A bean counters”™ confab in the Big Easy. Taxis pulling up in the rain. Smell of gumbo in the air. Gumbo and trouble. Someone”™s gonna get it. A flash of clothing. Lights out tonight. Blackjacked in the stairwell. Poor sap.
The human condition offers a host of reactions to this noir scenario: from sympathy to empathy to anger to the need for raw steak for the victim. Nothing like raw steak on a smacked-up kisser.
For Gail Farrelly, who was at a New Orleans accounting convention when someone was mugged, it made her think: “Wouldn”™t that be a great way to murder someone? In a distant city ”¦ the person is away ”¦”
And she seems so ”¦ pleasant. If you had not thought to ask her about any hard time in her past, the question seems not so off-limits anymore. No, Farrelly assures with a smile, there”™s no hard time in her past.
Farrelly is an object lesson in never judging a book by its cover. Pretty and slight and polite, you would not think her a person preoccupied with murder. “I can weave mayhem into anything,” she says, sipping her orange juice, cool as a cucumber. “It”™s disgraceful.”
She writes mysteries. Yes, people are murdered; no, they”™re not splattered in woodchippers by guys in Halloween masks. Farrelly”™s criminality is the soft stuff ”“ “cozy mystery,” she calls it and nods agreement that she tips more to “Murder, She Wrote” than to “Pulp Fiction.”
Farrelly is a retired accounting professor. She attained tenure status at Rutgers University where she taught for 18 years. She also taught at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and at Elizabeth Seton College in Yonkers, now part of Iona College, where she taught business classes that included typing and stenography. She earned her doctorate at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Farrelly says she was a good teacher: liked by students, but “a pretty tough grader.”
It is perhaps the highest praise for any college teacher when a second section must be added to allow for a course”™s popularity. In accounting, such popularity would have to border on the miraculous. But it happened to Farrelly. She says the interest came about as the Enron accounting scandal unfolded.
“Students signed up in droves,” she recalls. “There was a desire to understand, to make sense out of it. Some might have thought of it as a boring, bean-counting discipline. But with Enron it became something else.”
The 9/11 attacks and the long commute from her Bronxville apartment to Rutgers acted in concert to nudge her toward an early retirement in 2002. She had written about accounting and finance as a professor, but within her lived the soul of a mystery writer.
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By anecdote, she reveals the leap from accounting professor to author with pen nibs dipped in poison might not have been so great a leap ”¦ Imagine the author as a child. The child is told it costs a nickel to flick on the lights, so be careful with the lights. Now, imagine the child is disciplined. To get back at the parents, the child ”“ Gail Farrelly in this case ”“ retreats to an empty room and wrings payment from her parents by flicking the light switch on and off. For some punishments, she would inflict 25 cents damage on her parents”™ pockets; for others 50 cents. “On, off. On, off. On, off ”¦”
Her mother confided in her later in life how quickly she got over things as a child. “She didn”™t know I had this system,” says Farrelly displaying her inner imp. Through a friend, she learned such behavior is typical of people with criminal tendencies. But she”™s sticking to her story about no hard time.
Farrelly admits to typing 60 words per minute. She writes on a computer, though she carries around a notebook for quick notes and has been known to lounge around a pool in summer writing longhand.
“The big thing with me is to tell a story,” she says. “The focus is not on the horrible part of the crime. There is a horrible crime in each book, but it”™s not the focus.”
She writes most days, usually in the afternoon and evening. When she”™s really into the story, time can disappear: “Which is a really good feeling, when you”™re in that mode.”
Farrelly likes the works of Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, P.D. James, Ellis Peters and Anne Perry, to name a few. She notes Perry”™s fascination with the Victorian epoch and says if she were going to embrace an era other than the present, she would dip her quill into Victorianism.
Farrelly has three self-published books and a pair of stories in mystery anthologies. Her story “Even Steven” was a Dillinger Award finalist, a national-scope affirmation of her talents; it also has been picked up by an audio-story publisher, Sniplets.com, though its release date is not set. Her self-published books are “Beaned in Boston,” “Duped by Derivatives” and “Creamed at Commencement.” She is part of the professional anthologies “Carols and Crimes, Gifts and Grifters” and “Deadly Ink Collection” for which she penned a pair of short stories, “Santa and the Poor Box” and “The Jurors Who Knew Too Much.”
She signed “Carols and Crimes” recently at Womrath Book Shop in Bronxville and will do so again Nov. 26 at 7 p.m. in the Eastchester Public Library. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Toys for Tots program.
Farrelly has been to Europe, spent a lot of time in Italy, been to Hawaii twice. She considers herself “adventurous within limits.” Her sister is Rita Farrelly, author of “Not in Bronxville,” also a murder mystery. In the gloaming, when perhaps there comes gentle rapping at your chamber door, check out the mysterious Farrelly sisters at www.farrellysistersonline.com.
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