Calories: A Diane Andrews Mystery

Albert Tucher is not a New Jersey native, having moved there from Staten Island in 1955 when he was two. He has traveled extensively outside New Jersey, but he always returns.

At Princeton University he majored in East Asian studies (Chinese language and history) and wrote a senior thesis on the Chinese student movement in France in the 1920s, but at the same time he was also discovering a love of music, especially opera. He spent the summers of 1974 and 1975 in Austria and Germany, where he did office work while studying singing with local teachers and coaches. After college he chose to pursue music instead of Chinese studies, and he sang many roles with the small opera companies in New York City.

To support these endeavors, he needed a day job, which ultimately led to a forty-year career in public librarianship, chiefly at the Newark Public Library.

In 1992 he returned to Germany to audition for the state-supported theaters there. Many American singers had found work in Germany in the post-war years, but 1992 was the year the theaters didn’t need us anymore. The fall of the Berlin Wall produced financial pressures that led to drastic cuts in theater budgets. The end of Communism also allowed eastern singers to come west.

In 1995 Albert Tucher decided he had given the singing career his best shot. In the summer of 2000, suddenly single and looking for something different, he wandered into a fiction writing class at the local county college. His first story about suburban sex worker Diana Andrews came out of that class.

In the twenty-three years since then, he has published five novels and more than one hundred short stories, most of them about Diana. He has no plans to stop.