Success no mystery for New Haven author

New Haven, Conn. (WTNH) - New Haven's Karen E. Olson has a job she only used to dream about. She writes mystery novels. Her sixth comes out today.

Olson didn't become a successful author right away. She worked in newspapers for 20 years, and wrote her mysteries when she wasn't the travel editor, copy editor, and special projects editor for the New Haven Register.

"I learned how to write longer and make stuff up," she said, "because you can't do that as a reporter."

Her first four books were based on the life of Annie Seymour, a reporter for the "New Haven Herald" who lived in Wooster Square and worked the police beat in the Elm City. There's lots of local color in those stories.

"I like to write about real restaurants, to let people know this is what you can find in New Haven," Olson said. "It's not just Yale."

There's a method to her writing.

"My biggest fear is the reader will put the book down and not pick it up again," she said. "So I write five pages a day and in those five pages, something has to happen to move the story forward."

She learns a lot when she researches a story.

"In 'Dead of the Day' I got into the oystering that used to go on in Fair Haven and the oyster boats that used to be in the river."

Her sixth book is out today. "Pretty In Ink" is the second in Olson's Tattoo Shop Mystery Series. Olson based her new stories in Las Vegas because her editor thought New Haven was "too seedy" for a tattoo artist.

She doesn't miss her old life in newspapers, which many say is a dying medium, and she is not sorry she went after her dream.

"It's beyond my wildest dreams that I can do this, which means anybody can," she said.

But it didn't happen for her overnight. It took 15 years of rejection letters to get her first book seriously looked at.