Maureen Tan

 

           It’s another Sunday on the library circuit for Maureen Tan: Fresh copies of Tan’s novels are stacked on the conference table to the rear of the community room, and library staffers are setting out platters of cookies for the anticipated throng of mystery fans and would-be authors.

     Maureen Tan enters the room, and a few expectations seem dashed. This utterly pleasant woman with the natural smile and the casually maternal bearing is the spinner of dark tales of murder, alienation, and redemption? This former Marine “brat” and University of Illinois technical writer is a fledgling creator of video games packed with interactive intensity and 3-D intrigue?

     Tan, the author of AKA Jane and Run, Jane, Run, appears a bit surprised herself. Unlike her fictional heroine, brashly cool but emotionally troubled British agent Jane Nichols, the author and mother of three actively embraces family and the warm camraderie of coworkers and friends.

Like Nichols, she’s willing to face down a challenge, in Tan’s case launching a new career at Volition Inc., a Champaign electronic game developer.

     “A friend of mine said, ‘You have to go to Volition, because they Frogger and Donkey Kong, but Volition designs for Playstation II and PCs and all of that. They did Summoner and Red Faction, which are big games. I said, ‘They don’t need someone like me.’ need a writer,’” recalled Tan, an Illinois Farm Bureau member who celebrated her one-year anniversary with the firm in December. “Well, I remembered

     “And at that time, there were 60 employees, and two were women -– the receptionist and the office manager. The average age is 27. I’m thinking, ‘Oh, no; I do not belong here.’ But as I talked to them there, I realized that a lot of the skills I had as a fiction writer would be easy to apply to the games. That’s what selling games, now: The idea that they have a plot, that they have focused action, that they have dialogue.

“The president of the company said they were interested in me because they had read dialogue in my book, and it sounded just like dialogue you would have in an action game. I find myself at Volition now with 60-some employees, and there are six women. I’m at least a decade older than the next oldest person in the company. But it’s the sort of environment where no one seems to notice, so it’s cool.”

Born in Oceanside, Calif. , the daughter of a career Marine, Tan and her family were “hauled all over the country” before her father retired to Chicago . She left the Windy City for Ames , Iowa, after she married Peter Tan, and the family moved some 15 years ago to Champaign-Urbana, where Tan for 13 years was writer editor for the University of Illinois College of Engineering’s Engineering Outlook.

When she began writing the first Jane Nichols novel, AKA Jane, in the mid-‘90s, Tan “was not having the great adventures I wanted to have, because I was being a good responsible mom and a good responsible wife.” Tan, an expert in “hot-rolling steel mill sludge,” saw the suspense field seemed to her the perfect hunting ground for literary adventure.

But she did not forget her domestic roots, and Savannah , Ga. –- the “big city” for her family when her father was stationed at Parris Island -– became a chief locale for AKA Jane , published late in 1997. Tan vividly recalled “the swamps and the snakes” of rural Savannah, and the prospect of combining urban crime and rural adventure provided what she believed to be an ideal setting.

     Into this mix, Tan incorporated her memories of a ChicagoAtlantic, but instead of mining James Bond territory by assigning Jane to MI-6 (the British equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency), Tan attached her character to MI-5, a British law enforcement agency similar to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. neighborhood heavily populated with policemen’s and firefighters’ family. For her heroine, she looked across the

     “I understood that a lot better than espionage,” she said. “A lot of my heroine’s work involves arms smuggling, drug smuggling, national crimes. The male protagonist in the book is the Savannah police chief. So what we have is cop and cop. That relationship begins in book one and continues through book two.

“What I wanted was a strong female character who was very driven by her sense of duty -- to take the male stereotype of someone who would sacrifice everything because this is their job. Jane’s someone who kind of threw away family and happiness because she feels her duty to her country takes precedence over everything. I wanted a male character (Savannah Police Chief Alex Callaghan) who was more into home and family and who was constantly torn between what he feels is his duty and his obligations as a brother, as a boyfriend.”

Battered by the death of her parents in an apparent terrorist assault MI-5, the murder of a fellow agent/lover who was protecting her from an assassin, and her unwitting role in the death of an undercover policeman, Nichols in AKA Jane has retired to Savannah on the income she has earned secretly as a mystery writer. She is drawn back into the game when she discovers that her nemesis, Irish Republican Army terrorist Jim O’Neil, is a respected member of her new community.

Nichols initially sees Callaghan -- who according to Tan “would do anything for someone he cared about” -- as weak. But Tan refers to her first-person heroine as “an unreliable narrator” who uses bantering humor and a seemingly blasé attitude as a mask for her pain, and the personal relationship that develops between the two as they investigate a series of stranglings forces Nichols to reexamine her life.

In the sequel, Run, Jane, Run (1999), Nichols returns to Savannah U.S. soldier and mother was a South Vietnamese official. When her parents are killed, the central character is raised by her paternal uncles, Chicago in the service of MI-5, only to find Callaghan is being victimized by a stalker. Tan was uncertain when – or if – Nichols might tackle her next case: She currently is working on a new “first-person female” novel about a young Vietnamese-American woman whose father was a policemen, and Tan reported the new novel will feature “cultural conflict and a little mystery.”

     Among the code-writers, modelers, and animators at Volition Inc., Tan emphasizes that she is “all plot”: “All I’ve ever wanted a word processor for is to process words.” She recognizes her new medium is “primarily a young man’s game,” and hints that in addition to weaving a solid, straight-line “story,” a key to success in game development lies in “understanding why Lara Croft (the fetching star of the Tomb Raider game series) is appealing.”

     “You think about your audience, and think about what they’re actually going to enjoy,” Tan related. “They like action; they like adventure. They like to be the heroes and rescue the girl, and it doesn’t hurt if the girl is a babe.

     “You have to think of how you can give them what they want in a very interesting manner. The idea of suspense is that you don’t want to give away the plot -- whether it’s in the game or in the book – in the first chapter or the first hour of game play.”