Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries
Tonight (Wednesday) I’ll be having a Facebook Live conversation with my good friend Les Klinger (in LA), for Murder by the Book (in Houston)—here.
And I’ve dropped in on TWO blog sites for guest posts:
I’m playing with my friends on Jungle Reds (Maine, Texas, CA, Key West–you name it), a bunch of women talking about Feisty Women, i.e., Mrs Hudson—that one is here.
And on Career Authors, I have a craft-oriented piece on writing supporting characters, here.
Join me, for one or all!
Black lives lost are swept up in the busy-ness of life: a sad shake of the head, a purse of the lips (“He should have known better than to pull out his phone/ run at night/ hit a cop/ drive there/ live…”) before the name fades. But the entire planet now knows the name George Floyd, whose “counterfeit $20 bill” death beneath a white knee may have triggered, at last, the world’s revulsion against that knee. Then mere days later Rayshard Brooks, instead of being told to walk home and sober up, ended up shot. As Breonna Taylor, instead of being handed a search warrant, was invaded and shot. As Ahmaud Arbery was shot for being out for a jog. As Freddie Gray was slammed to death five years ago, in a police van. As Walter Scott was shot in a park over a broken tail light, also in 2015. As Eric Garner was choked to death for selling individual cigarettes in 2014. As Trayvon Martin was shot for being a teenager in a hoodie in 2012. As in 1955, Emmett Till, another teenager, was brutally lynched for speaking to a white girl. As in 1895, Emmett Divers was taken from his jail cell—
In 1619, “Antonio” and “Isabella” “Tucker” arrived in what would become the United States. Their actual names, those they were given at birth in what is now Angola, are lost in time. Antonio and Isabella may have been kidnapped and enslaved, or their presence may have been more voluntary—their status as “indentured servants” during that era makes the distinction less than clear. Certainly their son, William, was born a free man, and not every Black person in those early days was enslaved—some were landowners, and even owned slaves themselves, as plantations grew and intensive labor was needed.
The “Tuckers” were not lynched or shot: that response to perceived Black transgressions grew up after their time, when laws and institutions reinforced the cruelty of the slave economy—when the sugar/rum/slave trading triangle became a direct back-and-forth between Africa and the New World.
This is an animated history of the slave trade. Every dot represents an entire shipload of men and women ripped from their homes. That endless stream of dots into the Caribbean bears testimony to the short lives of those working on sugar plantations. The dots hitting America’s coastline carried men and women from whom George and Breonna, Freddie and Eric, Trayvon and Emmett and all the other victims, named and nameless, descended.
And as I say the names Antonio, Isabella, and William, I have to wonder how early this country might have chosen a different path to walk down.
“The actions we need to collectively take
to support the Black community.”
I live in the publishing community. My publisher is the biggest gorilla on the street, and I am actively involved in Mystery Writers of America, both of whom have come out with public statement on the #BLM movement (here and here.) And though we all know that the larger the organization, the more glacial the institutional racism can be, many of us are pledged to making sure real change does happen.
But on a more personal level, which Black writers do I recommend?
I thought you’d never ask.
Black Writers matter
There are a lot of Black mystery writers, and I imagine that we all (especially if we don’t have a hardback with an author photo) already read Black writers without realizing it. There are good places to begin with long and enticing lists that lead into the world of Black Mystery fiction. But let’s start with five authors I particularly enjoy. (Each has a link to Indiebound, to take you to your local bookshop, but you can get them anywhere.)
Barbara Neely (or BarbaraNeely) is this year’s MWA Grand Master, based on four delicious books about a Black cleaning woman ironically named Blanche White. They’re funny and moving and deal with all the issues you’d expect a working-class woman of color to encounter. Just too terribly sad that Barbara died before she held the plaque in her hand. Meet Ms. White in Blanche on the Lam.
Paula Woods also had a four-novel career, starting in 1999 with Inner City Blues. The name of her cop protagonist is Charlotte Justice, and I do not know why she stopped writing because they are good, solid crime fiction with a distinctive and compelling voice.
(Although: hmm. Two women, both Black, both fine writers, both with four-novel careers. So how much did their race—and particularly, the race of their characters—affect their publishing success?)
More recently, my friend Rachel Howzell Hall. She has a great series with police detective Lou Norton, starting with Land of Shadows, and a nice, creepy, alt-Agatha Christie thriller They All Fall Down. (Rachel has four in her series, but also the same number of standalones, so she’s well past the four-novel career curse.)
Attica Locke won the Edgar Award a couple years back for Bluebird, Bluebird, a thought-provoking tale of Black Texas life and the pulls when a Black man is also in law enforcement. I don’t know much about Texas, but Locke makes it sing.
The other writer I can’t recommend highly enough is sci-fi writer N. K. Jemison, the only author to have won the Hugo award three years running, for all three books in her Broken Earth trilogy. But her new one, The City We Became, is absolutely stunning. If you know China Mièville’s work, it’s a little like some of his, but if you don’t, I can’t think how to describe it except in superlatives. Rich, sharp, complicated. Amazing, fantastic, enthralling. Utterly unexpected and original. And so incredibly present, it might have been written last week.
Black Lives: a marker of progress for white lives?
I haven’t said much about the state of our world since the May 25 death of George Floyd (other than the introductory remarks in my last newsletter, here.) In part, I felt that #BlackoutTuesday and its basis, #TheShowMustBePaused, were meant to focus the world’s attention on Black voices, to encourage everyone to “take a beat for an honest, reflective and productive conversation about what actions we need to collectively take to support the Black community.” On top of that, I could see that the very last thing any of my exhausted Black friends needed was another plaintive and heartfelt apology for the incredible abuses inflicted on them by people who look like me.
So while the world was blowing up, I did my job, launched my book, watched the news, listened to people. I wept and raged and shook my head in disbelief-that-is-no-longer-disbelieving. I watched in awe as people like the angry and eloquent Kimberly Jones spoke her heart:
She’s way more generous than I am. If I’d been around during the French Revolution, I’d have swept through Versailles with a torch.
For the past four weeks I’ve watched, and listened, and tried for that honest and productive reflection. Because, as Jelani Cobb writes in his New Yorker article about Juneteenth:
There’s a paradox inherent in the fact that emancipation is celebrated primarily among African-Americans, and that the celebration is rooted in a perception of slavery as something that happened to black people, rather than something that the country committed. The paradox rests on the presumption that the arrival of freedom should be greeted with gratitude, instead of with self-reflection about what allowed it to be deprived in the first place. Emancipation is a marker of progress for white Americans, not black ones.
The problem is not with Black America, but with the side of the street I live on. In going forward, some of the actions I have decided on are behind the scenes, and will remain there. Seems to me that a person who needs credit for acts of decency is part of the problem.
Other things I decided on are longer term, and you’ll hear about them when they come around. Change only works if it lives past the present.
And then there’s the more immediate act—namely this week of posts here on Mutterings. (And no: if you’re tired of Black Lives Matter, if your head will explode with one more thing to feel guilty about, if life is already making your eyes weep and your ulcer flare, you don’t have to read me this week.)
I write fiction. My audience is incredibly mixed, in age and ethnic heritage and political beliefs. As a storyteller, this is how things work. It always astonishes me to come across a reader who holds vastly different beliefs from mine, but it is absolutely not my job to vet my listeners. The story is the story, and any subversive messaging I sneak in has to be low-key enough to overlook at first glance—not because I’m ashamed of it or want to lose a sale, but because nothing kills fiction faster than the smell of the soap-box. If you’re preaching, it’s not a story, it’s a sermon.
(Though I have a strong, knee-jerk reaction to being told what to do. People who email me saying they won’t buy my book because of something I said or didn’t say, or that I really mustn’t write that kind of book again, always get my second reply—the polite one, after I’ve deleted the first one. If my politics offend you that much, no one is making you buy my book.)
All of which means that on the one hand, I am a writer of fiction whose political and sociological opinions should be of less concern to the general world than my choice of dishwashing soap. On the other hand, I do have strong opinions, and I am a citizen of the world.
So the time has come to say, yes: Black lives matter.
White and blue and brown lives matter, too, of course they do—but in this country, Black lives have long carried an extraordinary burden, and at this moment, we might—we just might, if we all respond, have a chance to take that burden off the backs of our Black friends and neighbors. Or off their necks. And maybe redeem ourselves a little in the eyes of the future.
That’s the theme over the next five days here on Mutterings. I’ll be talking about Black writers, about saying the names of victims, about the idea of “defunding” the police, and some thoughts on where I’m going.
And I’m leaving the comments open, although anyone who loses the thread of rational conversation will be blocked.
May Riviera Gold bring you some simple pleasures in a complicated world.
Today I’m over with the Murder is Everywhere crowd, talking about using beautiful little Monaco as a place for murders. And The Dark and Stormy Book Club has me chatting about all sorts of mysterious things. (the Apple link is here, but you can find these ladies wherever your podcasts are found.)
But don’t forget tonight’s launch celebration at Bookshop Santa Cruz—well, not AT Bookshop, even though they are opening their doors today for the first time (YAY—and keep safe!) This will be a virtual chat, with maybe a short reading, and a Q&A (which we hope works better than the one the other day, sorry…) Click on that link to sign up for the event beforehand, or you’ll miss the first part of it while you’re signing up. See you tonight!
**
Well, this has been a week. Ten days ago, I wrote a post here about pouring bronze (a key element in Riviera Gold) but when I went to do a follow-up, marking a week before the publication date, well…
I wrote about it on my newsletter this week (here, if you didn’t see it) so I won’t do it again here, but I will say that I hope you are all safe, well, and not only listening, but hearing ways that we can all make things better. Events of the past months have made community even more important. I thank you for being a part of mine.
So: Riviera Gold.
I’ve signed a bunch of books, for Bookshop Santa Cruz and Poisoned Pen Books.
They both have a few unsold—or they did when I last talked to them—so you can still order one from them. (links are at the bottom)
But this book’s author events are all either virtual or written. Some are guest posts on blogs and sites—like this Q&A I did with the Rogue Women blog. I’ll post links on my Facebook author page and every so often here on Mutterings, in case you’re interested in what I have to say about “Feisty Old Ladies,” or “Professional Beauties,” or even “Keeping a Series Fresh.”
I’m doing streaming events—two Saturday, first with a group of Sherlockians called the Red Circle, then with Poisoned Pen Books, and on launch night (Tuesday) I’ll be with Bookshop Santa Cruz. (You have to sign up for the Bookshop one.) You can watch the bookshop talks at your leisure, wherever you might be.
Watch for the Riviera Gold Bookclub Kit, here. Recipes, fun notes, and photos, to go with your discussion.
And while you wait for launch day, you can do the Riviera Gold crossword puzzle by long-time friend and cruciverbalist Marjorie Tucker, here. (answers on Tuesday)
Keep safe, keep sane, keep reading…
Riviera Gold (excerpts etc here) comes out June 9, and is available for pre-order (signed) from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen—or from your local Independent bookshop, or Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle, or CD or audio.
Or—the following excellent Indie bookshops will sell you a copy with a very beautiful signed bookplate in it: Book Passage, Mysterious Books, West Portal Books, Third Place Books, and Murder by the Book.
One of the joys of writing crime stories is the wild variety of research projects that come along. In Riviera Gold, that includes bronze casting. And what do you know—there’s a foundry right here in Santa Cruz.
Sean Monaghan and Courtney Scruggs of Bronze Works made me welcome, let me poke around, and invited me to a pour. They even went over my story and didn’t laugh at it (at least, not loud enough for me to hear.)
Here’s what Russell sees in Riviera Gold, with what I saw in Santa Cruz. (Rafe is the sculptor she meets at the house of Sara and Gerald Murphy, M. Ferrant is the owner of the foundry).
***
First, the masonry oven at the back was opened and the hot moulds, empty now of their wax, were transferred to the battered trough in the centre of the room.
While Rafe loaded the oven with a new set of moulds, the other two worked at the trough covering the waiting mouths with small squares of tin…
… and pouring sand from the buckets around their bases.
What followed was a dance between three men and a lot of deadly machinery. First, clamps from the device overhead, lifting the rough, white-hot crucible free of the flames. The young man skimmed the slag off the top with a long-handled iron rod with a half-circle at its end. Casual blobs of thousand-degree metal were knocked to the floor, inches from ill-protected legs, as the chain lowered the glowing stone bucket into the embrace of one of those Medieval torture instruments.
Monsieur Ferrant locked it into place. His side of this pouring contraption had two arms, allowing him to steer the crucible and control its stream.
“Hoop,” he called, and the clamped pot rose, moved, and hovered over the row of plaster mouths. “Là,” he said, and a miniature river of white-hot lava disappeared into an upraised mouth.
Moving down the row of forms, bronze filled one cup, then the next.
The angle increased with the emptying of the crucible, until again came “Hoop” and the pair emptied the crucible’s dregs into a shallow metal tray, then reversed the process with carrying frame and the tongs. The crucible disappeared back inside the furnace.
The slabs of bronze that had been pre-heating along the top were laid gently in.
Meanwhile, the forms were cooling with amazing rapidity, going from white-yellow…
to dull red to barely rose.
While the crucible sat in its nest of flames, slowly melting its new ingots, Rafe began to work the plaster shapes out of the trough and lay them to one side.
The men drank long draughts of liquid—it turned out to be small beer—and resumed their gauntlets. The oven was unloaded, the sand nestled in around these, the tallest of the pieces—but when Rafe moved to assume his handle of the pouring shanks, the older man shook his head and gestured at his assistant. The sculptor protested, but the foundry owner was adamant—and when time came to pour these, the tallest of the day’s works, I could see why. Not only were the young man’s arms nearly ten inches further off the ground than Rafe’s, but his muscles were like iron, boosting the full crucible to chest level with an ease that made my arms ache just to watch.
The pour ended, the furnace shut down, the crucible was scraped out. I was surprised to find how quickly the liquid metal set: already, Rafe was trading his leather apron and goggles for a chisel and mallet, chipping experimentally at one of the earliest moulds filled. He took care not to rest his hand on the surface, and used the chisel handle to shift the piece around. A rough shape emerged, choked with white plaster and wrapped in the octopus- sprues, but one could see the outlines of the sculpture beneath. He then propped it up to bash enthusiastically into its centre, pausing a few times to shake out hunks of broken-up core.
When he had finished, he carried his proto-sculpture in one gauntleted hand along the rope line for the admiration of all—taking care to pull it back from any out-stretching fingers. But when Rafe came to Picasso, he held the piece out as a man might display a new-born son. The Spaniard bent over it, his finger sketching a line some inches above its surface, then reached out to deliver a hearty slap on Rafe’s biceps.
***
You can read more, two weeks from today on the Riviera Gold publication day. In the meantime, you can also see more “Background Research” videos for Riviera Gold on my YouTube Channel.
Riviera Gold (here) comes out June 9, and is available signed from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen—or from your local Independent bookshop, or Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle, or CD or audio.
And—the following excellent Indie bookshops will sell you a copy with a very beautiful signed bookplate in it: Book Passage, Mysterious Books, West Portal Books, Third Place Books, and Murder by the Book.
I’ve had a lot of my own books hit my hands. With 28 novels and dozens of books containing my shorter contribution, I’ve received a lot of hardbacks with my name on the cover.
But in case you’re wondering, no: it never gets old. I still open the box or envelope and pull the weight of it out with a thrill. Still run my hands over the dust jacket to feel the matte texture or the gloss sheen. Still admire the cover that I’ve been looking at, digitally and on stacks of ARCs, for the better part of a year. Still open it to check on the design of the title page and the look of the dedication and the crisp sharp print on the page.
What I don’t do is settle down to read it. Some writers do, but not me, for that way lies madness, because the moment I begin to read, I spot my first error, my first clunky phrase, my first missed opportunity for some clever plot point or clue….
Other than that, no, it never gets old. And I always take that first copy and write, just inside the flap, the words Author’s first copy. I add the date, and I sign it. That copy then goes into the file box stuffed with all the notes, printouts, articles, maps, and photos I used during the writing. It often contains an ARC, if I managed to hang onto one, as well as the first-draft typescript and what the publishers call the “foul matter”–a printout (what we old-school types have instead of e-edits) marked up with the dialogue between the editor, the copy editor, and me: comments, corrections, suggestions, queries, and quite a few of my own testy STETs, riding in the margins where I do not want something changed, thank you very much.
One of the next copies I receive will get a signature and a place on that shelf you see above (or rather, shelves, since they have now hit the end of my study’s second wall and require a start on the third.) But that first one goes into the master box, saved, to mark the project as complete.
If any of you are writers, tell me–what do you do with your first author copy?
***
Riviera Gold (excerpts and more here) will be out June 9, world-wide, print and audio: you can order a copy signed from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen—or from your local Independent bookshop, or Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle, or CD or audio.
(And have your local Indie write me if they’d like some signed bookplates.)
One of the great pleasures I have in researching books—okay, I admit, it’s not quite as much fun as the travel side of research…but a pleasure nonetheless—is getting to know some of the true-life characters of the time and place the book is to be set.
Take Sara and Gerald Murphy. I knew of them, of course, since it’s hard to do much reading on the Paris art scene of the Twenties without repeatedly tripping over them. They even had walk-on parts in Island of the Mad, as house guests in the Grand Canal palazzo hired for the season by Cole and Linda Porter. Sara and Gerald are in a photo I’ve used several times, bracketing Cole Porter and a friend on the Piazza San Marco in Venice—
Their story is so many things: joyous, inspiring, thought-provoking, moving, and sad—but above all, fascinating. Like the Porters, they were born into East-coast wealth, the wife was older than the husband, and the husband was not entirely heterosexual—although in Gerald’s case, it appears to have been a secret struggle rather than an accepted fact. Gerald, born into the family that ran Marc Cross, discovered in Sara a fellow Bohemian, and when their children were small they set off to first to England to train as landscape gardeners, then to Paris where the community of American expatriate artists and writers was exploding in all directions.
It was unthinkable in that time and place, that a person did not produce some kind of art. Writers drank with painters, poets slept with photographers, ceramists argued with print-makers. Friends were pulled in to sew costumes or paint backdrops for the Ballets Russes. In this air of creativity, Gerald started to paint, producing a series of geometric still-lifes that explored the universe of meaning in ordinary objects.
Sara was an artist, too, but in nothing as mundane as oil and canvas. Her medium was people, her music was the timbre of conversation in a room and the taste of foods, unusual or simple, on the tongue. A housewife’s talent, one might argue—but in fact, her collaboration with Gerald on a 13-year series of real-life encounters and episodes made for one of the most influential art works of the century.
From their 1921 arrival in Paris to their 1934 departure for New York, the Murphy apartment in Paris and the Murphy house in Antibes became the home of the art world. Not the drawing room, not the gallery, but the home, the beating heart of the place where you could always find friends, where you could be fed and sheltered and listened to and encouraged, where they would take you back even when you had misbehaved (and oh, did many of them misbehave. Scott Fitzgerald was banned for three whole weeks after one particularly nasty drunken evening.)
The two Murphys made America’s footloose expatriates into a family, miraculously melding a wild mix of adults with their own three small children. There were costume parties on the beach with Pablo Picasso, who traded sketches with little Honoria. There was skiing with Hemingway, dancing with ballerinas, sailing with a Russian nobleman, music on the terrace with everyone who wandered by. There was family.
And as a family it ended. The Murphys’ second child developed tuberculosis. The stock market chewed away their resources. They retreated to America, and when Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night came out, a book they had encouraged him to write over many years, it turned out to be a distressing mix of their lives and troubles with Fitzgerald’s own torments with Zelda. The Murphys’ eldest child died of a complication from measles, and their second son two years later. Gerald ran Marc Cross, and painted no more. They never returned to Villa America.
Gerald painted some 14 canvases in his life, of which 8 survive. But together, Gerald and Sara Murphy lovingly nurtured Twentieth century art and literature through its early years.
Riviera Gold (here) comes out June 9, and is available for pre-order (signed) from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen—or from your local Independent bookshop, or Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle, or CD or audio.
When I opened up the fundraiser for Bookshop Santa Cruz’s Keep Kids Reading project, I promised to read the Jabberwocky, and I did. Then we hit $250 and, having promised the Owl and the Pussycat, I not only read the poem—with illustrations—I tossed in an Illustrated/Annotated “Owl and the Pussycat” for your printing pleasure. And now…
“Mrs Hudson’s Case.” In which we first encounter Mrs Hudson’s hidden life, later to surface to startling effect in The Murder of Mary Russell and Riviera Gold.
The tale is from Mary Russell’s War, here (where you’ll find it, free and downloadable, for a few more days.) Make yourself a cup of tea and settle in to enjoy while I read to you this tale of an unexpectedly contrary housekeeper. (And if you enjoy it, you could donate a few dollars to Bookshop’s project, here.)
The YouTube link is here:
