Howard Jones and ABC’s Martin Fry embrace a new generation of fans since ’80s heyday

• February 6, 2025

Howard Jones and Martin Fry of ABC first found stardom in the early ’80s as the United Kingdom’s new wave and synthpop scenes overtook the United States like a second British Invasion.

Like many of their peers, their careers shot to the top of the charts only to experience lulls when their music fell from favor.

But now, they’ve come back into fashion with multi-generational audiences at festivals, such as Cruel World in Pasadena, which ABC played in 2023 and their own coheadlining tour that brings Jones and Fry to the House of Blues in Anaheim on Friday, Feb. 8.

There, you’ll see not only fans who’ve still got their original vinyl and tour T-shirts, but younger fans, too, many of whom weren’t born until years after ’80s hits such as Jones’ “What Is Love?” and “Things Can Only Get Better” or ABC’s “Poison Arrow” and “The Look of Love.”

“I always celebrate silently when I see a young person in the audience or groups of young people,” Jones says recently on video call from his home in Somerset, England. “Gen Z, particularly, we’re starting to get them coming now, and that’s just really, really exciting.

“It feels to me like, ‘Oh yeah, well for them, they’re hearing this music for the first time,’” he says. “It’s brand new. It’s like, Wow, how exciting is that? It’s so great.”

Fry, who played to a large crowd at the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena in 2023, said he’s noticed the same trend.

“There’s a new generation of younger people coming through in their 30s and 20s who have researched the whole ’80s era,” Fry says from a vacation home in Barbados. “Synth freaks, people that love the fashion, the clothes, the MTV visuals, the sounds.

“The audacity and blatant entertainment of the 1980s comes through,” he says. “It was a very experimental period in music, and visually, and in the clubs. So it is wonderful to be an elder statesmen of pop now along with Simon Le Bon, Bernard from New Order, and Robert Smith.

“It feels good to be in that exalted company and, joking aside, it feels great to be out on the road playing shows where the audience is into what you’re doing.”

In separate interviews edited for length and clarity and presented here together, Jones and Fry talked about their early days in music, what it felt like when their debut albums became hits, their mutual love for Motown stars such as Smokey Robinson and Stevie Wonder, and more.

Q: Tell me what it’s like touring today whether in theaters and clubs or some of the larger festivals out there.

Howard Jones: It is a wonderful thing to be able to do, to be honest. I feel very honored and privileged to be 40 years later able to go and people want to come and see me and hear the songs and be part of their lives. Those songs have become part of the culture and we have a bond together.

It’s one of those rare occasions now in our society where people can come together and focus on one thing. Sing together and celebrate together with the music they may have grown up with or have discovered since.

Martin Fry: The great thing about festivals like Cruel World and many of the other festivals we play in Europe is you’re playing sometimes to 10,000 or 20,000 people. There’s a lot of floating voters out there you have to persuade. You have to win some of the crowd over. Your fans are there but also there are many people who are checking you out for the first time.

When we played in recent years, I realized there were people who maybe got married to ABC’s ‘The Look of Love.’ Divorced to ‘Be Near Me.’ Remarried when we did ‘When Smokey Sings.’ You’re the soundtrack to their lives, you know. There are tears and laughter when you play, you know the songs mean so much to the audience.

When I got to Cruel World, I fully understood the audience and it felt great to play with that crowd. There’s a whole new generation of people getting interested in the early new wave. For me, to be hanging with the Human League and Echo and the Bunnymen – Squeeze were there and the Gang of Four guys who I’ve known for years – it was a really fascinating festival to play.

Q: You had success with your debut albums – ABC’s ‘The Lexicon of Love’ in 1982, Jones’ ‘Human’s Lib’ two years later. Tell me what had happened before that moment.

MF: We were really quite ambitious. We had a band called Vice Versa in Sheffield. The Cabaret Voltaire and the early Human League, all these bands in Sheffield were really experimental in the late ’70s, early ’80s. Vice Versa was kind of like a proto-Depeche Mode, sort of a Soft Cell band. We played Leeds Futurama Festival and I think we were about 89th on the bill, and I think Depeche Mode were 90th. We were just starting out.

We recorded analog [after changing the name to ABC] but a lot of what we were doing was digital, with the early sampling machines, Fairlights and stuff. So the sound of the record, ‘The Lexicon of Love,’ sounds quite sort of contemporary in a funny kind of way. It doesn’t sound like it’s 40 years old. And it’s served me well all these years to be able to get on stage and sing ‘Poison Arrow,’ ‘The Look of Love’ and ‘Tears Are Not Enough,’ songs from that record.

HJ: I went out to play as an electronic one-man band with equipment that you could buy in your local music store. I didn’t have fancy computers or bespoke machinery or anything like that. I had drum machines, a few synths, you know, whatever I could afford. I think I was the first person to do that. It was a great sense of pioneering something new.

So three or four nights a week, I was out there in pubs and clubs experimenting with this idea, and working out the songs, and then coming back home and fixing things and improving things, then going out again. I realize now it was a great way to do it. It was the ultimate sort of proving that the music was going to work and that people were going to like it.

Q: I would have been anxious, I think, trying something that complicated and new.

HJ: It was terrifying. [Laughs] It was absolutely terrifying. I mean, what was I thinking of? Because when you’ve got a band, you’ve got people to turn to for moral support on the stage, but when you’re doing it on your own, you carry it all. The good side of that is that it developed my stage personality, in terms of I had to talk to the audience. I had to engage them, because I had to do a lot of tweaking with the instruments and programming.

Q: But you weren’t entirely alone. You often had a mime, Jed Hoile, performing too.

HJ: It was more like performance art, really, we were doing. I really wanted to do something original, and so Jed used to come to the shows. He used to dance in the audience, and I thought this guy is amazing, he really should be up on the stage with me. So we worked together to create all these different characters he would engage with during the show. And we had TV screens running VHS tapes. We had all kinds of costumes that he was in. I would sometimes have costumes, too.

Q: I remember seeing that on MTV, and of course ABC had great videos then, too.

HJ: It was very visual (with Hoile), and it’s funny, it’s interesting because this is just at the time when MTV was exploding, and yet we were well down the line of working visually as well. It wasn’t just about the music, it was what it looked like, and what it looked like when you went to a show. We were very comfortable with that.

MF: The power of MTV meant that the videos we made were shown all across America. With the videos, we were very ambitious. We wanted to kind of do The World of ABC. You know, there’s Lisa Vanderpump [in the ‘Poison Arrow’ and ‘Mantrap’ videos], who went on to become a big star in America. There’s Julien Temple directing ABC videos. We wanted a lot of humor in our videos and they were plainly bonkers, you know, but highly entertaining, just like all the other videos on MTV in that period of time.

They weren’t big budget. It was definitely sort of everybody was wrapped up in the creative spirit and pushed it to the limit. Your friends would make the suits for you. The lighting guy would be somebody’s cousin. It was guerrilla filmmaking, definitely, of the finest order. It wasn’t Hollywood by any stretch.

Q: ABC’s first American tour came before all those videos were all out. What was it like to still be mostly unknowns?

MF: I arrived in Phoenix on a wet Tuesday afternoon, and in my sparkling tuxedo in late ’82, I guess it would be, with the violinists and our new pop vision, I got on stage, and looked out. Like ‘The Blues Brothers,’ it had chicken wire across the front of the stage at the venue for the protection not of the audience – of the artists.

People were like, ‘What the (bleep) is this? Like, ‘Who’s this guy in his sparkling tuxedo?’ And I realized, ‘Yeah, America is very different in musical taste. There was that whole chasm between the guys in the ’70s in leather trousers and the long hair, and all the young bands that wanted to sort of change the whole pop landscape like Duran Duran and ABC and Depeche Mode, the Cure, who are all thankfully still going strong. So we were definitely there in those pioneering days getting stuff thrown at us, but gradually, the power of MTV changed things.

Q: By the mid-’90s, things had tailed off for you and your careers. What was it like to hit a lull for some years?

HJ: I think this happens to every single artist, big and small. There will be a time when you are absolutely in the spotlight. Everyone wants to know you, it’s like you’re the thing. But that will go. It may come back later, but it will go. And it is a pretty tough thing to deal with for anybody. You suddenly think, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’

I’d had a great decade during the ’80s. I had hits. Ten hits in America, 13 hits in the U.K., hits all around the world. And course, that will stop. When the record company didn’t want to renew my contract after five albums and selling like millions and millions of records, it was a shock. I thought, ‘What? They must be crazy!’

But then another door opens, which was the internet came along. I was able to become an independent artist and sort of write my own script. It was a brilliant opportunity to carve out a new way of doing things.

MF: You know, in the late ’90s, I started playing shows and you kind of reached a point where people are going, ‘What are you still doing here?” You know what I mean? Like, ‘You had your hits back in the day, man; what’re you still doing here?’ But then people’s perception of ABC and my contemporaries definitely changed, and people realized there was still some excitement there.

Q: Howard, you played the Grammys with your hero Stevie Wonder, as well as Herbie Hancock and Thomas Dolby. Martin, your song ‘When Smokey Sings’ let to you meeting Smokey Robinson. Tell me about the excitement of those moments.

HJ: Obviously, I love Stevie Wonder and grew up with his music. But when you’re young you have a bit of youthful arrogance, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to step on that stage with those people. I think both me and Tom Dolby, we had our look, we had our music, we had our, you know, swagger. And that’s what you have to have if you’re going to be on the stage.

So it was a whirlwind. I was just enjoying every minute of it. I got to do something that people would only dream of, which was hang out in Stevie Wonder’s studio and jam with him for an afternoon. It was great.

MF: [‘When Smokey Sings’] came from a really tough period where I was 27 and got diagnosed with cancer. We were going to tour with Tina Turner and then everything stopped. I’d go home at night after hospital treatments and pick out box of 7-inch vinyl and just listen to my favorite tunes. So ‘When Smokey Sings’ is about some of those dark moments but being uplifted by hearing those songs.

We met Smokey Robinson at a TV show and handed him the record. It was great. Said, ‘Here we are, Mr. Robinson; this is about you.’ A couple of months later, Mark White [of ABC] and myself met Smokey Robinson in L.A. and he took us around to the Motown building and gave us this handwritten letter, saying how much he was moved and touched that we’d written the song about him and his contemporaries.

A lot of good things came out of that song from bad things.

​ Orange County Register 

IRS workers involved in 2025 tax season can’t take ‘buyout’ offer until May

• February 5, 2025

By FATIMA HUSSEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — IRS employees involved in the 2025 tax season will not be allowed to accept a buyout offer from the Trump administration until May 15th, according to a letter sent Wednesday to IRS employees.

The letter says that “critical filing season positions in Taxpayer Services, Information Technology and the Taxpayer Advocate Service are exempt” from the administration’s buyout plan until May 15, 2025.

The news comes after President Donald Trump announced a plan to offer buyouts to federal employees through a “deferred resignation program” to quickly reduce the government workforce. The program deadline is Feb. 6.

The buyouts, sent to roughly 2.3 million workers, are for all full-time federal employees with some exemptions, including military personnel, employees of the U.S. Postal Service and positions related to immigration enforcement. They would get about eight months of salary if they accept.

The federal government employed more than 3 million people as of November, accounting for nearly 1.9% of the nation’s entire civilian workforce, according to the Pew Research Center.

Union leaders that represent workers across the federal government have criticized the proposal. Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, has advised all federal workers not to accept the offer, which she says is dubious.

“This is not a good deal for them,” Greenwald told The Associated Press. “If you sign this document and then later change your mind, you are left without any power to fight back.”

She added: “I do not recommend people sign the document. They need to have control of their own career, and this document does not give it to them.”

The NTEU union represents roughly 150,000 employees in 37 departments and agencies.

“This country needs skilled, experienced federal employees. And so we are urging people not to take this deal because it will damage the services to the American people and it will harm the federal employees who have dedicated themselves and their career to serving.”

Jan. 27 is the official start date of the 2025 tax season and the IRS expects more than 140 million tax returns to be filed by the April 15 deadline.

“What most people don’t realize is that 85% of the federal workforce works outside of D.C.,” she said. “They’re your neighbors, your family, your friends. And they deliver key services for the American people.”

​ Orange County Register 

Clippers coach Tyronn Lue says his players need to refocus

• February 5, 2025

INGLEWOOD — From the moment he walked off the Intuit Dome court to the last three words of his postgame interview, Clippers coach Tyronn Lue’s frustration had clearly reached a tipping point.

He was clearly annoyed how his team came out meekly against the Lakers, showing little fight in a listless 122-97 loss on Tuesday night. The Clippers were outhustled, outworked and eventually outplayed in the one-sided game, leaving Lue simmering.

“And we’ve been good, so I can’t be, you know, all the way upset. But the last three games have really pissed me off,” Lue said before walking out of the room.

The Clippers (28-22) started this malaise last week in a victory over the Charlotte Hornets and it extended into a loss to the Toronto Raptors on Sunday and then to Tuesday against the Lakers.

“We’re just not getting off to good starts,” Lue said. “So, we’re not locking in defensively. Like 45 points in the first quarter (for the Lakers), like that’s just way too many. And so, we got to take pride in guarding.

“The last three games we’ve kind of let our guards down and this is what happens. So, we got to be better.”

Lue said their problems lie squarely with their transition game, turnovers and their lack of hustle.

“We got to have good floor balance. We’ve been talking about this for I don’t know how many years now. We came into this season and our defense was good,” Lue said.

“We got to make a conscious effort to make sure we are getting back, make sure we get the ball squared up. But right now, we’re not doing a great job with that.”

Lue said the players need time to reflect on what kind of team they want to be heading into the second half of the season.

“We got to look at ourselves in the mirror and think about do we want to win or not?” Lue said. “That’s got to be our mentality. And so, three games in a row, we come out with not a great defensive performance and it’s just not putting enough into the game. Even on the offensive end, not putting a lot into the game. And so, when that happens you get blown out like we did tonight.”

Lue said the Clippers have shown a lack of focus and “we got to change that mindset quickly.”

The Clippers get that chance to initiate change Thursday night when they face the Indiana Pacers at the Intuit Dome. But that might not be easy, according to star forward Kawhi Leonard.

Asked why the Clippers haven’t put forth the same effort they showed early in the season, especially with their transition defense where effort is key, Leonard said, “I don’t know. It’s hard to say. We all get paid to play this game and leave it all on the floor, so I’m not sure.”

Leonard agreed with his coach in thinking the team needs to take a hard look at itself.

“We have to look ourselves in the mirror first and be able to come out here and do our job,” Leonard said. “That’s where it starts. You know, can’t look over your shoulder for help with those things. Playing hard comes (from) within.”

PACERS AT CLIPPERS

When: Thursday, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Intuit Dome, Inglewood

TV/radio: FDSN SoCal, 570 AM

​ Orange County Register 

Palisades fire victim operated tiny Malibu movie theater that attracted Hollywood heavyweights

• February 5, 2025

At 4-foot-10, Betty O’Meara was diminutive in stature but, over her 94 years of life, was a force of nature.

Her daughter recalls how she once persuaded Hollywood movie executives to provide first-run films to the tiny Malibu Cinema she and her husband operated for nearly two decades.

“My mom cajoled them to get current movies shown at the theater, telling them that many voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences lived in Malibu,” recalled Betty’s daughter, Frances M. O’Meara.

The strategy worked.

Blockbuster movies quickly made their way to the 250-seat Malibu Cinema immediately after public release. Hollywood stars living in the exclusive seaside enclave soon followed, including Burt Lancaster, Paul Newman, Carey Grant, Robert Redford and Martin Sheen, who would rub shoulders with locals who flocked to the single-screen movie house that Betty and David O’Meara owned from 1972 to 1991.

The movie theater experience was just one of the many colorful chapters in the life of Betty O’Meara, who perished Jan. 7 in the horrific Palisades fire.

Betty, who had weathered numerous wildfire threats over the years, was ordered to evacuate her home on Roca Chica Drive in Malibu by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies. Unsurprisingly, said her daughter, she slammed the door in their faces.

“Everybody knew she was going to refuse to evacuate,” Frances said. “She was nothing but stubborn.”

Born in Hawaii before statehood

Betty was born in 1930 in Hawaii, which was a U.S. territory at the time. She had three siblings and her father was a physician. The family returned to their homeland of Japan before World War II broke out, Frances O’Meara said.

Following Japan’s surrender on Aug. 14, 1945,  Betty, who was still a teenager, assisted the Army post-war by squiring Gen. Douglas MacArthur around Japan.

Later, while in her early 20s, Betty worked for the Pentagon, where she went undercover to determine if a Chinese pilot, who was also her bridge partner, planned to defect to the United States.

However, the espionage mission abruptly ended when the pilot died after his plane was shot down. The military didn’t say who was responsible for downing the aircraft. Later, an Army general presented Betty with a package the pilot had left behind. Inside was a stack of bridge cards and a diamond engagement ring, Frances said.

Betty met David O’Meara, a disabled Army veteran, at a Washington, D.C., apartment complex where they both lived. After they married, David job with IBM, “selling micro-computers the size of airplane hangars,” took them to Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and, finally, to Malibu in 1969, Frances said.

Giving kids somewhere to go

Betty recounted in a 2017 interview with the Malibu Times that her husband became acquainted with the “local sheriff,” who asked him to open a business that would give Malibu youth something to do after school and keep them out of trouble in the nearby hangout of Santa Monica.

“So my husband just happened to have a little luck in the Malibu shopping center and he opened the cinema,” Betty told the newspaper. “It was small. He wasn’t used to running something so small. He was new to being behind the counter, exchanging money with customers. At first, some people thought he was not fit to be the cinema owner.”

While David ran the theater’s day-to-day operations, Betty worked behind-the-scenes from home, booking the films to be shown, the Malibu Times reported.

“At the beginning, they didn’t want to give me a good movie because it was a small theater and nobody knew of it,” she told the newspaper. “But then I explained to them that my customers (Academy Award voters) are the ones voting for this because they were in the industry. So they decided to give me a better picture.”

Active in community

In addition to mingling with movie stars at the theater, the O’Mearas also entertained celebrities at their home. Frances O’Meara, who played basketball at Stanford University and then coached women’s hoops at Loyola Marymount from 1981 to 1984 before becoming an attorney, said NBA legend Jerry West was among the guests who visited..

Betty also was well known for showering neighbors and fellow parishioners at Our Lady of Malibu Catholic Church with handmade watercolor greeting cards, cookies and brownies. “She used to say she kept the U.S. Postal Service in business with all the greeting cards that she mailed,” said Frances, who has a younger brother.

Several neighbors said on Facebook that Betty’s generosity was legendary. “This makes me so sad,” one neighbor said in a post. “I remember Betty and how sweet she was with our kids offering her lemon bars. Such a kind soul.”

​ Orange County Register 

Angels extend stadium lease to stay in Anaheim through 2032

• February 5, 2025

The Angels have extended their stadium lease in Anaheim and will continue to play baseball at Angel Stadium through at least 2032, the team announced Wednesday.

“We are excited to announce that we have extended our lease securing the Big A as the home of Angels Baseball into the next decade,” Angels spokesperson Marie Garvey said. “As we prepare for our 60th season in Anaheim, we wanted our fans and community partners to know that Angels Baseball and its foundation remain committed to being an active part of this city and region.”

The team’s current lease on the stadium was signed in 1996 and was set to expire in 2029.

The lease allowed for the Angels to extend it by three years up to three times. The team notified the city on Wednesday that they would exercise their right to extend the lease until Dec. 31, 2032.

“As a lifelong Angels fan, I join those in our city and across our region in welcoming baseball in Anaheim into the next decade,” said Mayor Ashleigh Aitken in a statement. “This lease extension brings added certainty and ensures the strong tradition of baseball in Anaheim. As mayor, I look forward to working with the Angels on future community partnerships, and, as a fan, look forward to a great season ahead.”

City officials say there still aren’t any talks underway about a long-term lease.

The stadium is one of the oldest in the majors and has been the Angels’ home since 1966.

The home opener at Angel Stadium is April 4, when the team begins a three-game series against the Cleveland Guardians.

Jeff Fletcher contributed reporting. This is a developing story. 

​ Orange County Register 

DOGE is subjecting the bureaucracy to death by humiliation

• February 5, 2025

I’m just sorry that P.T. Barnum isn’t alive to see this.

The Greatest Show on Earth is the new Department of Government Efficiency. If it started as a joke (DOGE was an internet meme of a dog and then a sardonically named crypto coin), it’s no joke now. An elected billionaire and an appointed billionaire are demonstrating that any enterprise running a nearly $2 trillion annual deficit could use an audit.

Years ago, the founding editor of the Washington Monthly, Charlie Peters, coined a phrase, “Fire the firemen first,” to describe how the bureaucracy reacts when a fresh crop of elected officials proposes budget-cutting.

Immediately the bureaucrats would announce that the cuts inevitably mean death and suffering, because every dollar in their department was spent so well and efficiently that there was not one single thing that could be cut before the blade sliced into essential life-support services.

Every budget item had its constituency and its congressional defenders, all giving interviews and posing for photos. News coverage would alarm the public with a drumbeat of the horrors that would be unleashed by the first dollar of budget cuts.

By the time a government efficiency task force was appointed, hired its teams of staffers and settled into its new office space, the next congressional election campaign was beginning and that was the end. Only the 750-page report a year later remained to mark the final resting place.

Not this time.

If you followed the saga of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, you’ll remember that he promptly fired about 80% of the employees, called the company a “crime scene,” invited reporters to view internal company communications, battled a shadowy effort to incite advertiser boycotts, and publicly told the people trying to “blackmail” him with advertising to “go (expletive) yourself.”

Twitter, renamed X, is thriving.

The reporting from the Twitter files revealed a government-wide effort to control and manipulate social media platforms and news organizations. Emails from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, even from the White House, documented pressure, threats and secret censorship in violation of the First Amendment. Musk made it transparent.

And the Biden administration came at him with a vengeance, launching multiple investigations of his companies from multiple agencies.

That’s the backstory for what you’re seeing now. DOGE is marching through government buildings like U.S. troops in Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

“We are going line-by-line when it comes to the federal government’s books,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday.

What’s different this time is the technique. Musk’s team is made up of code-writing software geniuses legally authorized to get inside the government’s information technology. They seem to be creating search engines to hunt for wasteful government contracts and spending. For example, they discovered that the federal government was spending $8 million on subscriptions to Politico, a Democrat-friendly political news publication.

“The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now,” Leavitt said.

DOGE is subjecting the bureaucracy to death by humiliation. Did you hear that USAID spent $1.5 million of your hard-earned money on DEI programs in Serbia? Or $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia?

They haven’t even reached the longstanding problem of “improper payments,” money the government sends out due to error or fraud.

Last month, the General Accounting Office issued one of its occasional reports on Improper Payments: Agency Reporting of Payment Integrity Information. “Since fiscal year 2003,” it begins, “federal agencies have made $2.8 trillion in improper payments — i.e., payments that shouldn’t have been made or were made in incorrect amounts.” The GAO estimates $161 billion in improper payments in FY 2024 alone.

One major source of improper payments is the welfare-through-the-IRS program of income tax refunds paid to people who didn’t owe or pay income taxes. These come from “refundable” tax credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Additional/Advance Child Tax Credit, which in FY 2023 cost taxpayers $64.3 billion and $131.4 billion, respectively. According to the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration, the “improper payment” rate was 33.5% for the EITC and 14.5% for the ACTC.

The circus is coming. Enjoy the show.

Write [email protected] and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley

​ Orange County Register 

‘Little Mysteries’ author Sara Gran created ‘the best detective in the world.’ No joke.

• February 5, 2025

Sara Gran got hooked on mysteries early, especially the work of Donald J. Sobel, creator of “Two-Minute Mysteries” and the “Encyclopedia Brown” series.

“Growing up, he meant so much to me,” says the novelist, short story writer and publisher during a December Zoom interview from her Marina del Rey home. “It’s difficult to put into words why these tiny little mysteries are so appealing and so impactful.

“But for me, they really stuck in my head,” says Gran, author of a series of books about Claire DeWitt, the “best detective in the world.”

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Gran’s new story collection, “Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall and Delight,” arrives in stores Feb. 11, and the book includes nods to those early influences with a one-minute mystery, a choose-your-own-adventure story and fun elements like a page you can cut out and fold into a tool for “psychospiritual divination.”

“There’s something exhilarating about the whole idea that there’s this tiny little thing and there’s a solution,” she says. “I think one reason why we like stories like that is because nothing in life is actually solved. You know, nothing in life is a two-minute mystery. It’s the however-old-you-live mystery, the 75-to-110-year mystery, you know? That’s what life is.”

For more than an hour, Gran discussed her work, her influences and her decision to become her own publisher along with a range of other topics. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. Your new book “Little Mysteries” takes inspiration from Donald J. Sobel, the late author of “Two-Minute Mysteries” and “Encyclopedia Brown” series. What appealed to you about doing that?

I am a big believer — for everyone, but especially for writers — in going back to the things that influenced you when you were a kid. Sometimes that means, Oh, my God, I wish this hadn’t influenced me; I [bleeping] hate it as an adult. 

Q. What’s an influence you wish you hadn’t experienced? 

I’d never thought about it like that until I just said it right now, but I’m really glad that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about sitcoms, especially “Three’s Company,” which I’m obsessed with. I used to come home every day after school and watch “Three’s Company” reruns. I don’t regret having watched it; there’s so much that’s great about it. 

But in all the sitcoms — even “M*A*S*H” and things that were more highbrow in the ‘70s and ‘80s — women are always this sort of blank slate who have no point of view. There’s one image from “Three’s Company” that I think about all the time that was very impactful and I’m glad I looked at it again. It’s not a good thing for a young woman to have in her head, which is Chrissy is always just like this vacant doll, and people will be talking about her body, her looks and her breasts, and she just doesn’t notice because she has no subjectivity whatsoever.

This lack of female subjectivity, you see it in all those shows, like in “M*A*S*H” with the Loretta Swit character. She had one mood, and it was, ‘Go [bleep] yourself,’ and it was like, of course, she did: You’re all constantly sexually harassing her.

I love “Three’s Company,” but I’m glad I went back and re-evaluated a lot of that and didn’t let it go.

Q. In these stories, you sometimes just throw in something bonkers — a tiger, say — as if it’s completely normal.

Speaking of mysteries I loved when I was a kid, one of them was the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout. My father obsessively loved them. He had the entire run of them and I started to really like them, too. And there’s one thing that’s so great about those books that I didn’t realize until I was an adult and went back and read “Fer-de-Lance,” which is the first one. 

All the things that I thought would be explained when I read the first book? None of them were explained. Everyone just knows each other. There is no backstory … it’s this really brilliant writing move. Rex Stout is where I got that idea from, the idea that it’s this fully inhabited universe, and you’re just jumping in and it works.

It’s the opposite of what everyone tells you, especially in screenwriting. My God, they’d shoot you if you did that [in a screenplay], but it just creates a real universe for you and it’s much more fun way to write. 

If you had to explain it, it wouldn’t be fun at all. It’d be a big [bleeping] drag.

Q. You’re working on a nonfiction book too, aren’t you?

I’m writing a book about writing now, and the second chapter is about how you will embarrass yourself, and you should embarrass yourself, because you should always be taking chances.

If you want to be good at something — whether it’s music, solving mysteries, writing books — you have to be willing to take chances, and that means [bleeping] up.

Q. Let’s talk about Claire DeWitt. As much as she’s a great detective, she can seem out of control.

This is something I hear from people a lot, but I see it differently. I see her as very in control. Not always. No one’s always in control. But I see her as someone living her life in a way that works for her to accomplish her goals.

It’s a life that almost no one else would want, but it achieves her goals. Her goal is to be the best detective in the world, and everything she does feeds that. There are some bad decisions, for sure, and there are some out-of-control moments, but most of what she’s doing is working towards that goal.

Q. Claire sometimes just bursts onto the page and we aren’t immediately sure when an event is happening in her life. Can you talk about how you play around with time that way?

That one I also stole from someone else. I feel like this will be a disappointing interview because everything you like about the books I’m like, “This is who I actually stole that from.” James Sallis has a detective series, which is called the Insect series because all the books are named after insects, like “The Long-Legged Fly.”

Another writer who does that really well is Andrew Vachss, but differently. He wrote this detective series for so long that he did what very few writers do: the characters age in real-time. So you really stayed with these people for like, 20 years, and saw them get older, and saw their kids grow up, and saw the city change around them. That was a big influence. 

Both really impacted me and were part of why I wanted to write a series — to stay with this character over time and to have time be real. 

Q. Claire is always referred to as “the best detective in the world,” and I wonder if you can even talk about what that term, and its repetition, means to you? 

People often think it’s a joke when I say that. It’s not a joke at all. And people within the fictional universe think she’s joking. She’s not joking. She is the best detective in the world, absolutely, 100%. The cool thing — but also the hard challenge about writing this character who grows with me as I grow — is that being the best at anything is not important to me at this point.

So while it is absolutely 100% true — she’s the best even though no one believes her — she’s got to move on to more interesting self-definitions as a human being. And I also wanted to make a point about how she’s not as respected as she should be in that world.

I don’t like the idea of messages in books. I think they’re silly and don’t really work. But I think if there’s one thing I would like people to take away is that you don’t know where wisdom is. You don’t know where you’re going to get a good idea. Everyone is complicated, and the more someone has this façade of “I know the answers” probably the less they have and they’re probably covering up some bad [bleep].

Q. You have moments of sincere emotion, which is refreshing in detective fiction.

I think that’s one of the things that fiction can do so well, you know, convey emotion. And I think it’s maybe underrated a little bit as a part of the novel.

Q. Another character of yours, Cynthia Silverton, is the epitome of the can-do teen crimesolver. In her stories, she can whip up a bowl of punch for a party but also knows an awful lot about astral projection. 

Yeah, it’s as if Chrissy came to life in “‘Three’s Company,” right? They’re inspired by Nancy Drew, but I was never a big Nancy Drew reader. There’s a whole universe of teen detectives and kid detectives so there’s no one inspiration, and I was never all that into them.

She’s a little bit like someone who’s realizing that she’s trapped in a story that can be a more interesting story.

Q. There’s a haunting story about Cynthia Silverton in the wilderness. Can you talk a little about that and its sense of existential dread?That is actually an excerpt from the book “Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway,” which was the last full Claire DeWitt novel. I had to get permission to reprint that, but I knew it would fit with the book. To me, that is a little bit like what the entire detective project of mine is all about in some ways. … It’s also sort of the natural conclusion of the detective story, like, the thing that you’re looking for is always going to be yourself.

Q. You are now a publisher, having started Dreamland Books in 2021. What has that experience been like?

It’s been great. This book was kind of the ultimate test, because I could not have [messed up] the printing process more, and it was incredibly stressful, and I felt totally sick so many days in a row about it. I’m still glad I did it, still glad I’m not working with a big publisher or any other publisher. So that was a good test for me.

Next year, I am publishing a bunch of reprints of my favorite public domain books, and I’m starting off with an Émile Zola and Leo Tolstoy double-edition and a Freud book publishing soon.

I like making my own mistakes … and I cannot even begin to say how many mistakes I’ve made, and I still absolutely love it, and I want to keep expanding it. No one else has figured out how to really make a living publishing books, but I am under the delusion that perhaps I will. Every childhood fantasy I had in my life led me here. I couldn’t be happier.

I needed a new challenge in life, and I decided to take this on, even when I made horrible mistakes, it’s just been such a dream come true. And also, I just want complete creative control over my writing. There are some things, like the next Claire DeWitt book, where I will absolutely need an editor’s help sorting it all out. It’s a big mess of a book, but I don’t need anyone to [bleeping] tell me what to do. I’m 53 years old. What the [bleep] is anyone gonna tell me that I don’t know about writing, you know? [laughs]

Sara Gran presents ‘Little Mysteries’ with Tod Goldberg

When: 7 p.m., Feb. 11

Where: Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave., Los Angeles

Information: https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-sara-gran-presents-little-mysteries

​ Orange County Register 

Declining enrollment and poor budget management spark Santa Ana Unified layoffs

• February 5, 2025

Public-employee unions need to understand their uneconomic actions eventually hurt not just the taxpaying public, but even union members. That was made clear on Jan. 31 when the Board of Trustees of the Santa Unified School District voted to lay off 286 teachers, counselors, social workers and other employees this year. 

The district is suffering a budget deficit of more than $180 million. At the board meeting, Associate Superintendent Ron Hacker explained school enrollment had declined from close to 47,000 students in the 2018-19 school year to just over 36,000 in 2024-25. That’s a drop of about 11,000 students, or 23%, in just six years.

The Register reported Board President Hector Bustos blamed the previous board elected in 2020 for improperly spending $308 million in COVID-19 relief money received in 2021, at the time 22.5% of the budget. He has a point. He and the other trustees all were elected in Nov. 2022 or later. It’s unfortunate for them, but democratic elections often mean cleaning up an inherited financial mess before other priorities can be advanced.

The district’s financial position also shows the need for cuts. Former state Sen. John Moorlach’s latest analysis of county school districts found SAUSD in 2022-23 ran up a $531 million unrestricted net deficit, a key number, or $2,145 per resident.

Santa Ana Educators Association President Sonta Garner-Marcelo said the union will continue resisting the cuts. “We will keep rallying, keep applying pressure and tell them that this is senseless,” she said. No matter how much she rallies, state money is allocated by the Local Control Funding Formula. More money does go to districts, like SAUSD, with higher percentages of low-income and English-learning students – provided they actually have the students.

Districts across the state are losing students as people have fewer children, and young families who can’t afford to live here move to other states, Lance Izumi told us; he’s the senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute. The state’s overall population dropped from 2020-22, then rose slightly in 2023-24. In the same period, Texas grew by 2 million. 

California’s public-employee unions are the bulwark of the Democratic Party that has controlled the Legislature for most of the past five decades and every statewide office since 2011. The high taxes and stifling housing regulations they have enacted, despite some recent reforms, have made the state unaffordable for so many families, while driving out companies with high-paying jobs.

SAUSD also just isn’t performing. According to the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, in the 2023-24 school year, 69% of reading 79% of math students did not achieve at grade level. 

Union contracts often stipulate the layoffs largely will affect those recently hired, while those with the most seniority will stay. Competence is less important. A system emphasizing excellence would keep teachers “based on their individual abilities, not on their group longevity,” Izumi said.

What’s needed is competition from expanded school choice. But the unions are blocking that. Nothing will change until parents insist on radical reform.

​ Orange County Register