Broadcast clues
TV veteran Hank Phillippi Ryan balances investigative reporting at WHDH with her blossoming career as a mystery writer
NEWTON - "The world of television is all about how you look - but how often can you really believe your eyes?" reads a quote taped on a vintage record player in Hank Phillippi Ryan's study.
Ryan, the WHDH-TV (Channel 7) investigative reporter known for her weekly "Help Me Hank" segments, keeps the quote by her computer for inspiration. When she's not exposing corruption or solving local mysteries, Ryan creates her own.
The TV reporter is now a mystery author. She chronicles the adventures of a fictional glib Boston TV journalist named Charlotte "Charlie" McNally, who solves crimes as she buys time to keep her job as a "media old maid." Harlequin Next published her first book, "Prime Time," this summer. It follows Ryan's 40-something alter ego, who worries that her bosses will replace her with a younger female reporter if she doesn't find a big story for ratings sweeps. Her second novel, "Face Time," comes out tomorrow and picks up where "Prime Time" left off. The book is filled with the same career paranoia as the reporter fights to free an innocent woman in prison. Ryan is under contract for two more books, due to be released in 2008.
Ryan, 57, knows how to unearth tales of corruption in Boston. But one puzzle has baffled her for years: How to become a mystery novelist?
That has been a dream of Ryan's since she was a little girl in Indianapolis, her hometown. She grew up reading Nancy Drew, Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie. She wanted to spin similar stories.
"I always wondered how the authors would make a story around the mystery," says Ryan, sitting in the kitchen of her home. Speaking calmly and exuding warmth, she contrasts the pushy, in-your-face, gotta-know reporter most viewers see on TV.
"The architecture of a mystery novel has fascinated me from the beginning because it all has to work, it has to be fair. The reader has to care and not feel ripped off at the end."
This is not Ryan's first stab at mystery writing. About 15 years ago, she tried co-writing a mystery about a female pro golfer whose Brookline golf course might be linked to toxic chemicals. When she approached two agents, they had extreme opposite reactions to the story. (One liked the writing but didn't like the plot; the other liked the story but not the writing.) So Ryan decided to shelve her career as a novelist and focus on her day job.
"I thought it would be [marketable], but it also taught me that writing what you know about is so necessary to make a book have life," says Ryan, who was born Harriet Ann Sablosky. In college, a friend teased her about her name and began calling her "Hank." It stuck. (The Ryan and Phillippi names are from previous marriages.)
Ryan began her TV career in Indianapolis in 1975 after a few starts and stops working for political campaigns, in radio, as a legislative aide, and as a contributor to a political column at Rolling Stone magazine. She became a political TV reporter and moved into reporting and anchoring in Indianapolis and then Atlanta before coming to WHDH 22 years ago. She works on 30 or more investigative pieces a year, from the conditions of local bridges to parents paying for protective military vests for their children in the Marines. Ryan has won 24 Emmy awards for her stories. She's also the face of "Help Me Hank," where she helps people faced with sticky consumer issues.
Her TV job naturally led her to her first fictional whodunit.
"One day I opened a spam by mistake, on how to refinance your home. There were lines from a play. Maybe it was Shakespeare, but I didn't recognize them," Ryan recalls. "And I thought, 'Oh, it's a secret message,' and I literally stopped in my tracks. I remember thinking, this is my plot."
Hank's mystery looked at how Boston businessmen encoded secret messages in spam for insider trading. Her fictional reporter chases the story for the November ratings sweeps. The story includes a romance as the character falls for a professor who helps with the case.
"I've had 30 years of practice writing mysteries. All my investigative stories are mysteries. All I had to do was create my own," says Ryan, who spent a year and a half writing the book, completing it in 2005.
After securing an agent, Ryan sold the novel to Harlequin Next, which publishes paperback romance novels for women over 35.
"It's her reporter's sense that makes her able to tell a good story," says Ann Leslie Tuttle, Ryan's editor at Harlequin Next. "She brings a real heart and warmth to the story. She takes us inside the world of television journalism, and that is something we are all curious about and fascinated by." The books are reminiscent of other female mystery writers such as former crime reporter Edna Buchanan and Janet Evanovich, but Ryan's are based in Boston and provide readers an insider's look at the world of local TV news.
Ryan is finishing her third book, "Air Time," which will involve a luggage fraud scheme at Logan and Hartford airports.
She writes in her home office after her WHDH job and on weekends. The creative writing sometimes cuts into her time with her third husband, Jonathan Shapiro, who says he enjoys peeking into her early drafts. (Ryan has two adult stepchildren with Shapiro.)
"I know how much it means to her, and I certainly enjoy it vicariously," says Shapiro, who is an attorney. "She, of course, will say that Charlie is fictional and that some of her traits are obviously drawn on Hank's real life. To me, Charlie is Hank."
Throughout the first two books, Ryan takes small jabs at her own youth-obsessed news industry, where there is a small pool of famous veteran female reporters such as Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, and Lesley Stahl. Ryan writes, "Don't let them banish me to the home for obsolete reporters. Get out while the getting's good. While it's still my decision."
Ryan says fading youthful looks is a constant concern for broadcasters, including herself.
"Has anyone ever said to me, 'You are too old to be on television?' Has anyone ever implied that to me? No," Ryan says. "In the book, no one's ever said that to Charlie. It's all her perception. Charlie fears she is going to be replaced. It's part of the pressure of television for Charlie to fear the new kid. I wanted to illustrate how that is partly reality and partly a built-in uncertainty about one's own value."
Johnny Diaz can be reached at jodiaz@globe.com. 