Courtesy of Braden Moran
With passion and intelligence, James DeVita has burned through numerous Shakespeare and modern roles, primarily with American Players Theatre. The actor has also travelled the U.S. and Ireland in a one-man show, In Acting Shakespeare. He has polymathed into a playwright, award-winning children’s book author and EMT. Now comes his first adult mayhem-mystery, A Winsome Murder, in which he hoists a “cheap crime paperback novel” formula into a Shakespeare-haunted, blood-adorned whodunit as effortlessly as his tough Chicago gumshoe might clean-jerk a cigarette to his curled lip.
Where and how did the idea for a literary murder-mystery come to you?
I didn’t set out to do that. I read that F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote something to a blocked writer: “Throw a body in there. It always livens things up.” So I just did that, I started with a body in a field and had no idea what was going to happen. The story started to grow around that. This line from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus came to me when the detective looked at the body because something was wrong. The body is dismembered. So I thought, that’s weird. But that happens in that play and the lines kept coming to me, and him. I wondered, OK, could Shakespeare be helping this guy with his crimes, with this little quirk? I started to like it. It got fun—I’ve got a lot of information in my brain to do that. I’m not quitting my day job. I want to enjoy what I’m doing.
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
Who are your primary influences among murder-mystery/ police procedurals?
Funny thing is, I wasn’t a mystery reader. Right now, I have Forensics for Dummies on my desk. So when I was writing it, I had the character Jillian McClay, who wants to write a mystery, doing that research. Most of my research was literal police procedurals. I wanted it to play out like most cheap crime paperback novels, and sneak this literature in. I kinda based Detective Mangan on some of my Irish uncles, some of the funniest men I know—dry, witty and quick. My two uncles were detectives.
The first victim is involved with setting up a meth lab. Did “Breaking Bad?” inspire you at all?
No. Behind that was my work as an emergency medical technician, which I’ve done as a volunteer in Spring Green for 15 years. Meth is a problem here in the country. We take people into the hospital for it. We did training with the police because you get called to these things and it’s very dangerous. When you cook meth, it smells like shit so they do it out in these fields and woods.
A Winsome Murder is available at uwpress.wisc.edu.
