This Brooklyn Teacher Has a Mysterious Second Career

A small publishing house near Union Square is the pivot on which Rebecca Pawel’s life turns. Most days, she passes underneath by subway on her way between home in Manhattan and the public school where she teaches in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, without coming up for air. But every so often Ms. Pawel breezes in to visit her editors at Soho Press, a publisher of mysteries set in exotic locales.On her way in to Soho’s offices on a recent evening, Ms. Pawel chatted with the security guard downstairs before continuing to the sixth floor, where Juris Jurjevics, Soho’s co-founder, embraced her.“I just got the Spanish proofs of ‘Death of a Nationalist,'” Ms. Pawel told Mr. Jurjevics. “They were fun to read.” An observer could have mistaken Ms. Pawel’s blase tone for that of an adult daughter trying to not seem too giddy in front of her father.Three years ago, Soho signed the then-unknown 24-year-old writer for two noirish detective stories she’d written, both set in Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Today Ms. Pawel has published the third mystery in the series, has one more on the way, and is a 2004 Edgar award winner for best first novel. She has a way of making her hard work sound like a game and her talent like good luck. The way Ms. Pawel tells it, she is an accidental author whose success came as the result of a casual email tossed off to a college professor, Persephone Braham, during a vacation in Spain in the summer of 2000.“I said to her, ‘I’m in Spain. Do you need any books? Do you want me to pick anything up for you?'” Ms. Pawel explained. “And she said, ‘Well, I don’t think I need any specific titles, but can you think of any murder mysteries set in Madrid?'”Ms. Pawel wrote back to say she couldn’t think of much, but that a crime novel set in Madrid shortly after the end of General Franco’s siege of the Spanish capital would be a fabulous idea.“And she wrote back and she said, ‘Yeah, why don’t you write it?'”About eight weeks later, Ms. Pawel finished “Death of a Nationalist.”The story develops around the discovery of a murdered Spanish policeman in a quiet street in Madrid in 1939. Carlos Tejada Alonso y Leon, a friend of the slain guardia civil[ITALS], undertakes an unofficial investigation of the case. A war hardened Franco supporter who hates Spanish Republicans and doesn’t hesitate to administer rough justice as he sees it, Tejada is about as far from Miss Marple as you can get. Nevertheless, Ms. Pawel has made him the hero, or anti-hero, of her next two books, “Law of Return” and “The Watcher in the Pine.”Ms. Pawel calls Tejada a “scene stealer,” a quality she is not exactly proud of having endowed him with. She says that after Soho made a deal with her to publish “Death of a Nationalist,” her thought was “I’m going to go hell for writing about this character this way.”Despite her misgivings about Tejada, Pawel freely concedes a certain kinship with him. For one thing, they both do much of their best thinking during solitary walks at night. The difference is that when Tejada goes strolling, he strikes fear in the curfew-bound burghers of Madrid, while Ms. Pawel elicits a very different response for the denizens of Central Park West.“All of the doormen know me because I’m the only one late at night walking home from dinner,” she says. “Some of them say hi to me after a while, so I stop and say, ‘How are you?'”An only child who is close to her mother and father, Ms. Pawel often joins her parents for dinner at the apartment on the Upper West Side where she grew up.Ms. Pawel attempted her first novel while she was still a student at Stuyvesant High School (it was about the cross country team, which she was a member of). Her romance with Spain also began during high school, when she traveled to Madrid for the first time on a summer language program.“There were three weeks in a university dorm in Madrid in a location which shows up as barracks in the book,” Ms. Pawel said with a chuckle.After Stuyvesant, she attended Columbia University as an undergraduate and then Teachers College, where she trained for her current job: She is a teacher of English and Spanish at the High School for Enterprise Business and Technology in Williamsburg.Where life will take her next, Ms. Pawel doesn’t want to say. She has high hopes for the response “Death of a Nationalist” will receive when it is published in Spain in 2005.“What’s odd is I told you that Persephone, who was my professor, had written to me and said, ‘Well no, there really isn’t anything about this time period,'” Ms. Pawel said. “There really wasn’t much about the immediate postwar. And then in the four years between when I first wrote the book and now, there has been an explosion of stuff precisely about this period, including a couple of things that were sleeper runaway best-sellers.”

This Brooklyn Teacher Has a Mysterious Second Career

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