Santa Cruz author Vinnie Hansen celebrates 2022 novel’s re-release, inclusion in Grateful Dead-inspired anthology – Santa Cruz Sentinel

SANTA CRUZ – Writers are constantly working, typing up their next big ideas and also publishing them around the world.

For Santa Cruz author Vinnie Hansen, October is a particularly busy month as she will re-release her 2022 thriller novel “One Gun” on Tuesday and kicked off the month with the publication of a short story in a crime anthology inspired by The Grateful Dead.

Writing is not something Hansen planned from the beginning. She grew up in rural South Dakota and, after spending a summer in Europe, went to Southern California to stay with her older brother, who suggested she try community college.

“I had never heard of such a thing in South Dakota,” she said.

Hansen took night classes in creative writing, which sparked a love of the form. Her writing was heavily inspired by her own childhood, which she said was very cathartic.

“I had a lot of trauma in my upbringing,” she said. “I grew up in poverty and had a lot of things to process and try to get out of. I wrote about these experiences and it was healing.”

This inspired Hansen to pursue a degree in creative writing. In graduate school, she had to hand in a book-length thesis and attempted to write her first novel.

“I found that I had a lot of difficulty plotting, but I always read mysteries and realized that mysteries had this structure,” she said. “That’s what led me to detective fiction.”

Hansen later moved to Santa Cruz and taught English at Watsonville High School for 27 years while writing continually. She has published many short stories, the seven-part Carol Sabala mystery series and the novel “Lostart Street,” set in the village of Soquel in the early 1980s. She received the Golden Donut Award from the Writers’ Police Academy in 2015 for her short story “ Bad Connection” and was a two-time finalist for the Claymore Award.

Hansen’s latest novel, “One Gun,” was first released in 2022 by collaborative independent publishing Misterio Press. After hiring Maryland-based independent publisher Level Best Books for her next book, “Crime Writer,” she was told they wanted a two- or three-book deal.

“They really wanted companion books or a series,” she said. “I didn’t have a book or series in mind for ‘Crime Writer’, but I had already written ‘One Gun’.”

Level Best Books has committed to a two-book deal, which has resulted in the re-release of “One Gun” under the Level Best umbrella. The story was inspired by a real-life incident in which Hansen and her husband returned home from shopping to find a robbery in progress. Her husband chased the robber down the street, resulting in the robber pulling out a gun and threatening to kill her husband.

“As soon as he started running again, my husband – thinking he couldn’t shoot him as he ran – continued to chase him until he dropped the things he had stolen from our house,” she said.

The police arrived and arrested the thief, but the gun was not with him.

“That story alone wouldn’t be part of the novel,” Hansen said. “What really got into my head was the thought of, ‘What happened to that gun? That gun is out there, waiting somewhere. The police never found him, so where did he go?’”

This idea served as the basis for “One Gun”, where the couple Vivi and Ben Russo go through a similar situation and try to find the gun so that the thief can be accused of armed robbery, but it ends up in the hands of two teenagers who take it. find. first.

“‘One Gun’ became the story of that gun and my idea of ​​where it was released in the community,” Hansen said.

“One Gun” is set in the fictional city and county of Playa Maria, heavily inspired by Santa Cruz, and will also be part of “Crime Writer”, scheduled for release in 2025.

In addition to the “One Gun” re-release, Hansen also had a story featured in the anthology “Friend of the Devil: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Grateful Dead.” She was invited by editor Josh Pachter because of her diverse short stories, which have been published in publications and anthologies such as Black Cat Weekly, “Santa Cruz Ghost Stories” and Santa Cruz Weird. She also has experience turning songs into short stories, like the psychedelic hit “96 Tears” by the rock band ? and the Mysterians for a one-hit wonder-inspired crime fiction anthology.

For “Friend of the Devil,” Pachter sought to compile a collection of short stories inspired by one song per album by the iconic jam band The Grateful Dead. Writers like James DF Hannah, Kathryn O’Sullivan, Paul Awad, and Pachter himself created stories named after songs like “Shakedown Street,” “Touch of Grey,” and, of course, “Friend of the Devil.”

Although she was a fan of the song “Ripple” at that time and played keyboards with a ukulele group that played Grateful Dead songs in Harbor Beach, Hansen doesn’t consider herself a Deadhead, so she deferred to her niece, Holly, to determine which song she liked. should choose. After receiving some recommendations, she chose “Dire Wolf” from the 1970 album “Workingman’s Dead.” The country-tinged murder ballad written by Robert Hunter told the story of a man who plays cards with the extinct wolf and was also inspired by the Zodiac Killer, who killed five people in the Bay Area, shortly before the song was written.

Hansen said she was drawn to the chorus “Please don’t kill me” and imagined it could work as a crime story. The story is about a woman named Carrie Cunningham, who plays keyboards in a band called Dire Wolf, who had a small hit called “Maybe,” written by Cunningham. When the song resurfaces viral, Cunningham’s singer and ex-boyfriend, John, takes all the credit and receives all the profits, prompting Cunningham to seek revenge on him.

As a keyboardist, Hansen enjoyed writing a character with this ability.

“For some time I wanted to use this knowledge to have a main character who played the keyboard,” she said. “Thinking about how the instrument could be used to kill someone was an intriguing problem for me.”

Hansen hopes that those who read the “Friend of the Devil” anthology will have a good time, like a Grateful Dead concert.

“I see the audience for this book as really Grateful Dead fans and anyone who likes crime fiction,” she said.

For “One Gun,” she hopes readers think more about guns in their community.

“I’ve tried really hard to avoid being preachy about this, but I just want people to think about when there’s a gun present, how that increases the dangers to people anywhere in the vicinity of the gun,” she said.

For more information about “The Devil’s Friend,” visit Downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/pachter-friend-devil/. For more information about “One Gun,” visit VinnieHansen.com.