Amanda Kyle Wiliams, Crime Writer, Dies at 61

As a student in rural Georgia, Amanda Kyle Williams, long before she became a successful mystery writer, struggled to read even the simplest sentences. The words on the page looked jumbled, like jigsaw puzzle pieces that wouldn’t connect.

Teachers thought she was anxious. Her family said she was lazy. She often heard words like “slow” or “stupid” being used to describe her.

At 16 she dropped out of high school. She became addicted to cocaine and checked into a rehabilitation center.

It wasn’t until she was 22 that a psychologist told her she was dyslexic.

“The diagnosis changed every way I felt about myself and every way I felt about my chances in the world,” she said in a 2014 interview with Camp Spring Creek, a summer camp in Bakersville, North Carolina, for children with the learning disability.

With the psychologist’s help, she learned to read, and at 23 she did something that had once filled her with dread: She walked into a library. There she finished her first book, “Pride and Prejudice.”

And from there, feeling confident and becoming fascinated by how the written word could convey a story, she went on to publish her first book at 28 and eventually landed a $1 million contract to write a mystery series about a tough female private investigator named Keye Street.

Williams died Aug. 31 at her home in Decatur, Georgia. She was 61. The cause was endometrial cancer, said Rebecca Guinn, chief executive of LifeLine Animal Project, a nonprofit in Georgia for which Williams was a founding board member.

Williams was born on Aug. 17, 1957, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Fred and Violet M. (Dale) Williams. She spent her childhood in Colorado and Georgia, where her father was a sales executive for a carpet company. Her mother was a homemaker.

After dropping out of high school, Williams worked as a house painter, a property manager and a commercial embroiderer.

She also took a job as a courier for a private investigator and learned some tricks about serving subpoenas to people who were evading lawsuits — planting documents, for example, in pizza boxes, or flower bouquets, or sweepstakes prize packages.

The work inspired her to write a crime thriller, “Club Twelve,” about a spy named Madison McGuire who works undercover for the government. She shopped her manuscript around to every publisher she could think of and received one rejection letter after another. Then Naiad Press, a small publisher that focused on lesbian literature, said it would publish her book if she made the lead character a lesbian. (Williams, who was openly lesbian by then, was happy to make the change.)

“Club Twelve” was published in 1990, and Williams wrote three more books about the character, but the series did not gain much attention. Meanwhile, “to keep the lights on,” she said, she started a dog-walking business and freelanced for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In 2009 she dreamed up another female protagonist, a tough Chinese-American private investigator. The character was inspired by her brother’s adopted daughter, up to a point: Unlike the daughter, the heroine, Keye Street, was a recovering addict who worked odd jobs, much like Williams.

“She’s slightly damaged, seriously flawed; a sober alcoholic with a mighty Krispy Kreme doughnut addiction,” Williams wrote of the character on her website. “She feels real to me.”

Williams took courses in criminal profiling and consulted with professionals in law enforcement and forensics. She then wrote a manuscript and sent it to her agent.

In November 2009, she was outside her house preparing to walk the dogs when her agent called. Would Williams give up her dog-walking business and develop Keye Street into a series? If so, a contract promised $1 million if the book hit sales targets.

Williams hung up the phone and, she recalled, began sobbing on her porch. When a neighbor asked if she was all right, she replied: “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.”

The first book, “The Stranger You Seek” (2011), was well-received and translated into seven languages It followed the tale of Keye Street as she helped a small-town sheriff solve a mystery that began with the discovery of two murdered teenage girls.

“Williams handles crime scene procedures with assurance, uses forthright language to portray a frightful killer and isn’t above injecting a bit of Southern humor into a grim situation,” Marilyn Stasio wrote in 2011 in The New York Times Book Review.

She wrote two sequels, “Stranger in the Room,” which was published in 2012, and “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” published in 2014. That year, Williams learned she had stage three endometrial cancer, which begins in the uterus. She later teamed with a photographer to publish an online essay about her cancer struggle titled “Bald.”

Williams’ survivors include her father; her stepmother, Betty Williams; her brother, Parkhill Scott Williams; and her sister, Heather Brianna Williams.

Williams often said that dyslexia was the most beautiful word she had ever heard.

“I lived in that undiagnosed, unsupported world for many years,” she said. “When you grow up feeling less than, feeling dumb, being told you’re not trying or not smart enough to do what is asked of you in school, it marks you. It just does.”