Author, heroine share feminist traits, find humor helps

You can't help loving a heroine who looks like Rita Hayworth and has a caustic wit.

Author Sparkle Hayter - yes, that's her real name - has given us such a character in her mystery series featuring television journalist and feminist Robin Hudson. And Saturday, she comes to Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Oakmont for a session of Winter Coffee & Crime to speak about the reissue of her novel "The Last Manly Man."

When you speak with Hayter, you simply have to ask her about her name. "Yes, it's real. You could never make a name like this up. It's a cross I have to bear. It was my father's idea. He is eccentric. I feel like a walking oxymoron," she says, laughing. "I was meant to be funny and homicidal."

Born and reared in Canada, Hayter attended New York University, where she got her degree in film and television. While attending school, she worked at CNN as an intern. After she finished school, she worked for that television news channel as a writer and producer, leaving in 1986.

"I knew I wanted to write novels since I was a little kid. I wanted to be Ernest Hemingway," she says, noting she wrote two early, unpublished books in the Hemingway fashion. She since has destroyed them, noting they were really bad.

After returning to the United States after a stint in India and Afghanistan, she says she wanted to live on the "lighter side." That's when Hayter began to do stand-up comedy - which she occasionally still does - and wrote her first Robin Hudson mystery novel, "What's a Girl Gonna Do?"

Before it was published, the book was rejected 37 times, she says. "People thought it was too quirky - it took awhile. I just thank God I have an ego. I never would have survived all that rejection," she says.

She has similarities to Robin Hudson - and differences. "She looks different than I do. She has big boobs; she's taller; her hair is redder and frizzier than mine. And she is smarter, funnier and has a more exciting love life.

"But we both are open, funny, tenacious and flawed. And we both have the capacity to find something good out of something bad. When something bad happens to me, at some point Robin kicks in. I find a laugh makes things easier," she says.

Her heroine, who disdains guns, still has a need to protect herself. She keeps poison ivy in her windowboxes as a burglary disincentive measure. Hayter says she looked into this in 1984 when she was attacked by a man in Atlanta. "I ended up beating the hell out of him with my umbrella - Robin is that side of me," she says. "She gave me more courage, because I knew I had that side of me and I could stand up for myself."

Robin Hudson and Hayter are feminists, but not man haters. "I was raised to be adventurous - to do things even though I was a woman. I like men. I would like things to be fair for everybody - everybody should have an equality of opportunity. Nobody should tell you that you can't do something because you are black, Asian or homosexual. I'm a global feminist. We could all be having a lot more fun getting over petty things," she says.

In "The Last Manly Man," Robin Hudson often displays her feminism in humorous ways. For instance: