Million-Dollar Mommy

Judy Blundell Moves from Star Wars to Noir

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, May 27, 2011

I don’t know how many books I’ve written or how many pseudonyms I’ve used. I do know I have a basement full of cartons.” Judy Blundell isn’t boasting, just stating the facts. After a point it gets hard to keep track.

The prolific author’s first titles were teen romances, celebrity bios, and TV tie-ins; the names on their covers were usually chosen by publishers. Under the long-running pseudonym “Jude Watson” (her married surname), the Katonah resident has written dozens of Star Wars spin-offs and two volumes of the New York Times bestselling series The 39 Clues. A hundred or so books into her career, at her editor’s urging, Judy Blundell finally published one under her own name. Her breakthrough teen noir What I Saw And How I Lied (Scholastic, 2008) won a National Book Award.

Blundell’s not boasting about that, either. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more down-to-earth superstar. In layered black, with a yellow-and-gray-striped scarf and windblown red hair tumbling over her glasses, she suggests the grownup version of some Molly Ringwald geek princess. She’s come to Oblong Books & Music to speak to the Hudson Valley YA Society about her new novel Strings Attached (Scholastic, 2011), but before the event, she squeezes in a swift photo session (“There’s no way to look 10 years younger or 20 pounds thinner, so I’ve learned to just give it up”) and a warm, rambling chat.

Blundell grew up in a Queens neighborhood much like the one where What I Saw opens. Her father was a doctor, her mother a housewife; Judy was the youngest of three. When she was 14, she broke her leg and spent several months in an unwieldy cast. Friends drifted away. “I couldn’t hang out at the movies, I was too cumbersome to cut classes with,” she explains. “And I was too embarrassed to say I couldn’t handle a cafeteria tray and crutches, so I ate out of vending machines for months, which is not as much fun as it sounds.”

When the cast came off, former friends started calling again, but she wasn’t interested. “I found out my friends weren’t really my friends.”

“I spent all that long summer alone. I developed a secret life. After midnight, I turned on the TV and watched movies all night: screwball comedies, drawing room comedies, dramas. I became a movie nerd. I fell in love with Cary Grant, idolized Irene Dunne,” Blundell says. “That was the summer I became a writer, even though I never wrote a word.”

It would be years before she started writing. An ardent reader, she devoured series like Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. “I loved being able to follow the same characters over many stories.” Later, seduced by Jane Austen and Trollope, she switched her college major to English. After graduation, she worked as a slush reader for Simon & Schuster and an editorial assistant at Silhouette. “I was very, very timid at that time,” Blundell recalls. “I was such a reader that I felt writers were very much smarter than I was, that there was some magic key I didn’t have.” Reading unsolicited manuscripts helped boost her confidence, but not by much. “I would think, well, I’m not as good as this one, but I’m better than that one. The height of my hubris was to aim for the middle. Isn’t that an awful idea? I would never let my daughter do that!”