HOMETOWN

Not long after Sara E. Johnson and I began a recent phone call, I couldn’t resist reminding my Pinecrest High School classmate what she had penned a long time ago in my senior yearbook.

“When you’re a rich and famous news man and I’m a rich and famous news lady,” she wrote on a back page in my Spectrum, “let’s get together and talk over old times.”

The words were the earnest well-wishes from one eager aspiring journalist to another. Sara LeFever and I were on the staff of The Courier, the student newspaper, for a couple of years, and officers in the Quill and Scroll club. We alternated weeks reporting high school news in The Pinehurst Outlook, with fresh-faced class pictures as our respective column sigs.

Neither of us fulfilled the futures mentioned in her message. I gravitated to sports, specializing in golf coverage. A stay-at-home mother of three until earning a master’s degree from UNC and becoming a reading specialist in her 40s, Johnson contributed articles on family and education to newspapers in Chapel Hill and Raleigh.

When we talked in January, the conversation didn’t revolve around our high school days (although we agreed it can be tough to review examples of our early, raw writing) but rather newer, exciting developments in Johnson’s life, which should be an example for anyone of a certain age. 

“I was 60 when my first novel came out in 2019,” she said. “People need to know it’s never too late.”

Johnson’s debut book, Molten Mud Murder, was the first installment in the “Alexa Glock Forensics Mystery Series.” The central character is a plucky and slightly geeky American investigator living in New Zealand, a traveling forensic who uses teeth to solve crimes. The debut has been followed by The Bones Remember, The Bone Track, The Bone Riddle and The Hungry Bones. The final book in the series, Bone Chilling, will be published this year.

The mysteries resulted from the nine months Johnson and her husband, Forrest, who live in Durham, spent exploring New Zealand in 2014. After returning home from a fascinating land that had intrigued her greatly, she pursued the notion of writing a book, something I had encouraged her to do in an email when we reconnected more than 20 years ago. “You said if you want to write a book, you can do it,” Johnson said. “Your message really stuck with me.”

Johnson has always been a wide reader, including mysteries. She has been enamored of the genre since she was 10 and read The Bungalow Mystery, a Nancy Drew book given to her mother in 1942. She spent a year writing Molten Mud Murder. Then came the hard part, which required much patience and persistence.

“I think I had 66 rejections from literary agents, but then the 67th came along,” Johnson said. “I don’t know where the cutoff would have been. Would I have contacted 75 or 100 agents? I don’t know. I was getting some positive rejections — people saying, ‘I like this and this, but don’t like that.’ What I call the positive rejections kept me going, and I kept honing the manuscript.”

Johnson informs her books with meticulous research provided by a cadre of professionals to ensure accuracy in her scenes. “I have wonderful experts who read over what I’ve written,” she said. “One forensic pathologist can spend two pages telling me how to flip a body on an autopsy table.”

At work on her seventh book, revolving around a coroner in northern Minnesota, Johnson will incorporate the forensics knowledge she gained producing the Alexa Glock series. She tries to write 1,000 words a day while relying on important assessments along the way from fellow writers.

“Hands down, the biggest help for me is being in a writers’ group,” Johnson said. “We meet weekly, not just mystery authors but folks in all kinds of genres. We bring 10 pages, read them, and people critique them. Reading your work aloud and getting good feedback is so valuable. I can’t thank them enough.”

As for others who might want to tap into their creative side later in life, Johnson believes it isn’t a mystery. “Sit down and do it,” she said. “If you have a dream to write a book, it’s possible.”