’Hoodunnit

As an antiques appraiser, Emyl Jenkins (MA, English ’62) walked into stately Southern houses and humble homes alike, listening to the tales behind rare bronze-and-ivory Art Deco figurines and diamonds belonging to Russian czars.

Most of the people, like the guy who stumbled upon his family’s valuable Art Deco collection, were genuine. Some, like the husband and wife who blabbed about the Russian diamonds as well as a set of first-edition Shakespeare volumes, were outrageously bogus.

Through other people’s stuff, Jenkins learned how to become a detective of sorts.

Little did she know that two and a half decades later, the stories from inside these homes — the family secrets, the nature of greed — would be fodder for her first novel,“Stealing With Style,” a mystery starring a Southern antiques appraiser named Sterling Glass.

In the novel, the appraiser, a divorcée of “a certain age,” Jenkins says, finds herself in the midst of some curious happenings. All of a sudden, rare pieces of history like an intricate Georgian pin show up hidden in donations to a local Salvation Army store. Thus unravels a cast of shady characters and crooked antiques dealers.

The novel was more than 20 years in the making. While Jenkins had been successful in nonfiction endeavors, publishing 13 books over the course of two decades, she yearned, as a literature buff who studied Walt Whitman for her master’s thesis, to try her hand at fiction.

The topic came naturally.

In the past, she had read fiction about antiques or art theft, and while the plot line would be solid, the facts about the objects wouldn’t necessarily ring true.

“It would be like me trying to write about a trial. I just wouldn’t get it,” she says from her Richmond home.

Then there were the factually accurate stories that weren’t well written.

She figured she’d try her best to do both.

“Some people think I did,” she says.

After a year of intense writing, Jenkins’ novel hit the shelves this summer. It received a starred review from Booklist, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s book editor wrote in a review, “The leap from writing nonfiction to writing fiction is a long one — and many fail to make the jump — but Ms. Jenkins has done it, with, um, style.”

Jenkins’ first foray into publishing came about accidentally. In 1970, she was living in Madison, Wisc., where her now-ex-husband was teaching at the University of Wisconsin. At the time, Jenkins was teaching remedial English to 16-year-olds who read at a second-grade level, she says.

Their books were boring. So she made one up herself, “Greg Walker, News Photographer,” a low-vocabulary-level but fun story about a man who drives around taking pictures. A state librarian visited her classroom, and soon her book was published as children’s literature.

A few years later, Jenkins’ then-husband packed the family off to Chapel Hill, N.C., where he would start studying for his law degree. This was during the energy crisis of the 1970s, and money was tight. Jenkins picked up part-time work at an antiques store. Silver theft was at a high, and insurance com-panies needed people to help them decipher theft claims.

This is where she started, unknowingly, to gather juicy stuff for her future novel. But first came the nonfiction. In 1982, after meeting an agent at an antiques conference, Jenkins wrote “Why You’re Richer Than You Think,” a successful how-to book about spotting good antiques and weeding out the duds. (Think “Antiques Roadshow,” but in print.)

She kept surprising herself. She never thought she’d make her living checking out antiques. She never thought she’d write a book about Southern Christmas traditions. She never thought she’d realize her dream of writing a novel.

Now Jenkins is at home, working on the next installment of the Sterling Glass saga.

“I’m the luckiest person in the world. I make no bones about it,” she says.

There’s more at EmylJenkins.com