THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, September 3, 1995 TAG: 9508310618
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
Former Charlotte Observer staff writer Jody Jaffe knows words and horses. It makes sense her first mystery novel would be about the equine world and move at a full gallop. She scorches the ground:
There's not so much difference between jumping a horse around a course and writing a good feature for the paper - when they both go right. You click into a lead, and if it's good, you sail right through the story with your fingers clacking across the keyboard like you're possessed. Which in a way may be true.
You'll want to go along for the ride in Horse of a Different Killer (Fawcett Columbine, 280 pp., $21). When a big show winner is murdered in a stable, short, red-headed feature writer Natalie Gold seizes on the story like shrink-wrap. Teamed with handsome investigative reporter Henry Goode of the ``Charlotte Commercial Appeal,'' she solves the crime - narrowly averting her own premature appearance on the obituary page.
Like Gold, Jaffe, 42, happens to be short and red-headed.
``And I'm married to Charlie Shepard,'' she said on the phone from their small northern Virginia farm near Front Royal. ``He's Henry. Charlie broke the PTL story.''
Shepard, former Observer star and author of Forgiven: The Rise and Fall of Jim Bakker and the PTL Ministry (1989), is now managing editor of Digital Ink, an expanded on-line version of The Washington Post. Married since 1982, he and Jaffe have two sons, Ben, 10, and Sam, 7. When they're not on holiday at the farm, they live in Washington.
Like Gold, Jaffe ``was one of those horse-crazy girls who grew up to be a horse-crazy woman.''
``It takes big bucks to ride,'' she said, ``and I grew up in the row houses of West Philly. But I always loved horses; I kissed pictures of horses. After my parents divorced in 1963, my father got me on Sundays and started taking me riding.''
In the fourth grade, Jaffe opened a bank account and sustained it with a dime a week. By the time she was 17 and enrolled at the University of Colorado, Jaffe had amassed $400. The third week of college, she purchased a horse with it.
``I've had horses ever since,'' she said.
Like Gold, Jaffe worked at her Charlotte newspaper for more than a decade.
``I loved newspapers,'' she says. ``I felt it was not a job but a calling. I was proud to be there.''
But after the birth of her second child in 1988, Jaffe returned to a changing publication that demanded ``USA Today storyettes'' instead of the full-blown features she was accustomed to.
``I had routinely written 40-inch stories,'' she said. ``I remember spending an entire week with Vanessa Williams, who had become the first black Miss North Carolina - big news then. But by the time I left in 1989, the average story length was running between eight and 15 inches. You can't stretch much as a writer in 15 inches.''
Her husband won a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard. They moved to Boston, then to Washington, where Jaffe devoted herself to short fiction for five years. She found the form artistically satisfying - ``like little Advent calendars, where you open a door and see just enough of the picture'' - but not enormously lucrative.
Then someone suggested that, with her long experience among throughbreds, she could become ``a female Dick Francis,'' and Jaffe attempted a thriller.
It sold fast.
She received an immediate $30,000 two-book advance from Fawcett; now Jaffe is 100 pages into the sequel, Chestnut Mare Beware. It's set in Charlotte and Middleburg, Va. ``Henry and Natalie come back and fight.''
At a safe distance from the newsroom, Jaffe could not resist a little literary revenge on survey-obsessed editors with hidden agendas. Gold's fictive boss is ``an automaton who was hired after scoring virtually no feeling points on her management psychological exam.'' The woman resembles ``a pale-faced and overbred Doberman pinscher.''
Bites, too.
But, beyond lampoon, Jaffe grieves at what she regards as a current dumbed-down devaluation of the Fourth Estate.
``Whether it's TV, USA Today, or whatever the reason,'' Jaffe said, ``we Americans have short attention spans, and newspapers are reflecting that. I loved newspapers the way they were.``
- MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Jody Jaffe wrote for the Charlotte Observer for more than a decade.
by CNB