Articles Archives
Finding common ground
Author P.L. Gaus looks to illuminate Amish culture, tell good mystery
March 7, 2009
Ben Beagle bbeagle@batavianews.com
A wry challenge from best-selling mystery writer Tony Hillerman put
Paul Gaus on the path to becoming a novelist.
Gaus, this year's featured author for the "A Tale for Three Counties" community reading project, was a chemistry professor at College of Wooster in Ohio who also taught a freshman class on minority American cultures. In the class, Gaus used Hillerman's books which were set among the Navajos of the American Southwest.
At one point, about 15 years ago -- and nearly 20 years after he began teaching the class -- Gaus arranged to meet with Hillerman and talk about the author's novels which, Gaus said, "not only tell a pretty engaging mystery story" but are also "salted thoroughly with Navajo culture."
It was the summer of 1995 and over lunch Gaus shared with Hillerman that he had had some success as a science writer (He co-wrote a best-selling chemistry text, Basic Inorganic Chemistry.). But that he had never tried fiction.
Hillerman responded, Gaus recalled, with "a wry comment at the lunch table that I might find fiction much more challenging than science and I ought to give it a try."
"He thought it would be entertaining, I suppose, to watch a scientist struggle with all the creative aspects of fiction," Gaus said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Wooster, Ohio. "So I started. And after a while I got something respectable that I thought was perhaps ready for someone to look at."
Books receive acclaim
With six books down Gaus has established himself in the admittedly unusual niche of Ohio-Amish mystery novels.
His latest, Separate From the World (Ohio University Press, July 2008), brings him to the area next week for a series of talks and book signings in Genesee, Orleans and Wyoming counties.
The Tale for Three Counties project began in 2003 as a way to encourage readers in each county to pick up the same book, read it and discuss it. Then meet the author during a series of visits -- Gaus stops Thursday through next Saturday -- in each county. The goal is to foster literacy, promote discussions among all kinds of people, and introduce local readers to an author they may not be familiar with.
Leslie DeLooze, the librarian at Batavia's Richmond Memorial Library who started the Tale program, first learned of Gaus' books about a decade ago, and then discovered the author was a professor at her alma mater.
"I love reading mysteries and was interested in the unusual setting," DeLooze said. "The books have all gotten good reviews, but when the newest one was published last summer, it caught my eye because it had received two 'starred' reviews, designating an outstanding book."
The stars came courtesy of Publishers Weekly, which said "a convincing plot and credible sympathetic characters make another winner in this fine regional series," and Kirkus Reviews, which called the novel a "perceptible look at problems that have no easy solution." Praise has also come from BookList and The New York Times; the latter says Gaus is "a sensitive storyteller who matches his cadences to the measured pace of Amish life."
A unique niche
Gaus' novels have all been published by Ohio University Press. It's an unusual route for a mystery writer as such publishers are usually the domain of poets, academics and non-fiction works.
The untraditional method means measuring success comes a little bit differently. But with six Ohio-Amish mysteries published, a seventh on the way, and a city-set non-Amish tale in development, Gaus -- writing as P.L. Gaus -- is having a solid career by most accounts.
Success, said David Sanders, director of Ohio University Press, is gauged "partly by the critical response we get, and that's been pretty good, and the number of people who come out to hear Paul talk. And his books sell much better than our typical texts."
Amish & English
Gaus has set all six of his mystery novels in Holmes County, Ohio, which claims the world's largest Amish population. It's here that a recurring cast of characters -- a college professor, the sheriff and a local pastor -- investigate cases that typically mix the insulated world of the Amish and the outside world of the "English," or what Amish often call outsiders.
Separate From the World begins at the end of another college year for professor Michael Branden, the main character in each of Gaus' mysteries. This story opens with the discovery of a dead Amish man, who is also a dwarf. His death is thought to be an accident, but his brother -- who is also a dwarf -- is suspicious. He turns to Branden for help.
Their discussion of odd details of the case is interrupted by a commotion on campus. A student has fallen to her death from the college bell tower in an apparent suicide. But again, there are suspicions, and the investigation becomes intertwined as Branden teams with recurring characters Pastor Cal Troyer and Sheriff Bruce Robertson to discover what happened.
'Unadorned' writing
Along the way readers get contrasting glimpses of small-town college life and the determined faith of the Amish. But the violence -- and there are at least a couple of gruesome acts in Separate From the World -- mostly happens off the page.
"I think that's necessary considering the kind of story I'm trying to write," Gaus says. "I really have some constraints as an author. I write purposefully in a fashion that is clearly unadorned. It is not elaborate writing. Well, to be direct about it, it's fairly plain writing," Gaus acknowledged. "But I do that as a means of honoring the plain culture that the Amish have. I try not to adorn the stories with any gratuitous violence or salacious sexuality or any of those types of things that might be more common in other forms of literature."
Living in Amish country
Gaus, an Ohio native, and his wife have lived among the Amish for more than 30 years. From their home in Wooster, they can be in the heart of Ohio Amish country within minutes.
"What I've done most often is just show up down there and wait for someone to approach me and talk to me," Gaus said. "I've spent a lot of time nosing around the back corners of Holmes County and talking to people I meet on the trips I take down there."
"I've traveled in sports cars, in four-wheel drives. I've walked the dusty country lanes, time and time again, I've been out on bicycles. I've sat in the shops and tourist attractions and been down to the courthouse to talk with Amish people who hitched their buggies there. I've just been all over the place talking to people."
On one occasion, Gaus said he gave an Amish fellow a ride around three or four counties in northeast Ohio so the man could get some business done.
"I spent the whole day with the fellow who proved to be very talkative," Gaus said. "I've done that hundreds of times over again ... I've done it over a stretch of many years and somehow I seem to remember every little thing that has happened. I put details from these trips to Holmes County into all of my stories."
Begins with concept
Gaus said he has two goals with each book: illuminate Amish culture and tell a good mystery.
Each story begins with a concept of Amish culture that Gaus wants to explore, a scriptural theme or an article of faith that illustrates why people of Amish faith live the way they do.
His stories have centered on such topics as repentance, pacifism, greed, child abuse and the Amish rite of passage known as "Rumspringa," in which Amish adolescents forego their traditional clothing and religious strictures as they experience the outside world before deciding if they will become baptized in the Amish church. Some teens go on fairly sedate adventures, while others are tempted by more dangerous behavior.
"I know first hand quite a lot about that particular problem, and anyone who lives in this part of Ohio knows about it, too," Gaus said.
Separate From the World looks at genetic disorders that afflict the Amish, who often intermarry. The story finds the book's Amish community divided over a question of modern medicine and the ethics of cooperation with science in an effort to find a cure for their illnesses.
The story for his next novel -- the seventh in the series -- "arises from a concept that a violent act by an Amish person is so completely unthinkable in the Amish world that if something should ever happen it would be almost impossible for them to deal with that event successfully," Gaus said.
"In fact," he said, "there would be a lot of trouble that would descend from such an act. That Amish people really wouldn't understand or be able to handle at all whereas out in the English world we have lawyers and courts and law enforcement officers and all sorts of mechanisms in place to handle an act of violence. Amish don't. They're not set up for that sort of thing. So the concept is this separation between this unthinkable act and the Amish people to handle."
A little bit of the author
While Brendan, Robertson and Troyer are familiar to regular readers of Gaus' mysteries, the cast of Amish characters is constantly revolving. He has not revisited any Amish characters -- save for the Miller family from "Prayer for the Dying" which was related to a pivotal family in Blood of the Prodigal, Gaus' debut novel.
"I have always designed Amish characters to fit the concept of the story," Gaus said. "I haven't found yet that any one of my previous characters was suitable to the new story. The stories are different enough, one from another, that I was never tempted enough to reuse a character.
"Now the three English characters I designed right from the start to be specific and definite people with recurring roles in all the stories. I designed the three English characters all very purposefully, and they've stayed true to that step throughout all the books, and the women in their lives, too."
And with a main character being a college professor, might Gaus share more than a few characteristics or attitudes with Branden?
"Actually, there are parts of me sprinkled into all three of those characters," Gaus said with a chuckle. "I chose a history professor because I've always loved history. I made him a professor of American history and a specialist in the American Civil War because that's an interest I've had for decades now myself. ... I wanted a thinker and I have very much admired the history professors over the years at the College of Wooster. It seemed natural to me to have the pensive, articulate member of my cast be a history professor."
The other characters were brought on for their own unique specialties. Robertson fills the law enforcement role and Troyer, the pastor, provides a strong connection to the churches of Holmes County, including the Amish community.
"I did all that because when I first started writing it seemed unrealistic to suspect that any one character could be all three of those things," Gaus explained.
An understanding press
As Gaus initially shopped his first novel, Blood of the Prodigal, to publishers he got a lot of encouraging comments about the story and the writing.
"But no one really could quite understand what to do with a murder mystery about Amish people," he said. "So I let it sit in a drawer."
Hillerman, who died in October (a few days before Gaus was named as this year's Tale for Three Counties author) would explain to Gaus that he needed to find a publisher "who had an ability to understand what (Gaus) was trying to do."
That's when Gaus shipped his manuscript off to Ohio University Press. The publisher, like many university presses, largely published non-fiction, poetry and academic texts, but Gaus also saw that they did a lot of work in cultural areas and thought "they might understand Ohio Amish society better than anyone."
"And they did," Gaus said. "They got it right away."
David Sanders, director of Ohio University Press, said publishing a mystery series is "a bit of a diversion" for the press, but the Ohio connection in the stories led him to take a second look.
"If it was about Teamsters on a dock in New York City it probably wouldn't interest us as much," Sanders said. "It presented an angle into the Amish, and what Paul calls the 'English,' the standard population, in a way that you would be hard-pressed to get from a scholarly or sociological study.
"What I thought was really nice is there can be moments in the books where you have insight into the characters and the culture. Paul really gave a sense of what it was like without it being a lecture or some dry recitation."
The first book, Blood of the Prodigal, was published in 1999.
"It's been an amazing project that's gone on for a number of years," Sanders said. "I didn't necessarily expect it to take off as it has. I think that's partly due to the nature of the books themselves. The stories lend themselves to a fairly broad market. People appreciated mysteries, and they don't necessarily want the violence."
Gaus is working on the seventh book in the Ohio-Amish mystery series. He can go as long as there are deep religious principles to write about and scripture verses to include in the front of each story.
"Young authors and inexperienced authors dream always of the biggest and the best, so I thought to myself at the time, why not make it a series of books," Gaus recalled. "I hoped that it would be more than just a few."
Author Visits
P.L. Gaus will discuss his work and sign copies of his books during a series of four programs in Genesee, Orleans and Wyoming counties. The schedule:
THURSDAY: 1 p.m., Genesee Community College, 1 College Rd., Batavia; 7 p.m., Richmond Memorial Library, 19 Ross St., Batavia.
FRIDAY: 7 p.m., Lee-Whedon Memorial Library, 620 West Ave., Medina.
MARCH 14: 2 p.m., Perry Elementary/Middle School Auditorium, 50 Olin Ave., Perry, presented by Perry Public Library.
Courtesy of Batavia Newspapers Corporation