Friday I attended the Celebration of Life for Christine T. Jorgensen (1941-2024). I met Christine during my first Colorado Gold conference in 1994. She was incredibly gracious, poised, and welcoming to a wannabe writer like me. Christine was one of the founders of Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and its first president. Over the course of her writing career, she published seven mystery novels.
I didn't know her very well and it was both enlightening and inspiring to hear anecdotes of a full life from her husband, children, and friends. An interesting writerly detail was that she had a thirst for cocktails and could hold her own when it came time to partake in the booze. Christine was born September 12, 1941, in Champagne, Illinois. With the start of WW2, her father was called up, serving later in the Philippine campaign, and the family moved to southern California to be closer to him before he shipped out. After college, Christine worked in family and child support services in Chicago and Denver. A voracious reader, she was drawn to writing, initially trying her hand with romance novels until her critique group noted that a romance story does not typically have a murder. Even if it did, seven dead bodies in one book were too many for the genre. With that advice, Christine turned her attention to murder mysteries, eventually penning five in the Stella the Stargazer series, followed by two stand-alones. Any one of us would be lucky to be so fondly remembered.
To read her obituary, click here Christine T. Jorgensen.
