Joan Nixon, 76; Wrote Mystery Stories for Young Adults

Joan Lowery Nixon, whose mystery stories for young adults won her four Edgar Awards, the top prize given by the Mystery Writers of America, has died. She was 76.

Nixon died July 5 in Houston of cancer.

Born in Los Angeles and raised in east Hollywood, Nixon was one of three daughters of an accountant father and a kindergarten teacher mother. She later described her early years as a secure and happy time when her grandparents lived next door and her mother equipped a playroom for her and her sisters with a piano, paints and an easel.

She published her first poem in a children’s magazine when she was 10 and her first story at 17. In college she studied journalism, which she later said taught her to streamline her stories and fill them with factual details. Her books, more than 100, were based on news accounts of murders and crimes, or real-life experiences mixed with a strong dose of imagination.

Once, while she and her husband were riding in a hot-air balloon over Sedona, Ariz., Nixon got an eagle’s view of a man putting something into the trunk of his car. “Suppose he had just committed a crime and was stuffing the body bag in the trunk?” she suggested to her husband. Many of her mystery novels started that way.

She liked mysteries, she said, because she found them comforting. “A mystery is always solved,” she told the Houston Chronicle in 1993. “The bad guy is always arrested and sent to jail or bumped off. You’re safe.”

She graduated from USC before she moved to Texas with her husband, Hershell Nixon, a geologist in the oil business.

While she was raising her four young children in the late 1950s, Nixon would take them and her portable typewriter to the beach. The kids played in the water while she worked on her writing. In 1961 she attended a writers conference where two of the speakers were children’s book authors who encouraged her.

Her first book, “Mystery of Hurricane Castle,” was about two girls (Kathy and Maureen, named after her two oldest daughters) marooned in a hurricane who took shelter in a forlorn castle. After 12 rejections, Nixon found a publisher.

From then on she completed, on average, two books a year and spiced most of her interview conversations with tips on how to write fiction. She also wrote a book on the subject, “The Making of a Writer,” in 2002.

Not all of her novels were mysteries. She also wrote historical novels for young adults. Many of her main characters were enterprising teenagers with personal obstacles to overcome. To develop the protagonist Rebekah -- a Russian Jewish immigrant in Nixon’s trilogy about Ellis Island, published in the early 1990s -- she imagined the girl being raised in a culture where typically only boys were sent to school.

“I thought of my mother being told by her mother that she couldn’t go to college because it would be a shame to waste an education on a girl,” Nixon told the Houston Chronicle in 1995. “I suddenly saw Rebekah ... standing outside of Columbia University, vowing to get a degree. And I told myself, ‘Now I know what her passion is. Now I can write the book.’ ”

After a decade of writing and publishing novels, Nixon taught creative writing at Midland College in Midland, Texas, and later at the University of Houston from 1974 to 1978 while the family lived there.

She won her first Edgar Award for “The Kidnapping of Christina Lattimore,” in 1979. Three others followed: “The Seance” (1980), “The Other Side of Dark” (1986) and “The Name of the Game Was Murder” (1993).

Later in her life, with 13 grandchildren to dote on, she tested crime-solving techniques on them, writing them letters in code or in lemon juice. “The lemon juice turns brown when you put the letter in the oven so you can decipher what it says,” she explained.

She spent part of her day answering some of the 1,000 letters she received each year from fans. Letters from teenage mothers inspired her to create a picture book, “My Baby” (1995), with photographs of young mothers and their babies from the Houston area, and tips on caring for infants and toddlers.

Some of her readers asked how she could write such exciting books when she lived in such a plain, ordinary place. “I always tell them to look in their own backyard for stories,” she told the Houston Chronicle in 2002.

In addition to her husband, Nixon is survived by her three daughters, 13 grandchildren and her two sisters.