Mysteries with Elsa Klensch

As I’ve said before, as a youngster, I spent far, far too many hours in front of the television watching CNN. Quite the junkie, I was. So that’s how I was introduced to the odd accent and utterly fashion-conscious Elsa, who guided me on who was tops in the Pret-a-Porter world. Because this is incredibly important information for a little girl.

Anyway, now that the show’s off the air, Klensch had to find something else to do, so hey–why not write a mystery novel? She talks to the Cleveland Plain Dealer about what got her started:

Elsa became a staff writer for Women’s Wear Daily and then a senior fashion editor at Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar before joining CNN and becoming internationally known.

“I started off with a bang,” she says of her first show in 1980 on the then-new network. “My first show was Halston, where I met Martha Graham, Liza Minnelli and Andy Warhol.”

Soon, it was on to Europe. The travel was exhausting, yet it was sometimes hard to sleep.

“I didn’t want to read fashion magazines,” she says. “It had to be something that took me away from work. So I read a lot of murder mysteries – I loved LeCarre, Elizabeth George, P.D. James.”

After she left CNN, she began writing the book and found an agent and a publisher. Based on her outline and 10 chapters, she got a two-book contract.

Alas, I did want to like this book, as lord knows I need to maintain my enjoyable trash quotient. But this didn’t really fit the bill, and the ending especially felt rushed and tacked-on. Killing another character and having the main character “magically” find the solution after pages and pages of ditzy behavior speaks to some degree of pacing problems. But then again, maybe I’m not the book’s target audience as I’ve yet to be Botoxed….