In describing his creative process, novelist Aran Jane quotes another writer of the many he has admired—not his favorite, James Joyce, but rather a renowned singer/songwriter: “Kris Kristofferson wrote a song that comes to mind, ̒The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.’ There [are] lyrics that say, ‘He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction / Taking every wrong direction on the lonely way back home.’ ”

Jane’s writer’s garret is a car—suitably for a California resident. It’s how he developed his SF debut novel Mondragon in 2016, inspired, he says, by the epic scale of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and the thoughtful worldbuilding of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Now Jane’s mileage has produced a second work, the genre-blending mystery-thriller The Water Column. While both were composed in the driver’s seat, it was not via Steve Allen’s method of tape-recorder dictation but by bringing along an iPad.

“My lovely wife, Sheri, a…nurse, sees patients all over Southern California, traveling from Los Angeles to San Diego,” Jane says. “I do the driving. In the breaks between conversations on the road, when the two of us are lost in thought, I work out the plot points in my head. I typically get maybe an hour at each stop….That works out to three to four hours of actual writing, five days a week.”

Kirkus Reviews calls The Water Column an “enthralling and initially conventional detective story [that] gets progressively more complex.” At first, it is a Fortean gumshoe tale. In Chicago, two men fatally plunge from the exteriors of different high-rise apartments—same night, same time. One of the fatalities, Wolf, was actually a skilled young alpinist doing…what? A stunt to enter an estranged girlfriend’s flat? Or were the deaths something more uncanny? Wolf’s grieving father—retired from the CIA—hires a PI to ferret out the truth. She’s Lila Piper, whose rocky upbringing included a fling with prostitution; she still undergoes an experimental, high-tech form of therapy to cope with personal demons. 

Lila’s bulldog investigation of what really happened opens doors into very unexpected cloisters indeed, from the Wisconsin dairy industry to psychic phenomenon/espionage to the late Venezuelan despot Hugo Chavez:

She made a few more notes, thinking, The owner of a limo company and a tanning salon a Marxist? Rather unlikely. Sounds like a pose. And if he was posing, she wondered, to what end? Was he CIA like his old man? Didn’t the CIA want Chavez deposed? And what about the rumors that the CIA was responsible for his death? Could Wolf have played some role in that? 

Layers of enigma culminate in a revelation that takes everything Lila—and the reader—has experienced to a second level of strangeness, forcing her to rethink what has gone before and what will happen next. The Water Column is material that would find appreciation among crime fanciers at BoucherCon as well as those who read Asimov’s Science Fiction. 

Says Jane, “I knew that I wanted to write a…crime story, but I didn’t want it to be conventional. I wanted it to have a female…PI—to cast against type—and I wanted it to have a mind-bending twist. I love toying with postmodern themes, especially when it comes to undermining ‘certainty.’ I majored in chemistry, so the SF elements are always there in the background.”

As a sort of literary inspiration, Jane points to Charles McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn with its blend of fact (the JFK assassination) and conspiracy-thriller elements. “I took note of the clean, crisp approach that McCarry used to construct his plot and introduce his series character…gradually weaving in the darker geopolitical threads,” he says.

Jane says early writing ambitions led him to quit high school, buy a briefcase, legal pad, Bullfinch’s Mythology, and the complete works of Shakespeare, and go on the road. “My girlfriend and I hitchhiked from San Diego to Portland, Oregon. She wanted to escape her dysfunctional family, and I was determined to write the great American novel. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that 16 years of life with no education and little experience is not exactly the stuff of great literature….

“For me, it turns out, 63 works much better than 16. After having launched several businesses in a variety of industries, I’m now happily in a position where I have something to say and actually have the time to say it. With far fewer boneheaded moves to block my progress.”

He still hits the road, but with more 21st-century accoutrements than before: the iPad and specialty software. “Since I have so little time, I cannot afford to waste it writing a story that ends up, in Kristofferson’s words, ‘taking every wrong direction.’ The way I manage to avoid that problem is by using a software program for screenwriters and novelists called Dramatica Story Expert. Dramatica allows me to build a comprehensive outline. By the time I start writing the prose, I can do so with absolute confidence, knowing that my story will make a complete argument without any plot holes. It’s a hat trick, I know, but it helps me get from driving Miss Daisy to writing behind the wheel.”

McCarry’s Tears of Autumn turned into the first in a series with the same protagonist, and while The Water Column was conceived as a stand-alone, it is Jane’s master plan to continue with his heroine. “Book 2 in the Lila Piper series—Whalebones—is on deck,” he says. “The outline is complete, and I’m probably several months away from [finishing] my first draft.

“Then again, who knows? Maybe I’ll run a ‘Free Aran Jane!’ promotional campaign, prompting folks to go out and buy my books as a way of freeing me from the confines of my car. No telling how fast I could write if I could only get out from behind the wheel.”

Ohio-based author Charles Cassady Jr. writes about pop-culture, paranormal, and true crime novels.