…because in the publishing world, yes, these things do help.
Making Sense of It (the edit)
As I’ve said any number of times, my first drafts are awful, more like expanded outlines than an actual novel. Mostly, they’re a way to confirm the machinery of the plot before I buckle down to craft a sensible narrative out of contradictory notes, half-baked characterizations, and half-seen sub-plots. (No modesty here: they really are that bad.) In other words, there’s a lot of editing that goes into making a book out of it.
And because it’s REALLY tough to edit at your own work, I depend on the skill and good will of my publishers, who are willing to:
- Read the VERY rough first draft without instantly canceling my contract (editor)
- Read a (hopefully) improved second draft (editor, art department)
- Read a “final” draft (editor, marketing, publicity, copyeditor)
- Read the copyedited pages (the poor souls inflicted with the task of transcribing the mess for typesetting)
- Read the proof pages (in-house reads followed by more poor souls having to incorporate various peoples’ remarks, questions, typo notes, etc etc)
After which the book goes public, and various other people send in notes and objections and places where we all missed untrimmed plot snippets, repetitions, and eyes of the wrong color, some of which have to be jammed in at the very last instant before the presses start running.
Some writers of series novels have a “bible” reminding them of the things that they’ve said before. Mine is not that organized, but the publisher does have a Style Sheet that transfers from one book to the next, so that I only need to explain once that in the Russell books, it’s finger-nail and school-teacher but ash tray and bedsheet; that Mrs, Mr, and Dr have no full stop (period) after them; and that the possessive of Holmes is not Holmes’s but Holmes’.
Individual copyeditors also have styles. Sometimes I get a remarkably detailed plot-line, page after page of what exactly happens when. Other times it’s a sort of index with every proper name and its first appearance in the book.
But the key element of any story is the back-and-forth with my editor. And although now, houses tend to use e-edits—
—and I certainly know how to do them, I’m old-school enough to value the dialogue that comes with an actual on-the-dead-tree edit, whether with a copyeditor—
—or the editor herself. Because there’s nothing like seeing notes like this to let you know you’ve done the right thing:
Meeting the characters
I’m working my way through the final proof pages of Castle Shade (out in three months—hooray!)
…which means reading every word aloud, watching for mistakes and, more important, listening for oddities. I can only manage 50 or 60 pages a day, but I am finding small errors on nearly half the pages, even though it’s been edited and copyedited by several people. And although you’d think it’s irritating, seeing how much has got past us all, in fact it’s deeply satisfying, like baking out the impurities.
I’m also seeing the characters again, in their final forms, and remembering when I first encountered—for example—Queen Marie of Romania, seen here in the castle where the book is set, and wearing the pearls that play a role in the story:
And her youngest daughter, the Princess Ileana (who has the most charming accent):
These are two of the true-life characters in Castle Shade–like last year’s Riviera Gold had Lillie Langtry:
I hope you enjoy getting to know Romania’s queen and princess. Mary Russell sure did!
Castle Shade, out June 8, 2021, here.
Order a copy signed from Bookshop Santa Cruz and Poisoned Pen, or from your local Indie bookshop, or Barnes & Noble or Amazon.
The Senses and Riviera Gold
A recent discussion about my next contract (and how long it would be before I could jaunt off to Paris, sigh…) had me reflecting on how dependent I am on the use of the senses to provide what writers call the “telling detail.”
I have a scene in Castle Shade (no, I’m not going to give you a spoiler here) where all Russell’s senses—the taste of new grapes, the smell of the gardener, the cool dapple of shade on her skin, the sight of Holmes’ long fingers and the cat blinking in the sun—come together in a flash of what she knows is going to be one of those lingering, vivid, Proustian memories we all have. (Although of course, this being a mystery, the scene also contains a clue.)
Thinking about it, after the conversation with my editor and re-reading that scene in the copyedit, I realized that I tend to be sparing in my use of sensory information, saving it for moments when a smell or taste can underscore some element of the story. That element may be plot, or a character’s mood or deeper nature. Unexpected details—jarring, troubling—can be used to undermine the security a reader had up to that point, and suggest that all is not as it seems. Sensory detail can even foreshadow a larger world, as in the beginning of Riviera Gold, when Mrs Hudson is a young woman arriving at a ball—
The warm air smelled of honey.
The air outside had been sharp with the usual London stinks of horse dung and coal-smoke and rain, making the Duke’s townhouse a welcoming refuge. Granted, by the end of the night the pleasure would be reversed, with exhausted, footsore dancers stumbling away from the smell of sweat and the stifling miasma of women’s perfumes and men’s hair-oil. But for now, drifting from portico to cloak-room, hallway to the ballroom itself, all was promise and sparkle and the sweet aroma of beeswax candles.
—since many readers of Riviera Gold are quite aware that in the world of Mary Russell, honey means the beekeeper, Sherlock Holmes, who in that scene lies some years in the future.
When Russell wakes in her Riviera hotel, crisp linen sheets against her skin and the rhythmic sound of a gardener’s rake on gravel assure her (and us) that she’s in a place of pampered luxury. The odors of salt water and jasmine, the sounds of birdsong, rustling palm fronds, and the music of sailboat rigging in the distance places us on the shoreline of Monaco, while the smell of hot leaves with the drone of cicadas makes the hill Russell is climbing feel even steeper and more exposed to the sun. When the cloy of death in Mrs Hudson’s home is replaced by the sharp odors of Jeyes Fluid, sunshine, and lemon—the reader’s lungs feel cleared as well.
But sensory detail is tricky, and should be used sparingly. If s sensation is not universal, the writer needs to provide hints: without the sunshine and the lemon, would most 21st century readers know what Jeyes Fluid evokes, or what emotional reaction they should feel at a Charlie Parker record? It also depends on placement: sand between one’s toes brings up the beach, yes—but does the reader instantly know if the character is enjoying it, or finding it a source of considerable irritation? It has to be deft: if I can’t find THE exact sensation that provides a missing element, maybe it’s better to go on without it? And it had to be the right timing: if the plot is moving along briskly, now is not the time to veer into any but the briefest of sensory reflections.
There is nothing like sensory input to provide “the telling detail”—a small thing that casts light on everything around it. Walking into a room that smells of furniture polish and cigars instantly tells us that we’re in some kind of a men’s club, in a way that a lengthy description of the furniture and lighting cannot. And warm air that smells of honey—to a woman with Sherlock Holmes lying in her future—can carry with it more weight than simply the presence of expensive Victorian candles.
So I’m curious. Was there any particular “telling detail” that caught your mind’s eye in Riviera Gold?
Fired up, thanks.
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)
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
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
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
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!
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.