Ever since I was a little girl, I've loved reading crime and detective (侦探) novels, so I guess it was pretty normal that I started writing them when I was older. However, my family is very big on having a traditional career (职业) and so when I said that I wanted to go to college and study writing, my parents told me that I couldn't. They told me that I had to study for a degree so that I would achieve a career, and not something as risky as writing. I suppose I could have studied journalism (新闻),but I didn't want to lose interest in writing because it would be something I would do every day for work, not for pleasure. I thought that teaching looked like a pretty good compromise (妥协), especially because of the long holidays. It was a good choice: by the time I was twenty﹣five,
I'd already finished two novels and had an agent.
To be honest, I never meant to keep my being a crime writer a secret or anything, and my friends have always known. One of the reasons most people don't know is because my agent told me that my name Hazel sounded too much like a romance (浪漫) novelist for older women. She suggested Brooke Lane and I thought, "Well, if you think it'll make me successful, okay," I'd totally forgotten about it until I walked into school one day and saw one of my workmates reading my novel. I asked her some questions about it, and it was so clear that she had no idea that I'd written it —she even offered to lend it to me after she'd finished! Of course, sometimes I wonder what my students would think if they knew that their teacher was going home on the weekend to write about murders and dead bodies, but I think my parents probably did me a favor: my teaching job keeps me in touch with the real world.
