"All I know is, I plod," said Mark Zubro about his remarkable career as a mystery novelist. Zubro is the author of 28 mystery novels, plus a science fiction trilogy. In 2014, his work was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award.
Zubro spent years as a teacher, and thus learned how to balance work and writing effectively, as evidenced by his output. Teaching also served as an inspiration for his first mystery, where he had a gay couple, Tom and Scott, solve the murder of one of Tom's fellow teachers.
"Many people asked me after the first book came out, where I just roasted school administrators.... Three reporters, three different cities, they kind of leaned over and asked, "you based these administrators on our administrators, didn't you?" Zubro said, laughing. "You catch something universal. You want to catch something true to the human heart."
In general, Zubro finds his inspiration in everyday events. "When you're creating a world, it's real simple. All you have to do is repeat all the idiot things you've ever heard from relatives, former friends, TV commentators, Republicans. You don't have to make much up," he said.
Zubro said that he found himself shaken by the Orlando, Florida, mass shooting, as his latest entry in the Tom and Scott series, A Conspiracy of Fear, involved a gunman in a gay art gallery. He'd written the book prior to Orlando, but the coincidence seemed eerie. On the other hand, figures like Donald Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos seem like prime material for fictional villains to Zubro.
The writer likes to delve deep into the world of his characters. "I begin to live in their world, especially when I'm writing a first draft. I'm there with them," Zubro said. "And I know how they're feeling. What I'm trying to do is make it realistic: what would a sane, sensible, realistic person do here."
Occasionally, Zubro runs into stumbling blocks. Zubro said his sci-fi trilogy, Alien Danger, took 30 years to percolate. And of course there's always those troublesome mystery plots. Once, Zubro said, he got to the end of a book and realized no one had committed the crime. "This is not good in a mystery. So you line them all up in your imagination, and of course you have go back and revise in light of the new information."
Zubro's favorite authors include Robert B. Parker and Carolyn Hart: he loves their skill with dialogue. His inspiration for writing, however, came from a children's book series about a pig named Freddy, who briefly had a detective agency and read Sherlock Holmes mysteries. That Christmas, Zubro asked for Sherlock Holmes books.
As someone who has written both police procedurals and books with amateur sleuths—think Agatha Christie's Miss Marple—Zubro has little patience for what he calls the "Jessica Fletcher syndrome." Referring to the main character of Murder, She Wrote, Zubro cracked, "I think the very best ending to Murder She Wrote: in the final, two-hour episode, it would be revealed that Jessica did them all."
As a writer, Zubro has never shied away from gay content. His sci-fi trilogy involves gays banished from their home planets, and the Tom and Scott series stars a longtime couple.
"In '87, when I was writing the first Tom and Scott book, Scott the baseball player was in the closet completely. He's come out. There is no question that the world is better for us," Zubro said. "In '87, there were no happy gay couples in mystery literature. There weren't very many anywhere. We either had some dreadful disease or we were going to commit suicide. And I said,'I'm going to have a happy gay couple and they're going to be in love.' And that, to me, was different."
Even though Zubro said he's a sucker for a love story, by the third book in the series he had to draw the line about how well Tom and Scott's relationship was going. "I wanted to give them something to fight about and argue about. So a friend of mine said, 'have them redecorate the house'," Zubro laughed.
Ultimately, though, whether his heroes face danger or decoration, Zubro wants the world to be made right. "By the end of it," he said, "Tom and Scott's love is going to triumph."