Like the main character of his novel “I Become Her,” Joe Hart is married. Unlike her, he has not murdered anyone. Or, at least, he jokes, “None that they’ve caught me for.”
That’s not all Hart is cagey about. He lives in northern Minnesota, but prefers not to specify where, and he doesn’t want to name his wife or two children, a daughter who recently had Hart’s first grandchild and a son with nonverbal autism.
This much, we know: Joe Hart is his real name, he’s 42 and he writes ripping good yarns. That’s evidenced by the Mystery Writers of America giving him their equivalent of an Oscar, the Edgar (Allan Poe), in 2023 for “Or Else.” And by his new “I Become Her,” in which Imogen is on a honeymoon cruise with her husband when she suspects he’s been unfaithful and, perhaps accidentally, tosses him off the ship. He survives the fall, somehow, and his memories of what happened gradually return.
Personal trainer-turned-full-time-author Hart has written two dozen novels in the 15 years since he decided to buckle down on his childhood dream of being a writer.
“After I self-published my first collection of short stories, it wasn’t a lot of money,” said Hart, who started tapping out short stories on his mom’s electric typewriter when he was 9. “I’d sell a couple copies a day, if that. It wasn’t until I started getting my feet wet with the marketing side of things that it slowly built. The first month, maybe you make enough for a tank of gas and, down the road, enough for a nice dinner. The goals keep increasing and you think, ‘Maybe some day I can pay for our house payment every so often or we can afford another vehicle.’”
Like romance giant Colleen Hoover and Hart’s writing idol, Stephen King, the Minnesota author shifted from self-publishing (financing the publication of his books) to getting picked up by a major publisher. In his case, Amazon told him they’d like to re-release his 2014 thriller “The River Is Dark” (“I Become Her” is published by Amazon’s imprint Thomas & Mercer).
Hart writes in multiple genres, with two books coming out in the next couple weeks: “I Become Her” hits shelves Aug. 26 and a gothic thriller, “Wyndclyffe,” is out Sept. 2.
“I prefer to work on one thing at once but almost always different parts of the publishing process come due at different points. Right now, I’m pretty free and clear, closing in on the end of my latest novel. But, earlier this year I was finishing up another novel and editing two others,” said Hart. “You’ll have a desert where it’s just you alone at the keyboard for months and no one is calling or emailing, and you feel like you don’t exist to the outside world. Then, everyone is calling and needing something.”