Janet Evanovich
© Roland Scarpa

Stephanie steps up

Janet Evanovich lets her leading lady break a few rules to get the job done

Janet Evanovich has a theory: She is her average reader, and if she thinks something is funny, then the reader will too. This theory has proved true for 26 years and 42 New York Times bestsellers, including the Stephanie Plum series, which combines action with laugh-out-loud humor.

Humor may be the heart of the series, but there are also plenty of thrills. “I like to start a book with some action to engage the reader, to grab them in the beginning so they want to read the book,” Evanovich tells the Connection.

Going Rogue: Rise and Shine Twenty-Nine finds bounty hunters Stephanie and Lula looking into their co-worker’s disappearance—and breaking rules along the way.

“It was time for Stephanie to have an epiphany about her job—that she’s actually a pretty good [bounty hunter]. She needed to go rogue and step out of her comfort zone,” says Evanovich, a Costco member. “She’s an average person. Most of us go along putting one foot in front of the other and fall into something, and continue our career. That’s Stephanie. She has no life plan; she is just trying to make it through the day with the same struggles—paying the bills; visiting her parents, who are getting older; trying not to eat too much.”

Evanovich calls characters like Stephanie “little heroes”: “[The novel is] about little heroes; the guy who goes to work at a job for 30 years and puts food on the table and sends his kids to college—he’s a hero—or the working woman who raises three kids—she’s a hero.”

Stephanie’s evolution began with the 1994 novel One for the Money. After years spent writing romance novels, Evanovich found success with the plucky heroine. So much success that she paid off her credit cards, paid for her children’s college education and asked her family what they wanted to do next. The answer? They liked where her career was going and decided to work for her.

Evanovich clearly relishes that her books are a family business—and splits her time between Florida, North Carolina and Hawaii, because she can take her computer anywhere and still play with her grandkids.

Though she no longer lives in her home state of New Jersey, the Jersey of her memory still plays a crucial role in the Plum books. “The longer I’m away from Jersey, the more Jersey I become,” she says. “My concept of it stays the same, and growing up there informs my sense of humor.

“Humor is the way that we face very difficult times; it’s a different way of looking at things if done with kindness. [And this is] just a happy series that people can count on to make them laugh and get them through the day.”

Evanovich concedes there were some challenges with writing the 29th book in a series. She had to write something she hadn’t already written and keep readers guessing on Stephanie’s relationships with the two men in her life: Ranger and Joe Morelli. She refers to this relationship triangle as “the hardest part of the series to write. I don’t know how she would choose, since I like both of them for different reasons.”

When she’s not amusing herself writing Stephanie Plum novels, she also writes the Lizzy and Diesel series, the Fox and O’Hare series with co-author Lee Goldberg and more, including a new series, The Recovery Agent.

You also might find her at a Costco Food Court in Hawaii: “Costco members are my people.”

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