Walking into Zarita’s, I wasn’t sure what I’d find. Private investigator SJ Rook had agreed to meet me in his favorite off-duty joint. Rook was seated in a rear booth facing the door, a glass of bourbon settled between his relaxed hands. Black open-collar shirt, black jeans, three-day stubble: he hadn’t gone to any extra fuss for our appointment. I couldn’t judge his height, but he seemed to occupy more space than average. The following excerpts are from a conversation that extended over ninety minutes.

Delia C. Pitts: Thank you for making time to meet with me. Are you in the midst of any investigations you can tell me about?

SJ Rook: My time is your time. But I figure you know that already. I’m working on a couple of cases, yes. I’m doing prep work for a block party this weekend. We’re providing security to keep the peace between a couple of feuding families. And we’re looking into a string of car thefts. Nothing major: police have taken reports, but no action, so the clients are unhappy and asked us to dig a little deeper. And this morning, a lady came in with a complaint about missing jewelry. Four rings, a necklace, and enough bracelets to cuff every clown in Rikers. My bet is on the boyfriend’s sister.

DCP: Are these typical cases? Can you give a little background on the Ross Agency and how you came to work for them?

SJR: OK. We provide security for house parties, holiday receptions, bridal showers, birthday celebrations, office gatherings, and family reunions. When friends or pets get lost, when documents or jewelry go missing, people call us. We help out with all those neighborhood events or personal relationships where tensions run high and violence bubbles just under the surface. The Ross Agency investigates intimate matters and little mysteries the police consider beneath their interest or beyond their abilities. We never cross the cops unless forced to, but we don’t always run on parallel tracks with them either.

DCP: So, you’re a neighborhood fix-it service with Harlem as your beat. Tell me about your colleagues in the Ross Agency.

SJR: Norment Ross is the founder of the firm. He started in the security business over twenty-five years ago, providing services his neighbors couldn’t get anywhere else. He’s a tough guy with a big soul. Country strong, with a personality that consumes all the air in any room he enters. His daughter, Sabrina, is a perfect complement to Norment. She’s got brains, logic, and common sense enough for five people. I’d say she’s too quick on the trigger, but then I can’t complain. Her gun skills have saved me a time or two over the years. Brina’s a deadeye with bullets and questions both.

DCP: Good with a weapon. And gorgeous too. You seem kind of soft on her.

SJR: I don’t know if that’s the right phrase. But, yes, I like her. More than I’ve liked any woman in a long time. Too often in this business, you run into a femme fatale. But Brina’s a femme vitale. If that’s a word.

DCP: A good enough word. You describe the Ross Agency as dealing with neighborhood problems that fall off the official radar. But you seem to encounter a large share of murders too.

SJR: Murder isn’t my beat. Not by a long shot. But it finds me all the same. Sometimes a murder case drops onto my plate when our digging uncovers a lethal secret. Sometimes my pal Detective Archie Lin drags me into an NYPD investigation when he runs into a dead end. So to speak.

DCP: You’ve managed to talk about everybody except yourself. How do you fit into the Ross Agency?

SJR: I joined Brina and Norment Ross at the detective agency a little over two years ago. Before that, my pock-marked career included a stint in the army, lots of dead-end jobs, and a sorry divorce that ended an even sadder marriage. I was a down-on-his-luck scrub when Norment invited me to join his little security firm. I provide the muscle and enough ignorance to lubricate our investigations.

DCP: Fists and plenty of smarts, I bet. But what about guns? You mentioned Brina carries one. How about you?

SJR: Not since Iraq. I won’t do it. I figure, if I make my reputation in this neighborhood with a gun, I’ll have to defend it every day against some fool who thinks he can beat me to the trigger. The way I see it, a gun is an invitation to kill or get killed. That’s a party I won’t join. Not anymore.

DCP: Now, tables turned, Rook. Any questions for me?

SJR: Sure, a few. How’d you come up with the idea of a private eye in the first place?

DCP: I’ve loved film noir all my life. I remember geeking out for Alan Ladd in “The Blue Dahlia” and Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon” as a kid in grade school. And my favorite reading has always been detective fiction. Everything from Margery Allingham to P.D. James to Ruth Rendell to Chester Himes to Walter Mosely. With Agatha Christie as my touchstone and Arthur Conan Doyle as the source I always return to for inspiration. I’ve been writing fiction in one form or another for as long as I can remember, so when I had the chance, detective stories just came to me naturally.

SJR: And why Harlem?

DCP: I was born and raised in Chicago on the great South Side, but Harlem has been on my mind forever. The vitality, the verve, the creativity, and resilience of the capital of Black America make it a perfect place to set my detective fiction. If there are eight million stories in the Naked City, then at least four million of them are in Harlem. People come from all over the world to make Harlem their home. So, the diversity and inclusiveness of this neighborhood is an important character in the series.

SJR: How did you develop my first-person narration? I’ve heard readers say my voice feels so distinctive it worms right into their heads.

DCP: I didn’t know you looked at reviews! Your voice bloomed fully formed in my ear as I wrote the first volume, “Lost and Found in Harlem.” The sound seemed right for the setting and the situation. I wanted a mature voice that was terse, but warm. Smart, but not heavy with book learning. A little weary, a bit wounded, but still suffused with optimism. A romantic who’d been disappointed more than once in life, but was still in there slugging. A little bit of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, with a lot of Langston Hughes.

SJR: You gave me a backstory full of deficits – a bum foot, a dead army buddy, a bad marriage. But the toughest for me is my name, Shelba Julio Rook. How’d you come up with that doozy?

DCP: I didn’t realize you hated it so much. I saw the name “Shelba” on the side of a truck on my commute to work one day and wondered what it could possibly mean. So, I concocted a story that it was the combination of two names: Sheldon and Alba.

SJR: My parents. I get it.

DCP: Right. I figured your mother Alba Julia didn’t have Sheldon in her life any more, but she could memorialize him by blending his name with hers to make your unique name.

SJR: Mighty tough on a little kid growing up in south Texas, though.

DCP: But you turned out all right, Rook. More than all right.

To learn more about Rook, read Practice the Jealous Arts, the second book in the Ross Agency mystery series.

The private investigators at the Ross Agency in Harlem specialize in tracking down lost checks and missing relatives and solving other mundane mysteries. Murder isn’t normally on their plate, but when it is, they rise to the occasion.

Practice the Jealous Arts continues the adventures of private eyes S J Rook, Sabrina Ross, and her father Norment, who made their debuts in Lost and Found in Harlem. First, Rook is asked to help his NYPD buddy Archie Lin investigate the murder of an elderly math teacher at the prestigious Harlem Select School. Someone hated the mathematician enough to try to divide her head in two. Lin’s stumped and hopes Rook and the Rosses can find a motive in a tangled web of suspects that includes teachers, students, and parents.

After Rook cracks the first case, he accepts an out-of-town assignment with Sabrina. A celebrated artist has asked the agency to provide security on his farm. Caught up in the artist’s troubled, twisted family dynamic, Rook and Sabrina quickly discover rural life is long on drama and violence.

Welcome back to the Ross Agency. If you’ve got a mystery, they’ve got a solution— whether you approve or not.

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Meet the author
Delia C. Pitts is the author of the Ross Agency murder mystery series, which includes Lost and Found in Harlem, Practice the Jealous Arts, and Black and Blue in Harlem (forthcoming, winter 2018). She is a former university administrator and diplomat in the U.S. Foreign Service. She earned a Ph.D from the University of Chicago and has published over sixty fan fiction stories under the pen name Blacktop. She and her husband live in central New Jersey. They have twin sons living in Texas. Learn more about her at deliapitts.com.

All comments are welcomed.