Ever since I was a little girl, I've loved reading crime and detective novels, so I guess it was pretty natural that I started writing them when I was older. However, my family's very big on having a traditional career and so when I said that I wanted to go to college and study writing, my parents told me that I couldn't. They told me that I had to study for a degree that would secure a career, and not something as risky as writing. I suppose I could have studied journalism, but I didnt want to lose interest in writing because it would be something I would do every day for work, not for pleasure. I thought that teaching looked like a pretty good compromise, especially because of the long holidays. It was a good choice: by the time I was twenty-five I'd already finished two novels and had an agent.
To be honest, I never meant to keep my being a crime writer a secret or anything, and my friends have always known. One of the reasons most people don't know is because my agent told me that my name sounded too much like a romance novelist for older women. She suggested Brooke Lane and I thought, "Well, if you think it'll make me successful, okay." I'd totally forgotten about it until I walked into school one day and saw one of my colleagues reading my novel. I asked her some questions about it, and it was so obvious that she didn't have a clue that I'd written it she even offered to lend it to me after shed finished! Of course, sometimes I wonder what my students would think if they knew that their teacher was going home on the weekend write about murders and dead bodies, but I think my parents probably did me a favor: my teaching job keeps me in touch with the real world.