PROFILES IN MYSTERY:
Denise Swanson

    Had Denise Swanson's original big-city wanderlust taken root, she might today be writing about Washington power-brokers or spies.

    But the small-town Illinois farm girl-turned-school psychologist has looked far afield only to find her literary niche close to home, spinning mysteries about a small-town farm girl-turned-school psychologist. Swanson was nominated for an Agatha Award, one of mystery writing's top honors, for her maiden 2000 whodunit, Murder of a Small-Town Honey.

The Plainfield junior high psychologist's second Skye Denison mystery, Murder of a Sweet Old Lady , was published earlier this year, and a Skye Denison short story, "Not a Monster of a Chance," was included in the recent mystery collection, And the Dying is Easy.

"I held a garage sale with my mom recently down in Coal City, and one of the women I'd gone to high school with came to the sale with a friend," Swanson recounted. "She said to her friend, 'See -- this is the woman I went to school with, the one that had the book published.' Then she turned to me and said, 'Tell her I'm so-and-so in the book.'"

    While Swanson's family continues to run a corn and soybean operation in Coal City, the farm life didn't appeal to the budding novelist. She nonetheless found life at Chicago's Loyola University -- a campus plagued in the late '70s by drug and crime problems -- to be "quite a shock," and eventually transferred to the University of Illinois.

At Champaign-Urbana, Swanson met her husband-to-be, chemical engineer David Stybr. They married during her senior year, and moved back to Coal City for three years.

Swanson and her spouse then moved to Washington, D.C., area, where she soon realized "I really didn't like the city as much as I thought I would. They returned to live in Frankfurt for several years before settling in Plainfield.

    Amateur sleuth Skye Denison "shares a lot of my personality," Swanson admitted, though "she certainly has a lot more trials and trevails than I've had." However, while Swanson has been a psychologist for 17 years, Denison only recently launched her career, and thus is "probably the younger me."

    Beyond providing her heroine a profession and investigatory backdrop, Swanson has applied her career skills to her writing technique. When she begins an evaluation of a student, Swanson conducts a "clinical interview." She adapted that practice, in effect "interviewing" her major characters to make them more "rounded" -- "I could tell you their favorite colors and what radio station they like."

    In Murder of a Small-Town Honey , Denison, jilted by her boyfriend and fired from her previous job, reluctantly returns to her native Scumble River only to discover a dead body at the local Chokeberry Days festival. Murder of a Sweet Old Lady finds Denison investigating the murder of her grandmother and uncovering family secrets.

    Denison's school career played a minor role in Swanson's first novel and a somewhat greater part in Sweet Old Lady. "Not a Monster of a Chance" relates Denison 's inquiry into a death she encounters as a lifeguard during summer break.

Her newest novel, Murder of a Sleeping Beauty, involves a death at Denison 's high school. While her books are generally humorous, Sleeping Beauty explores serious mother-daughter issues, "especially mothers who are trying to relive their own teen-age queen lives through their daughters" and society's perceptions of and obsession with female beauty.

    In the real world, Swanson sees anxieties about long-range college or career goals "more with the parents than with the student." She encourages parents at the junior high and early high school levels to focus more on development of sound study skills and less on their children's future income and earnings.

    "Usually, if you ask a junior high boy what he wants to do after he graduates from school or what he wants to do for a living, he wants to be some sort of sports star," she reported. "If you ask a junior high girl what she wants to be, it's split between Britney Spears and a teacher.

    "They really don't have any concept at the junior high level of career. But parents are very forward-looking at this point. A lot of the parents want their kids to be going to Northwestern or one of the other big colleges, and are looking for any way to get an advantage for their kid."