SANTA CRUZ – Authors are consistently working on their next big ideas and getting them out into the broader world.
October is an especially busy month for Santa Cruz creator Vinnie Hansen, as she’s going to re-release her 2022 suspense novel “One Gun” on Tuesday and can end the month with the discharge of a brief story in against the law thriller inspired by The Grateful Dead -Anthology began.
Hansen didn’t plan the writing early on. She grew up in rural South Dakota, and after spending a summer in Europe, she went to Southern California to remain together with her oldest brother, who suggested she try community college.
“I’ve never heard anything like this in South Dakota,” she said.
Hansen took a night class in creative writing that sparked his love for the shape. Her writing was heavily inspired by her own childhood, which she said was very cathartic.
“I had a lot of trauma from my upbringing,” she said. “I grew up in poverty and had to process a lot of things and try to get out. I wrote about these experiences and it was healing.”
This inspired Hansen to pursue a level in creative writing. In graduate school, she needed to submit a book-length thesis and attempted to put in writing her first novel.
“I noticed that I was having a lot of trouble planning the plot, but I had always read crime novels and I realized that crime novels had that structure,” she said. “That’s what got me into crime fiction.”
Hansen later moved to Santa Cruz and taught English at Watsonville High School for 27 years, while also writing often. She has published many short stories, the seven-part crime series Carol Sabala and the novel Lostart Street, set in Soquel Village within the early Nineteen Eighties. She received the 2015 Writers' Police Academy Golden Donut Award for her short story “Bad Connection” and was a two-time finalist for a Claymore Award.
Hansen's latest novel, “One Gun,” was first published in 2022 by the independent publishing collaboration Misterio Press. After securing a take care of 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 companion book or series in mind for Crime Writer, but I had already written One Gun.”
Level Best Books committed to a two-book deal, which resulted in One Gun being re-released under Level Best's auspices. The story was inspired by a real-life incident during which Hansen and her husband returned home from shopping to seek out a break-in. Her husband chased the burglar down the road, which resulted within the burglar pulling out a gun and threatening to kill her husband.
“When he started running again, my husband kept chasing him because he thought he couldn't shoot him while he was running until he dropped the things he had stolen from our house,” she said.
The police arrived and arrested the burglar, however the weapon was not on him.
“It’s just that this story wouldn’t make it into the novel,” Hansen said. “What was really on my mind was the question, 'What happened to that gun?' The gun is out there, waiting somewhere. The police never found it. So where did it go?'”
This idea became the basis for “One Gun”, where couple Vivi and Ben Russo go through a similar predicament and try to find the gun so the burglar can be charged with armed robbery, but it ends up in the hands of two teenagers, they find it first.
“'One Gun' became the story of that gun and my idea of where it spread locally,” Hansen said.
“One Gun” is set in the fictional town and county of Playa Maria, which is heavily inspired by Santa Cruz, and will also appear in “Crime Writer,” due in theaters in 2025.
In addition to re-releasing One Gun, Hansen also had a story 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 numerous short stories, which have appeared in publications and anthologies such as Black Cat Weekly, Santa Cruz Ghost Stories, and Santa Cruz Weird. She also had experience adapting songs into short stories, such as the psychedelic hit “96 Tears” by rock band ? and the Mysterians for a crime anthology inspired by one-hit wonders.
For Friend of the Devil, Pachter wanted to put together a collection of short stories inspired by one song per album by the legendary jam band The Grateful Dead. Authors such as James DF Hannah, Kathryn O'Sullivan, Paul Awad and Pachter himself have written stories named after songs such as “Shakedown Street”, “Touch of Grey” and of course “Friend of the Devil”.
Although she was a fan of the song “Ripple” at the time and played keyboards in a ukulele group that performed Grateful Dead songs on Harbor Beach, Hansen does not consider herself a Deadhead and therefore left it to her niece Holly to figure out which song she was playing should choose. After getting a few recommendations, she chose “Dire Wolf” from her 1970 album “Workingman's Dead.” The country-tinged murder ballad, penned by Robert Hunter, told the story of a man playing cards with the titular extinct wolf and was also inspired by the Zodiac Killer, who killed five people in the Bay Area shortly before the song was written .
As a keyboardist herself, Hansen loved writing a character with that ability.
“I've wanted to make use of this data for quite a while to have a foremost character who plays the keyboard,” she said. “It was a fascinating problem for me to think about how the instrument could be used to kill someone.”
Hansen hopes those who read the “Friend of the Devil” anthology will have an entertaining time like a Grateful Dead concert.
“I really see the audience for this book being 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 very hard to avoid preaching on this, but I just want people to take into consideration how having a gun increases the risks to people anywhere across the gun,” she said.
For more information on “Friend of the Devil,” see Downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/pachter-friend-devil/. For more information on “One Gun,” see VinnieHansen.com.
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