Laurie R. King

Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries

LAURIE'S NEWSLETTER

Fired up, thanks.

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You may have heard that we have a fire going on here in Santa Cruz.

Flames coming at us…

Fires are, unfortunately, not unusual in California—generally in October, when the dry season is dragging on.  But fires are now an annual, close, pressing presence, all over the state. For a quarter of the year, every year, our lives have become dominated by fear.  Fear and smoke.

This year, nothing is usual. Why should fires be?  Or rather, fire fighting.

Because this one, they’re not actually fighting.  Thousands of homes are in the line of the fire, and yes, so far most of the people have gotten out, but a fire that would normally have 3000 or more firefighters on it, has had 600.

Normally, within twenty minutes of the first whiff of smoke, you hear the spotter planes.  Then the water-bearing helicopters and the retardant-spraying planes arrive, to crush the fire before it could build and take off—

Over my house, two years ago. No messing around.

But for two days, our skies have been empty.

In part, it’s a problem with the terrain, and the difficulty of dumping water on the tops of redwood trees, attempting to get it to the ground.  And in part, it’s the way the wind is riding the front of the fire line, obscuring the target ground.

Charred leaf, drifted down onto my deck.

And the bigger problem?  Our inability to get the Covid response under control.

Summer fires in California depend on the inmates of prisons and youth facilities, who train, get paid, and have a highly employable skill when they get out.  But in 2020, the prisons have either locked their inmates down or given them early release.

This morning, I wrote a note on Facebook with a picture of the air we’re trying to breathe—

No filters on the photograph, though an N95 on the photographer.

—and a comment that decisions made in DC have rippled across the country.

Now, I did not mean that DC has anything to do with where our Conservation Corps prisoners are sent.  I meant that the incredible catastrophe that is this government’s Covid response has now resulted in a situation where my neighbors’ houses are burning, their livestock and the wild creatures that live here are dying, and a quarter of my county has loaded up their cars and fled to safety.

Other countries have problems, absolutely.  No argument there.  And yes, global heating means that the hills are tinder dry and the sun is hotter than ever and you can’t blame the people in DC for all of that, since much was inherited.  But once the fire is burning?  Locking down our firefighters has thrown kerosene on the flames.

The camera couldn’t deal with the intense glowing red eye of the sun. Use your imagination…

The countries that acknowledged the problem early, that frankly ordered people to retreat until the numbers were down, that required their people to wear masks and keep apart and be both responsible and sensible—those countries might be watching their hills burn, but it isn’t because firefighters who want to work are kept from the fire lines.

This is a stupid way to live. What can be more basic than wearing a bloody mask and not going to large gatherings?  Why is this country not only unable to bring the response under control, but unable to even agree that there are things that can be done, now? Why can we not just grow up?

My fire has nothing to do with your life, I know.  Of course, if my house burns down, it means that you won’t have a book or two from me while I’m trying to put my life back together. And if you insist on not wearing a mask when you go out, and pretending that hanging out in a crowded bar or venue doesn’t matter, and yes, if you vote for people who treat it like a joke, then thanks, but I’m not sure that we’re ever going to crawl out from under this thing. Which would be too bad, to never be able to hang out and chat about the new one.

Ripples spread.  And the Covid-denier one is currently crashing on my coastline.

Yes: Black Lives Matter (4)

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Defund the police?

White people now know what this country’s Black citizens have known for a very long time: if you’re Black, you don’t phone the police if you need help.

The scenes that are playing out on our tv screens night after night reflect a tragic irony: if you ask a cop why they volunteered for the police—actually choosing to be one of the people who run towards danger and catastrophe when everyone is running away—most of them will say that they wanted to serve. They wanted to make things better, to stand up for the weak, to push back against those who would abuse and harm the innocent. And many cops do, fighting hard to give a balanced response to all the people in their town.

Santa Cruz, CA police take a knee during a Black Lives Matter demonstration.

But those are not the police officers we’re seeing on our screens. What we see is a group of idealistic young men and women who have been turned into a pack of huge, armored monsters cradling weapons that can mow down a crowd.  We see men (and women? Can one tell, beneath those helmets?) whose single learned response has been shaped into aggression, whether to peaceful demonstrators or journalists with cameras or a tipsy Black man who fell asleep in his car.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to abolish the police entirely. Sometimes a situation requires a big guy with a gun—and occasionally, a whole lot of big people with large guns. But that situation is rare.  And yet, the response too often, especially when it involves citizens of color, is not.

“Defund the police” is a terrible, all-or-nothing slogan.  Sure, we could do without the police if nobody owned a gun, if no one could drink or abuse drugs, if we had truly robust social services that cut off domestic violence and treated mental illnesses before things got ugly.

Until those things happen, we need a police force. However, recent events have made it clear to the most oblivious among us that the system is not working—that giving civilian police military equipment, encouraging the police to think of tasers, tear gas, and rubber bullets as safely non-lethal, and training cops to greet every situation by inflating their chests and trying to dominate only creates a terrible circle of escalation, violence, and mistrust.

90% of the time, confrontation only makes things worse. Yes, we need to be prepared for that remaining 10%—but not at the cost of escalating every situation until it ends up there.

Instead, we need to Re-fund the Police. We need to get rid of those massive armored vehicles, retired from war zones, that make a department think–hey, this demonstration might be the time to finally make use of the thing.  After all, when you have a really sexy new hammer in your hand, don’t you just ache for a nail to use it on?  And if the only tool you’ve been trained to use is a hammer, why would you expect anything else but to bash?

We need to stop equipping regular cops with enough arms to put down a Russian invasion, and instead equip them with the skills to defuse a tricky situation.  We have to make police unions accountable for their members, so “bad apples” don’t keep moving on to spoil new departments.  And we need to shift a whole lot of their budget to the police department’s natural partners, the services that aim to change things before they spill out onto the street and into the emergency rooms: mental health, social services, women’s clinics, housing inspectors, school counselors. Schools, period.

We also need to rethink what a cop looks like.  Not just the color of their skin, but the person under the uniform. Time after time, studies have shown that more female cops would help stop the brutal police response, that women cops are better at de-escalating violence rather than pushing it higher.  Women cops even have fewer citizen complaints against them.

Women are taught from birth to be aware of our vulnerability. Even a tall, muscular woman will automatically check her surroundings in a dark street, has learned how to carry keys as weapons, and will back away from a belligerent drunk in a bar.

So bring in women, and cops of color—which will in turn make the police an organization where women and people of color feel more welcome.  Make the police into peace officers, not a paramilitary.  Lock that equipment away, teach them how to defuse, de-escalate, and introduce a human link into a situation.

Like this cop answering a noise complaint:

Which ended up not with a shooting, but with a surprise guest:

Which in turn ended up as a national project, #HoopsNotCrime.

When the question of #DefundThePolice comes to your community, think a while about what it actually means.  Here’s the basic Wikipedia definition. “Defunding the police” doesn’t necessarily mean doing away with the police, but it does involve changing how we think about punishment.  It sound irresponsible, but when only 5% of police time is spent dealing with serious offenses, wouldn’t it be more sensible to assign those traffic violations and late-night noisy parties to someone who might have other tools for dealing with the trouble than just arrest?

The police are a major part of why Black Lives Matter. Maybe it’s time to look at what we can do about that.

The Bronze Pour

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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.

It never gets old

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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.)

 

 

 

 

Sara and Gerald Murphy: the art of the family

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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.

DEADLY Pub Day!

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Deadly Anniversaries comes out today!

(And congratulations, Ellen, Richard, and Pat—you’ve won the hardback!)

When the Great War began, in August of 1914, the British Army had about 250,000 regulars.  It took time to train new troops, and in the Kaiser’s first push, the Brits would have been hard put to hold fast, but within six weeks, 150,000 experienced Indian soldiers arrived.

But in the minds of every British officer was the memory of the Indian Mutiny, when the Sepoys rose up, triggering terrible slaughter on both sides. The final offense had been the tallow used to grease rifle cartridges, repugnant to Muslim and Hindu soldiers alike, but that was only the spark that lit a generation of accumulated tinder.

In the Great War, the British Army remembered.  Those Indian Army soldiers were desperately needed, and although they couldn’t do much about the climate in northern France, they did take care to consider and respect their actual needs.

Which meant that starting in December 2014, when a wounded Indian soldier was evacuated from the field hospital to longer-term care, he would wake up here:

I imagine most of them thought they were hallucinating.

The Brighton Pavilion was built in the late 18th century, but was turned into a mock-Moghul profusion of domes and minarets by one of the most prominent architects in London, John Nash. This was a place where a working-class Indian lad would feel at home, right? But as I said, Britain’s officers had learned the painful lessons, and they not only wouldn’t feed a wounded Hindu soldier beef, or put pork in front of a Muslim, they set up a series of individual kitchens for the various religions and gradations of caste. Muslims were given a space to pray facing Mecca, Sikhs had a gurdwara.  Muslims who died were taken to a nearby mosque, while the Hindus and Sikhs were taken to an actual burning ghat, built for them in the hills above Brighton.

When Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller asked me to write a story on the theme of “anniversaries,” I thought of all those men, dragged thousands of miles from home to fight for a country that hadn’t always shown them the utmost expect, and how vital they proved.

I wanted to tell a story for them.

The Illustrated Mrs Hudson

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The 2020 

“Mrs. Hudson’s Case”

Illustration Contest

My US publisher has managed to stick an extra carton of the galleys for Rivera Gold onto a truck for me, which means I can give them away–yay!

So let’s do this:

15 copies of the Riviera Gold ARC 

In a random drawing for those who enter the contest

(Winners, as planned earlier, get a signed hardback in June…

AND the ARC now!)

Riviera Gold is all about Mrs Hudson and what she did after The Murder of Mary Russell (Did you hear that the e-book is only $1.99? Click here for links.) So I thought it would be fun to revisit her first adventure, giving away a short story I wrote way back in 1997. Which has some intriguing insights into the landlady’s true character…

Here’s one of the early submissions:

Any illustration will do: collage, drawing, oil painting, a photo of her tea setting, a recipe for her rock cakes—whatever appears in the story is fair game. Scan it, send it, we’ll choose a few of the illustrations to make The Illustrated Mrs Hudson’s Case. And so it’s worth your while, 15 submissions will get an ARC, plus winners will get an ARC and a signed hardback of Riviera Gold in June. Sound good? Closes May 5, so:

Get art-ing! 

The story, with the contest instructions, are at the top of the page, here.

Happy Anniversary, Russell & Holmes

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On this day 99 years ago, two friends of ours were wed.

February 17, 1921

Marriage, to Sherlock Holmes?  He was the least marriageable man I knew.  On the other hand, we were already partners.  And having that piece of paper—that otherwise meaningless piece of paper—would undoubtedly ease such matters as border crossings, hotel rooms, and claiming one another’s body in the event of a fatal mishap.  Marriage would also keep me from the temptations of pure academia, a world that, especially for a woman, could become terribly enclosed.

Marriage—this marriage—would ensure that I was never bored.

So, it was a rational decision, a sensible choice for two intelligent and level-headed people, the obvious next step in our partnership.

* * *

The actual marriage proposal had come when my head was spinning (having been knocked unconscious, deliberately—by Holmes.) and his head was dripping wet, grease-clotted, and thoroughly scorched from the fiery, mid-Thames boat wreck that claimed the life of our most recent villainous opponent.  Miraculous survival, one’s own and of one’s most significant attachment, has a way of adding its own spin to the head.  Or perhaps it was just, as I mentioned, the concussion.  In any case, when he emerged from the filthy surface of the Thames, there followed an astonishing, unexpected, and remarkably… stimulating physical encounter, right there on the docks.  Namely, we kissed.

* * *

And there, dear reader, I married the only man who mattered in my life.

Reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of…well, perhaps not of God, but certainly of prowling cousins with shot-guns, we vowed that we knew of no impediment to our joining; we swore that we would love, comfort, honour, and keep, in sickness and health; and we entered into the state that was ordained for the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.

(Did I imagine it, that brief glance Holmes shot towards the portrait that hung beside the door, as the vows were being said?  I do not think I did.)

Our Welsh friend romped us through a nice brisk service, trimming away any references to obedience, skipping over the part with the rings (we’d both forgot about rings) and glossing over all mentions of children, Christ and the Church, or St Paul (indeed, pretty much the remainder of the Service.)  He fell to the temptation of acoustics and sang his portions of Psalm, although his voice was throttled down considerably from what he so clearly wanted.  At the end, Mrs Hudson was in tears, Dr Watson was bright pink, the vicar was beaming, and even Mycroft looked moved as he reached inside his breast pocket for a pen.

We hadn’t even been interrupted by gunfire.

* * ** * *

From “The Marriage of Mary Russell,” in Mary Russell’s War. If you want a signed

copy, you could ask Bookshop Santa Cruz to send you one.

The Past in the Present

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The threads running from past to the present have fascinated me since I was a grad student. Back then, my academic interest was on certain themes that could be traced from the pre-Israelite cultures and through the Hebrew Bible into the New Testament and beyond.

Of course, now I write fiction, and there’s only so many places in a mystery series that you can weave in Canaanite poems and imagery of the Divine. But there are other kinds of threads that run through stories—threads of theme, or secrets, or an event from the past.

I seem to use those last threads a lot.  In Locked Rooms, Russell’s memories of the 1906 earthquake, followed by her flawed memory of the 1914 motoring accident that killed her family, are still strongly binding her life together when she reaches San Francisco in 1925.

Not that she realizes it at first (since this is a tale of a woman slowly discovering that she has spent her life as an unreliable narrator) but her problem of now turns out to make sense only when she begins to trace it back to then.

And I’ve been thinking this month about The Art of Detection, a book that is generally listed with the Kate Martinelli stories, although it has one foot firmly in that same Russell & Holmes visit to San Francisco in 1925.

(Or does it? Maybe the Billie Birdsong case is an unpublished oddity from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle, following his own disgruntled visit to SF…)

(I’ll be writing a little more about Billie Birdsong in a few days.)

And of course, The Murder of Mary Russell.  I have to say, I had a load of fun with Mrs Hudson’s unexpectedly racy history. (You’ve seen Una Stubbs’ Mrs Hudson in Sherlock? Well, mine is closer to her interpretation of the landlady than the one developed by Rosalie Williams, who played opposite Jeremy Brett.)

 

 

 

 

 

(Which Mrs Hudson looks like she’s having a better time?)

And—for those of you who liked that book’s window into Mrs Hudson’s world—you may be pleased to find that she’s the central character in the next one.

In Riviera Gold, as in The Murder of Mary Russell, one of the threads that spins back into the past is a case of embezzlement committed by a man named Jack Prendergast, a year or two before Mrs Hudson was even born.  This crime led to a mutiny and shipwreck in 1855 (from the Conan Doyle story about the Gloria Scott), which in turn became a blackmail case that set a young Sherlock Holmes onto the path of being a consulting detective.  Everything is tied to the Prendergast crime: Baker Street, the Sherlock Holmes/Dr Watson partnership, his retirement to the Sussex Downs where he met Mary Russell….

And in Riviera Gold—which launches four months from today, HOORAY!—that same embezzlement surfaces again, the thread glimpsed through the events of the present.

I’ve had such a great time writing Riviera Gold, from researching it to chuckling over the mischievous deeds of old women.   At this point, I’m like a kid with a secret, clapping my hand over my mouth so as not to give things away.  I’m really looking forward to being able to share it with you, so we can talk about it at last.

Wouldn’t you say this lady has a secret?

Riviera Gold (you can read about it here) is available for pre-order, if you’d like to demonstrate your enthusiasm to my publishers.  Signed from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen—or get it from your local Independent bookshop, or Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle, or as CD or audio.

Tender is the Prose

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As part of my general research on the next Russell & Holmes novel, I re-read the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender is the Night.

And frankly, I found it very hard going.  Meandering plot, puzzling metaphors, characters distorted to fit into the roles he needs for them.

Start with his take on women.  The book is supposed to be about them—the girl who falls in love, the woman who goes insane—but even for a 1930s writer, he has a completely tin ear when it comes to how women actually work.  For example, here about the young (17 when we meet her) actress who falls in love with a married man:

Rosemary was from the middle of the middle class, catapulted by her mother onto the uncharted heights of Hollywood. Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world—they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.

Where does one start with such a statement? Were American women in fact unhappy about existing in a man’s world, or did they just shrug and get on with things? Is a good wife like a good courtesan? How does a person preserve her individuality through another person?
And later:

They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears. Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad.

Really?  So, girls—do we like to be told how to feel?  Or do most men like to believe we’re so childlike, we need to be led into such realization?

Then there are the sentences—dozens and dozens of them—that sound clever, and feel as if the author is proud of them, but are actually baffling.  Such as this, about Rosemary’s mother / stage manager:

One of her husbands had been a cavalry officer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard—by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at present was directed toward herself and saw the world through her eyes.

Huh?  Or when the man Rosemary wants to seduce first kisses her in a taxi, then turns her down:

Her face drooped with dismay and disappointment and Dick said automatically, “We’ll have to simply—” He stopped himself, followed her to the bed, sat down beside her while she wept. He was suddenly confused, not about the ethics of the matter, for the impossibility of it was sheerly indicated from all angles but simply confused, and for a moment his usual grace, the tensile strength of his balance, was absent.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” she sobbed. “It was just a forlorn hope.”

Should I know what the tensile strength of his balance means?  Would any young woman actually say forlorn hope?  Did he think it clever to insert, after a long interruption, the blithe phrase “To resume Rosemary’s point of view…”  Is there some reason why Rosemary is sitting on the beach trying to avoid talking to one group of people while admiring another, and then suddenly she’s out in the water with one of the swimmers? “Nicole” goes from the most stable person on the page to a complete raving lunatic.  Some characters we find sympathetic, then they turn loathsome—and vice versa with others.

I do realize that literary fiction tends to have different rules from genre storytelling, but please.

Anyone else out there have problems with some of the classics?