Santa Cruz author celebrates inclusion in Grateful Dead-inspired anthology

Writers are constantly working, typing away at their next big ideas and also getting them published into the wider world.

For Santa Cruz author Vinnie Hansen, October was a particularly busy month, as she re-released her 2022 suspense novel “One Gun” and published a short story in a crime anthology inspired by the Grateful Dead.

Writing is not something Hansen planned early on. She grew up in rural South Dakota, and after spending a summer in Europe, she went to Southern California to stay with her oldest brother, who suggested she try community college.

“I’d never heard of such a thing in South Dakota,” she said.

Hansen took a night class in creative writing, which fueled a love for the form. Her writing was heavily inspired by her own childhood, which she said was very cathartic.

“I had plenty of trauma from my upbringing,” she said. “I grew up in poverty and had lots of things to process and try to get out. I wrote about those experiences, and it was healing.”

This inspired Hansen to pursue a degree in creative writing. In graduate school, she had to turn in a thesis that was book length and attempted to write her first novel.

“I discovered I had a lot of difficulty plotting, but I’d always read mysteries and I could see that mysteries had this structure to them,” she said. “That’s what turned me toward crime fiction.”

Hansen later moved to Santa Cruz and taught English at Watsonville High School for 27 years while also steadily writing. She has published many short stories, the seven-part Carol Sabala mystery series and the novel “Lostart Street,” set in Soquel Village in the early ’80s. She received the Writers’ Police Academy’s Golden Donut Award in 2015 for her short story “Bad Connection” and was twice a finalist for a Claymore Award.

Hansen’s latest novel, “One Gun,” was first released in 2022 by the independent publishing collaborative Misterio Press. After contracting with the Maryland-based independent publisher Level Best Books for her next book, “Crime Writer,” she was told they wanted a two or three-book contract.

“They really wanted companion books or a series,” she said. “I didn’t have a companion book or series in mind for ‘Crime Writer,’ but I had already written ‘One Gun.’”

Level Best Books committed to a two-book contract, which resulted in “One Gun” getting re-released under the umbrella of Level Best. The story was inspired by a real-life incident where Hansen and her husband returned home from shopping to find a burglary in progress. Her husband chased the burglar down the street, resulting in the burglar pulling a gun and threatening to kill her husband.

“Once he started running again, my husband — thinking he couldn’t shoot him while he was running — continued to pursue him until he dropped the stuff that he had stolen from our house,” she said.

The police arrived and arrested the burglar, but the gun was not with him.

“Just that story wouldn’t make the novel,” said Hansen. “What really took hold in my head was this idea of ‘What happened to that gun? That gun’s out there waiting somewhere. The cops never found it, so where did it go?’”

That idea became the basis for “One Gun,” where couple Vivi and Ben Russo go through a similar predicament and attempt to find the gun so the burglar can be charged with armed robbery, but it ends up in the hands of two tweens who find it first.

“‘One Gun’ became the story of that gun and my idea of where it went out in the community,” said Hansen.

“One Gun” is set in the fictional city and county of Playa Maria, which is heavily inspired by Santa Cruz, and also will feature in “Crime Writer,” due to be released in 2025.

In addition to the re-release of “One Gun,” Hansen also had a story featured in the anthology “Friend of the Devil: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Grateful Dead.” She was invited by editor Josh Pachter due to her many short stories, which have been published in publications and anthologies like Black Cat Weekly, “Santa Cruz Ghost Stories” and Santa Cruz Weird. She also had experience turning songs into short stories, like the psychedelic hit “96 Tears” by the rock band named Question Mark and the Mysterians for a crime fiction anthology inspired by one hit wonders.

For “Friend of the Devil,” Pachter sought to compile a collection of short stories inspired by one song per album from the iconic jam band The Grateful Dead. Writers like James D.F. Hannah, Kathryn O’Sullivan, Paul Awad and Pachter himself created stories named after songs like “Shakedown Street,” “Touch of Grey” and, of course, “Friend of the Devil.”

Although she was a fan of the song “Ripple” back in the day and plays keyboard with a ukulele group that performs Grateful Dead songs at Harbor Beach, Hansen does not consider herself a Deadhead, so she deferred to her niece, Holly, to determine which song she should choose. After being given a few recommendations, she settled on “Dire Wolf” from their 1970 album “Workingman’s Dead.” The country-tinged murder ballad penned by Robert Hunter told the story of a man who plays cards with the titular extinct wolf and was also inspired by the Zodiac Killer, who killed five people in the Bay Area, shortly before the song was written.

Hansen said she was drawn to the refrain of “Please don’t murder me” and figured it could work as a crime story. The story is about a woman named Carrie Cunningham who plays keyboards in a band called Dire Wolf who had a minor hit called “Maybe,” written by Cunningham. When the song has a viral resurgence, the singer and Cunningham’s ex-boyfriend, John, takes all the credit and receives all the proceeds, prompting Cunningham to seek revenge against him.

As a keyboardist herself, Hansen liked writing a character with that skill.

“I wanted to use that knowledge for quite some time to have a keyboard-playing main character,” she said. “To think about how the instrument could be used to kill somebody was an intriguing problem for me.”

Hansen hopes those who read the “Friend of the Devil” anthology will have a fun time, like a Grateful Dead concert.

“I see the audience for that book really being Grateful Dead fans and anybody who likes crime fiction,” she said.

For “One Gun,” she hopes readers will think more about guns in their community.

“I tried very hard to avoid being preachy about that, but I just want people to think about when there’s a gun present, how it increases the dangers to people anywhere in the vicinity of the gun,” she said.

For more information on “Friend of the Devil,” go to Downandoutbooks.com/bookstore/pachter-friend-devil/. For more information on “One Gun,” go to VinnieHansen.com.