Mary Anna Evans, Gainesville Mystery Writer
Mary Anna Evans
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Photo by Albert Isaac
Marry Anna Evans sits on a window seat in her Gainesville home with a pair of guitars and her novel, "Findings." Her latest novel, "Floodgates" is now available.
Several years ago, an interesting thing happened to author Mary Anna Evans on her way to Mississippi. While traveling on Interstate 10, Evans envisioned the setting for her first mystery novel, as well as the fictional character Faye Longchamp, the archaeologist who would appear in “Artifacts” and many more books to follow.
“I’ve plotted two or three books while driving down I-10, because it’s so boring,” Evans said during a recent interview in her home in Gainesville. “Almost always my stories come out of the setting. She [Faye Longchamp] came out of the place.”
Evans, who holds degrees in engineering and physics, was born in Hattiesburg and is a second-generation Mississippian. She was on her way home to visit her mother when inspiration struck. A scene popped into her head: an old home in disrepair, the image that now graces the front cover of “Artifacts,” painted by Gainesville artist Eleanor Blair.“I had this sort of guilty pleasure for antebellum domestic architecture, and a big pile of picture books of the houses,” Evans said. “Some of them were all restored and some of them were falling down. I’m an engineer enough to like the ones that have fallen down, because I can see how they were made.”
Evans had the setting and the character, but still did not have a story.
“And “Gone With the Wind” had already been done,” she said with an easy laugh. “If you’re writing for a 21st century audience, you have to acknowledge that these homes were built by slaves.”
Evans said she decided to take the topic head-on. She made the character descended from the slaves — but with a twist.
“Wouldn’t it be interesting if she’s descended from the owners, too?” Evans said. “So now I’ve got a character with an internal conflict that will never go away.”
Thus, “Artifacts” began to take form.
Evans has always liked to write, but she attended the University of Mississippi and Murray State University to earn degrees in physics and chemical engineering. She was writing, but not exactly the kind of writing she enjoyed.
“You could go for six months in the engineering school and write a lot of Greek and a lot of numbers and not write a complete sentence,” Evans said. “I’m not suited for that. The right side of my brain was shriveling.”
But while in graduate school, Evans had a chance to audit a writing class for which a national book award nominated author was doing a visiting professorship.
“I walked into a wonderful class,” she said. “I wrote one story, and got her comments and got an A+.” Evans also won a campus writing contest.
One could say the rest is history. As her Web page states, “Mary Anna Evans has degrees in physics and engineering, but her heart is in the past.”
Her mystery series all have two stories: history and the murder mystery. Because of the historical component, she is often invited to speak at high schools and middle schools.
“They use my books in schools because they find they can teach math and science — and history, obviously,” Evans said. “This is very important in educational circles right now. The idea is to teach from books that kids would want to read anyway. They call it reading across the curriculum.”
But before all this came to pass, Evans spent her time teaching, raising a family, and writing short stories and poetry at night.
“When I had two babies in diapers, and was working full-time, it was haiku,” she said with a laugh. “But I actually published a few haiku.”
Evans is the proud mom of a son who is now 23, two daughters, ages 22 and 13, and a grandson.
When she was fresh out of college, Evans was an instructor at Paducah Community College in Kentucky. As the “new kid,” she taught math for nurses, physics for physicians and computer science for engineers.
“I always got the classes nobody wanted to teach or take,” Evans said. “But, I liked that, because at the end of the semester they could do it.”
Her then-husband’s job brought the family to Gainesville where Evans worked as a consulting engineer. She kept writing. She found an agent. And during that long ride to Mississippi, she thought about her new character.
“I still didn’t know anything about her at this point,” Evans said, recalling the process. “There’s no money inherited with the house. How would she pay taxes? So she digs up artifacts and sells them on the black market. Sooner or later she’s going to dig up a dead body. A murder victim. And that’s when I knew it was a murder mystery. I was still on I-10.”
Evans then began her research and learned everything she could about archaeology.
“I got a stack of books and crawled all over the Internet. I spent about a month, early on, reading for a living,” she said. “It all kind of piles up and you wake up one day and — it’s time.”
In 2003, “Artifacts” hit the bookstores and went on to win the Benjamin Franklin award. Evans was asked to write another one. And another.
In 2007, Evans’ third book in the series, “Effigies,” won the Florida Historical Society’s Bronze Award. And now she has wrapped up “Floodgates,” the fifth (but not last) in the series. On July 26, she will have a book signing at Goering’s bookstore in Gainesville.
All of her novels are available in large print, and “Findings” is available in audio. Evans said that all should soon be available in audio.
Evans’ creativity does not stop with writing; she is also an avid musician. Guitars and a grand piano grace her living room. Her favorite short-story project includes fellow writers who are also musicians. Evans was asked to contribute a song to accompany her short story for a book/CD anthology titled, “A Merry Band of Murderers.”
“We debuted it at the World Mystery Convention,” Evans said, “and we got to be rock stars for about 10 minutes.”
The book features four best-selling authors, including Rupert Holmes, who wrote the Piña Colada Song.
These days, Evans keeps busy with her writing and research, speaking engagements, raising her daughter, and organizing the upcoming Anhinga Writers’ Studio 2009 Summer Workshops, formerly the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Writing the Region Workshop. Evans and her partners took over when the sponsoring body pulled out.
“We have assembled a world-class faculty, featuring the “New York Times” bestselling author Charlaine Harris,” Evans said. “I’m very excited. I get to work with my friends. I get to meet people who do what I do. I get to teach — and I love to teach.”
And as for the future, her next book in the series, “Floodgates,” set in post-Katrina Louisiana, is now hitting the bookstores. As with all her work, a healthy dose of research was in order. Evans poured over a 700-page independent report on the levee failures, and the history of the drainage system.
She gets her inspiration from a variety of sources, from long drives to archaeological magazines to the “WPA Guide to 1930s Alabama,” where she spotted an obscure article about a tri-racial ethnic group in an isolated area of Alabama.
“That is what kicked off “Relics,” Evans said. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t Faye just give her eyeteeth to investigate people like that?’ My reading gets me off to all kinds of interesting places.”
And if all else fails, there is always the long drive on Interstate 10.
