Vin Packer Upon graduation, she worked as a file clerk with
Dutton Publishing, then as a proofreader with
Gold Medal Books, and began writing mostly mystery novels as Vin Packer. According to her autobiographical young adult book
ME ME ME ME: Not a Novel (1984), Meaker began her professional writing career by posing as a
literary agent, whose "clients" consisted of her own pen names. As Packer, Meaker wrote 20 books in all, including
The Evil Friendship from 1958, an account of the
Parker–Hulme murder case in New Zealand. Two books by Packer were loosely based on the
Emmett Till murder and the aftermath of the investigation:
3-Day Terror and ''Dark Don't Catch Me''. Unlike other popular crime writers in the pulp market, Packer's books were less based on action, and more "psychologically dense" and "insidious". One mystery critic said of Packer's books, "Her probing accounts of the roots of crime are richly detailed snapshots of their times, unconventional, intensely readable, and devoid of heroes, villains, or pat solutions." As Vin Packer, Meaker wrote the groundbreaking romance novel
Spring Fire, published in
1952, which along with Tereska Torres' ''
Women's Barracks is credited with launching the genre of lesbian "pulp" fiction. Spring Fire'' was a response to the immense success of the 1950 Torres novel, which sold 4.5 million copies. Eager to continue their financial success, editor Dick Carroll asked Meaker to write a book with a lesbian theme. Her original story idea involved a romance between two students of a boarding school, but editor Dick Carroll asked her to change it to sorority sisters because the boarding school setting was too risky. "He said, 'Well, it has to be a sorority, because a boarding school is too young.' He added, 'Make sure that these girls turn away from homosexuality because it is immoral, don't just have them talk about it being a hard life. We have to pass postal inspection.'" The response to
Spring Fire was beyond all Meaker's and Gold Medal Books' expectations. Meaker states she got "boxes of mail" from women who were thrilled to see a book that addressed a lesbian relationship; gay audiences weren't considered a market at this time. Paperback novels were rarely reviewed by mainstream literary reviews, but a Packer novel titled,
Come Destroy Me was noticed by
The New York Times crime-fiction reviewer
Anthony Boucher. Meaker said, "I decided then and there that I would never write an ordinary story again; that if I was writing for paperback, I would write suspense because I wanted the reviews." In an interview with the
Lambda Book Report in 2005, Meaker reflected on the impact of her books as Ann Aldrich, saying, "I honestly never thought about anything except people like me buying the book. I never thought of us having any entitlement or any importance; it just never dawned upon me. If somebody had showed me the [gay couples in the] wedding pages of
The New York Times, which was awaiting us in the future, I wouldn't have believed it. I thought books were important, but these were paperbacks and so I didn't think they would last any longer than the paper that they were printed on." In 1970,
Gene Damon of
The Ladder referred to Meaker as "the evil genius" for her excellent writing about unpleasant and unsatisfactory lesbian themes.
M. E. Kerr Meaker was persuaded to try
young adult fiction at the suggestion of author
Louise Fitzhugh (
Harriet the Spy), and chose to do so after reading
Paul Zindel's
The Pigman. She chose the pen name M. E. Kerr, as a phonetic play on her last name. Although the audience was different from Vin Packer's, Kerr's approach to her stories and characters seemed to vary little. She still addressed topics not usually covered by children's books:
racism,
AIDS,
homosexuality, absent parents,
social class differences, and her characters still had problems that had no easy solutions. She said of this direction, "I tend to write about people who struggle, who try to overcome obstacles, who usually do, but sometimes not. People who have all the answers and few problems have never interested me, not to write about, not to befriend." Mary James books include
Shoebag,
The Shuteyes,
Frankenlouse and
Shoebag Returns. Meaker gave advice in an interview for any aspiring writer, from her own experience: "I would tell aspiring writers to read. Read, read, read, read ... Read the kind of books you'd like to write. Study your competition, see how they do it. Go away to college, or to work or whatever. See some of the world away from where you live. Try to join or start a writers' group where everyone shares what they're working on." == Impact and legacy ==