Lisa Lutz was an unknown writer with a single film credit to her name when her debut novel The Spellman Files was published in 2007. It was a very funny book about a family of private investigators, but what has kept readers returning for multiple books is the main character of Isabel Izzy Spellman. Isabel is funny and good at her job, but she also drinks a little too much, doesnt always like herself, struggles with relationships and feels a little lost in life. The books are also that rare mystery series not about murder and serial killers, but about smaller crimes and the work that private investigators actually do. Its a rare gift to be able to write a funny book thats also a thoughtful character study and examination of loneliness. Lutz perfectly captures that sense that many of us in our twenties and thirties experience where friends and relatives get married, get divorced, have children, and we feel as if were standing still in comparison. Lutz also co-wrote the novel Heads You Lose about brother and sister pot growers in Northern California and wrote the hilarious new ebook Isabel Spellmans Guide to Etiquette: What Is Wrong with You People?
Lisa is currently on tour for her new book, The Last Word, the sixth and final Isabel Spellman book. We spoke recently about why she ended the series, how it will be replaced by a different book series featuring Isabels younger sister Rae, and writing unconventional mystery stories.
ALEX DUEBEN: I was a bit worried because the title The Last Word sounds ominous and then I reached the end of the book and I was a little heartbroken
LISA LUTZ: Im sorry. [laughs]
AD: So why did you decide to make this the last Isabel Spellman book?
LL: All along I never really knew how many books I was going to write. I wrote the first book without any notion of it being a series. There was this fear, because of the nature of what it was, not having a murder or intense crime to hang the books on, how am I going to keep this going and keep it fresh. When I was writing the sixth book, I really felt like I had told Isabels story and I was reaching a point where I felt like I wasnt going to have much more to say about her. I knew I could write another Isabel book, but I didnt know that it would be good. Thats been my fearof just rehashing things. Just so you know, the sixth book was not intended to be the last at all. When I got to Raes story I thought, wait, this is something I want to write about. That was sort of when I knew. The last two chapters were actually written very much after the book was complete for a while.
AD: Was part of that just because Raes voice is so different from Isabels?
LL: Yeah I started to think that this could be an interesting departure. Slightly darker stories that were more about the different ways we manipulate people. I felt Raes voice in a different way than I had before.
AD: The idea with the Rae stories is that they would be more about other people and the cases she takes and less about the family.
LL: Exactly. I mean the family would be there, but it would be from a different perspective and be really not as focused on the family. It still obviously wouldnt be mysteries in that traditional sense, but I think that theyll be more about the cases she works on.
AD: One of the things Ive enjoyed about the books is that theyre not conventional private eye stories as theyve come to be. Theres no murders, theyre not hunting serial killers or doing all the things that cops do, which is how many of those books work. Why did you decide to do that?
LL: I think you hit the nail on the head. [laughs] Theres just a preposterousness in a lot of crime novelsthat I absolutely read and enjoy readingbut when I wrote something, I need to buy it. It needs to feel plausible to me. I worked at a P.I. firm for a couple years in the nineties and we never solved a single mystery. [laughs] There was never a murder. I think we had one case where a girl went missing and they did some preliminary investigations and they couldnt help find her; she stayed missing. I thought it was possible to write about private investigators in a way where youre talking about what theyre really doing, but to somehow make the mundane interesting. That was my challenge.
AD: You could say that about all the aspects of the book because youre taking the Spellmans family life and turning it into a weird mystery thriller
LL: Exactly. Its an interesting challenge taking something thats normal and everyday and making it feel more sensational.
AD: And you can do this because while my family may not talk, the Spellmans really dont talk.
LL: [laughs] Its true. They just dont like to answer questions and they dont like to ask them. They just go, Ill figure this out another way.
AD: One thing that stands out is that while the books are funny and zany things happen, ultimately theyre books about loneliness and that feeling of getting older when we hit our late twenties/early thirties.
LL: Absolutely. When anyone gets older, whats wrong with them becomes in sharper relief. When youre younger you can be a fuck up and it doesnt hit you that hard. You get older and you go, oh shit. This is me. Im stuck with this. Its sad. Shes absolutely a character who has evolved and has some hope, but I was writing about someone who didnt completely like herself.
AD: I know that one of the reasons I love the books is because I am Isabel, which well let pass without comment
LL: [laughs]
AD: But you really capture that idea of getting older just because you feel as if youre falling behind not just your peers and other people around you.
LL: Yeah, its something that I dont think I could write about it if I didnt relate to it. I got this book deal when I was thirty-six. I was pretty much a screw-up until that time. Bad jobs, no life, just trying to write and everyone telling me to quit. In fact Isabel is in many ways doing a lot better than I did for a long time. [laughs]
AD: She is in a better place after six books and six-ish years later. A lot has happened to her.
LL: Ive tried to keep it roughly in real time in terms of how they age. In six years of your life, a lot of stuff is going to go down, especially during that time late twenties to mid or early thirties. A lot of things really do happen in that timeframe.
AD: A lot more happens to other people and so though shes changed and gotten better, Isabel is constantly comparing herself to them.
LL: Youre right. Shes sort of staying the same, which I hadnt really thought about, but its something I can relate to. Watching all my friends get married and have children and theyre marking the passage of time whereas Im less aware of it.
AD: Isabel has a great line in the book which I emailed to a few of my friends: When I say middle-aged I always mean at least fifteen years older than I am (In ten years, the same math will apply).
LL: [laughs] I forgot about that, but isnt that true? I remember I was hanging out with a bunch of friends and we were in our mid-thirties and somebody said that were middle-aged and I was like, middle-aged? No! [laughs]
AD: You also have a new e-book, Isabel Spellmans Guide to Etiquette: What Is Wrong with You People? Where exactly did this idea come from, because most readers would agree that Izzy is not someone who should be writing an etiquette book.
LL: Im sure youre familiar with how authors are coming out with e-books that are short stories involving their characters. My editor asked me to do that. I dont really like short format. I cant remember the last time I wrote a short story. I just flat out said no. I never say to her; usually I just do whatever she asks me. I said, no, I cant do that. Then I started to think. I mean I personally have always wanted to write an etiquette book. I thought, holy shit, I could write Isabel Spellmans etiquette book and get some things off my chest. I didnt know if it was a good idea at the time, but then I ran it by my agent who said, that could be really funny, and then my editor really liked the idea. Of course it ended up being much more work than any short story would have been, but it was very satisfying.
AD: Along similar-ish lines you also have a picture book, How To Negotiate Everything.
LL: Yes. Thats the childrens book which was featured partially in Trail of the Spellmans. That came about because when I knew I wanted to have an excerpt from a childrens book in Trail, I went to an illustrator. When I saw her illustrations they were so awesome I thought, this should be a book. Like a lot of things I do, people are like, what? Its being misinterpreted. I saw some review online where this woman was furious that this book existed.
AD: To be fair, in Trail you do portray it as a horrible, psychologically damaging childrens book. [laughs]
LL: [laughs] Yeah its all part of the experiments theme in Trail. People who know me know that Im really kind of obsessed with nature/nurture experiments. If somebody mentions theyre a twin my next question is, did your parents do experiments on you? I just think twins should be obligated to have some sort of minor experiments done on them. Theyre the perfect control group. Why are we wasting all these twins on nothing.
AD: I did want to talk about your previous book, Heads You Lose which you wrote with your ex and it was presented as the two of you wrote alternating chapters.
LL: Thats all true. Im still really proud of Heads You Lose. It wasnt a book for everyone. Last night I gave a reading and Dave Hayward my co-author was there and there were lots of people there who had been fans of the book, which was really nice because so often I get hate mail about that book.
AD: Hate mail? Really?
LL: Oh my god. Its almost like Im being reprimanded. So much of the hate mail is in the form of a reprimand: youre better than that, you shouldnt be writing that book, I really didnt like it. My reaction is, you telling me what to do is not going to stop me from writing what I want to write. Just because this one person didnt understand the book doesnt mean its not a good book. Its for some people, its not for others. I never mind it because people hate the book because they understood the conceit, but it still didnt work them. That doesnt bother me. But people think that legitimately Dave and I wrote this book and then turned it in half done?
AD: In that book and also in the Spellman books you use footnotes and other conceits and I wonder how people respond to those meta-narrative aspects of the books.
LL: Well in the Spellman books, obviously there are some people who hate the footnotes and especially early on I got a lot of mail about that, but some people really like them. The Spellmans wasnt demanding as much in the meta sense as Head You Lose so I think a lot of people go along with it.
AD: Where did you get the idea of utilizing footnotes in your books?
LL: When I started the book I had fairly recently finished Infinite Jest and I thought, lets give really easy footnotes so you just have to glance at the bottom of the page. [laughs] Now with ebooks the footnotes are a real pain in the ass but if youre reading one of my books in a book form its not that hard. There were very few footnotes in the first draft. As I was revising with my editor, I just kept adding footnotes to see what she would do. I was certain at some point she would be like, okay, were cutting all the footnotes. So I just kept adding and adding to push her buttons and then eventually when she said nothing I said, so youre okay with the footnotes? She said, I love them. Because I was trying to push her I did some really strange things with the first book. Like every time I mentioned KAOS from Get Smartwhich I mentioned a lotthere was a footnote that said The International Organization of Evil. I think that footnote happened several times in there.
AD: Would you recommend writing a book with ones ex?
LL: Well, whenever Dave and I are asked about our experience writing the book, I say, it was really fun, and Dave was miserable. So I dont know if I could do it with him again. Daves now writing his own novel and I think because it was his first novel he was really good at deferring to me on a lot of things, but now I think we would legitimately butt heads constantly. The parts that were the most fun were when we were revising the notes to each other and our insults. We would just be like throwing different insults back and forth like, how does this work for you? People dont realize that thats actually how we talk to each other. Theres this exchange in Heads You Lose where Dave is making fun of the fact that I dont know some words. I said, you know I took three years of Latin in high school. In real life I said this when he was giving me shit about something. He said, you hide it well. [laughs] In the book it ended up being, you mean Latin dance? I dont know. I had a good time with it.
AD: I imagine that co-writing a book is an odd thing.
LL: Which is why I had the idea for Heads You Lose. There are a lot crime writers who do these books together and often theyre men. I think, how do these egos work together? I cant fathom it. That was when this idea came to me.
AD: So whats next for you?
LL: Well the next book is a non-Spellman book. That one is with my editor now. Ive been thinking about the Rae book, but Im not really there yet.
AD: Do you want to say anything about next one?
LL: Its called You Were Here. Its about three friends over the course of twenty plus years and every chapter is a moment in a year. You first meet them when theyre eighteen and then next meet a character when shes thirty-six and it doesnt make sense, so the book unfolds like a mystery. Turning a life into a mystery even though its not an actual mystery novel.
AD: I can see thinking about it in those terms and making it into a puzzle that the reader has to understand.
LL: I think any book that can grab the reader is structured somewhat like a mystery. You start with a question, you give the reader something where theyre like, I need to understand this, and then they keep reading.
Lisa is currently on tour for her new book, The Last Word, the sixth and final Isabel Spellman book. We spoke recently about why she ended the series, how it will be replaced by a different book series featuring Isabels younger sister Rae, and writing unconventional mystery stories.
ALEX DUEBEN: I was a bit worried because the title The Last Word sounds ominous and then I reached the end of the book and I was a little heartbroken
LISA LUTZ: Im sorry. [laughs]
AD: So why did you decide to make this the last Isabel Spellman book?
LL: All along I never really knew how many books I was going to write. I wrote the first book without any notion of it being a series. There was this fear, because of the nature of what it was, not having a murder or intense crime to hang the books on, how am I going to keep this going and keep it fresh. When I was writing the sixth book, I really felt like I had told Isabels story and I was reaching a point where I felt like I wasnt going to have much more to say about her. I knew I could write another Isabel book, but I didnt know that it would be good. Thats been my fearof just rehashing things. Just so you know, the sixth book was not intended to be the last at all. When I got to Raes story I thought, wait, this is something I want to write about. That was sort of when I knew. The last two chapters were actually written very much after the book was complete for a while.
AD: Was part of that just because Raes voice is so different from Isabels?
LL: Yeah I started to think that this could be an interesting departure. Slightly darker stories that were more about the different ways we manipulate people. I felt Raes voice in a different way than I had before.
AD: The idea with the Rae stories is that they would be more about other people and the cases she takes and less about the family.
LL: Exactly. I mean the family would be there, but it would be from a different perspective and be really not as focused on the family. It still obviously wouldnt be mysteries in that traditional sense, but I think that theyll be more about the cases she works on.
AD: One of the things Ive enjoyed about the books is that theyre not conventional private eye stories as theyve come to be. Theres no murders, theyre not hunting serial killers or doing all the things that cops do, which is how many of those books work. Why did you decide to do that?
LL: I think you hit the nail on the head. [laughs] Theres just a preposterousness in a lot of crime novelsthat I absolutely read and enjoy readingbut when I wrote something, I need to buy it. It needs to feel plausible to me. I worked at a P.I. firm for a couple years in the nineties and we never solved a single mystery. [laughs] There was never a murder. I think we had one case where a girl went missing and they did some preliminary investigations and they couldnt help find her; she stayed missing. I thought it was possible to write about private investigators in a way where youre talking about what theyre really doing, but to somehow make the mundane interesting. That was my challenge.
AD: You could say that about all the aspects of the book because youre taking the Spellmans family life and turning it into a weird mystery thriller
LL: Exactly. Its an interesting challenge taking something thats normal and everyday and making it feel more sensational.
AD: And you can do this because while my family may not talk, the Spellmans really dont talk.
LL: [laughs] Its true. They just dont like to answer questions and they dont like to ask them. They just go, Ill figure this out another way.
AD: One thing that stands out is that while the books are funny and zany things happen, ultimately theyre books about loneliness and that feeling of getting older when we hit our late twenties/early thirties.
LL: Absolutely. When anyone gets older, whats wrong with them becomes in sharper relief. When youre younger you can be a fuck up and it doesnt hit you that hard. You get older and you go, oh shit. This is me. Im stuck with this. Its sad. Shes absolutely a character who has evolved and has some hope, but I was writing about someone who didnt completely like herself.
AD: I know that one of the reasons I love the books is because I am Isabel, which well let pass without comment
LL: [laughs]
AD: But you really capture that idea of getting older just because you feel as if youre falling behind not just your peers and other people around you.
LL: Yeah, its something that I dont think I could write about it if I didnt relate to it. I got this book deal when I was thirty-six. I was pretty much a screw-up until that time. Bad jobs, no life, just trying to write and everyone telling me to quit. In fact Isabel is in many ways doing a lot better than I did for a long time. [laughs]
AD: She is in a better place after six books and six-ish years later. A lot has happened to her.
LL: Ive tried to keep it roughly in real time in terms of how they age. In six years of your life, a lot of stuff is going to go down, especially during that time late twenties to mid or early thirties. A lot of things really do happen in that timeframe.
AD: A lot more happens to other people and so though shes changed and gotten better, Isabel is constantly comparing herself to them.
LL: Youre right. Shes sort of staying the same, which I hadnt really thought about, but its something I can relate to. Watching all my friends get married and have children and theyre marking the passage of time whereas Im less aware of it.
AD: Isabel has a great line in the book which I emailed to a few of my friends: When I say middle-aged I always mean at least fifteen years older than I am (In ten years, the same math will apply).
LL: [laughs] I forgot about that, but isnt that true? I remember I was hanging out with a bunch of friends and we were in our mid-thirties and somebody said that were middle-aged and I was like, middle-aged? No! [laughs]
AD: You also have a new e-book, Isabel Spellmans Guide to Etiquette: What Is Wrong with You People? Where exactly did this idea come from, because most readers would agree that Izzy is not someone who should be writing an etiquette book.
LL: Im sure youre familiar with how authors are coming out with e-books that are short stories involving their characters. My editor asked me to do that. I dont really like short format. I cant remember the last time I wrote a short story. I just flat out said no. I never say to her; usually I just do whatever she asks me. I said, no, I cant do that. Then I started to think. I mean I personally have always wanted to write an etiquette book. I thought, holy shit, I could write Isabel Spellmans etiquette book and get some things off my chest. I didnt know if it was a good idea at the time, but then I ran it by my agent who said, that could be really funny, and then my editor really liked the idea. Of course it ended up being much more work than any short story would have been, but it was very satisfying.
AD: Along similar-ish lines you also have a picture book, How To Negotiate Everything.
LL: Yes. Thats the childrens book which was featured partially in Trail of the Spellmans. That came about because when I knew I wanted to have an excerpt from a childrens book in Trail, I went to an illustrator. When I saw her illustrations they were so awesome I thought, this should be a book. Like a lot of things I do, people are like, what? Its being misinterpreted. I saw some review online where this woman was furious that this book existed.
AD: To be fair, in Trail you do portray it as a horrible, psychologically damaging childrens book. [laughs]
LL: [laughs] Yeah its all part of the experiments theme in Trail. People who know me know that Im really kind of obsessed with nature/nurture experiments. If somebody mentions theyre a twin my next question is, did your parents do experiments on you? I just think twins should be obligated to have some sort of minor experiments done on them. Theyre the perfect control group. Why are we wasting all these twins on nothing.
AD: I did want to talk about your previous book, Heads You Lose which you wrote with your ex and it was presented as the two of you wrote alternating chapters.
LL: Thats all true. Im still really proud of Heads You Lose. It wasnt a book for everyone. Last night I gave a reading and Dave Hayward my co-author was there and there were lots of people there who had been fans of the book, which was really nice because so often I get hate mail about that book.
AD: Hate mail? Really?
LL: Oh my god. Its almost like Im being reprimanded. So much of the hate mail is in the form of a reprimand: youre better than that, you shouldnt be writing that book, I really didnt like it. My reaction is, you telling me what to do is not going to stop me from writing what I want to write. Just because this one person didnt understand the book doesnt mean its not a good book. Its for some people, its not for others. I never mind it because people hate the book because they understood the conceit, but it still didnt work them. That doesnt bother me. But people think that legitimately Dave and I wrote this book and then turned it in half done?
AD: In that book and also in the Spellman books you use footnotes and other conceits and I wonder how people respond to those meta-narrative aspects of the books.
LL: Well in the Spellman books, obviously there are some people who hate the footnotes and especially early on I got a lot of mail about that, but some people really like them. The Spellmans wasnt demanding as much in the meta sense as Head You Lose so I think a lot of people go along with it.
AD: Where did you get the idea of utilizing footnotes in your books?
LL: When I started the book I had fairly recently finished Infinite Jest and I thought, lets give really easy footnotes so you just have to glance at the bottom of the page. [laughs] Now with ebooks the footnotes are a real pain in the ass but if youre reading one of my books in a book form its not that hard. There were very few footnotes in the first draft. As I was revising with my editor, I just kept adding footnotes to see what she would do. I was certain at some point she would be like, okay, were cutting all the footnotes. So I just kept adding and adding to push her buttons and then eventually when she said nothing I said, so youre okay with the footnotes? She said, I love them. Because I was trying to push her I did some really strange things with the first book. Like every time I mentioned KAOS from Get Smartwhich I mentioned a lotthere was a footnote that said The International Organization of Evil. I think that footnote happened several times in there.
AD: Would you recommend writing a book with ones ex?
LL: Well, whenever Dave and I are asked about our experience writing the book, I say, it was really fun, and Dave was miserable. So I dont know if I could do it with him again. Daves now writing his own novel and I think because it was his first novel he was really good at deferring to me on a lot of things, but now I think we would legitimately butt heads constantly. The parts that were the most fun were when we were revising the notes to each other and our insults. We would just be like throwing different insults back and forth like, how does this work for you? People dont realize that thats actually how we talk to each other. Theres this exchange in Heads You Lose where Dave is making fun of the fact that I dont know some words. I said, you know I took three years of Latin in high school. In real life I said this when he was giving me shit about something. He said, you hide it well. [laughs] In the book it ended up being, you mean Latin dance? I dont know. I had a good time with it.
AD: I imagine that co-writing a book is an odd thing.
LL: Which is why I had the idea for Heads You Lose. There are a lot crime writers who do these books together and often theyre men. I think, how do these egos work together? I cant fathom it. That was when this idea came to me.
AD: So whats next for you?
LL: Well the next book is a non-Spellman book. That one is with my editor now. Ive been thinking about the Rae book, but Im not really there yet.
AD: Do you want to say anything about next one?
LL: Its called You Were Here. Its about three friends over the course of twenty plus years and every chapter is a moment in a year. You first meet them when theyre eighteen and then next meet a character when shes thirty-six and it doesnt make sense, so the book unfolds like a mystery. Turning a life into a mystery even though its not an actual mystery novel.
AD: I can see thinking about it in those terms and making it into a puzzle that the reader has to understand.
LL: I think any book that can grab the reader is structured somewhat like a mystery. You start with a question, you give the reader something where theyre like, I need to understand this, and then they keep reading.