a ginger and white cat who is afraid of her own shadow. We just put down the best dog in the world. A large Golden, he was a week shy of his fourteenth birthday. I miss him every day.

KRL: Is there anything you would like to add?

Claire: Just keep writing. At a certain point, you will find how your brain works with words. This is your voice, and it’s unique to you. Sometimes people find their voice right away, sometimes it takes time. I just read a quote from Gore Vidal who admitted he hadn’t found his voice until something like eight novels in. Also, and this is key, not everyone is going to like your writing. If eight out of ten people like your writing, then you can safely ignore the two naysayers. If eight people don’t like it, but two people do, then you need to listen carefully to those eight. Criticism is hard to take, I know, but it can be invaluable.

KRL: Where can our readers find you online?

Claire: Website: clairemjohnsonwrites.com
Instagram.com: clairejohnson414
Facebook: Claire.m.johnson.98

You can click here to purchase this book.

To enter to win an ebook copy of Fog City, simply email KRL at krlcontests@gmail[dot]com by replacing the [dot] with a period, and with the subject line “fog” or comment on this article. A winner will be chosen August 17, 2024. U.S. residents only, and you must be 18 or older to enter. You can read our privacy statement here if you like.

Check out other mystery articles, reviews, book giveaways & mystery short stories in our mystery section. And join our mystery Facebook group to keep up with everything mystery we post, and have a chance at some extra giveaways. Also listen to our new mystery podcast where mystery short stories and first chapters are read by actors! They are also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify.

Disclosure: This post contains links to an affiliate program, for which we receive a few cents if you make purchases. KRL also receives free copies of most of the books that it reviews, that are provided in exchange for an honest review of the book.