Laurie R. King

Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries

LAURIE'S NEWSLETTER

Passing It On

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I live in the hills, so when I go out, it’s rarely for just one stop. The other day my list of tasks included x-rays, fruit stand, and bookshop.

Obviously, Bookshop Santa Cruz came first, and it would only take a minute because I was picking up a pre-paid order.  But when I stopped at the pickup desk, I discovered that I’d accidentally double-ordered a book I’d missed when it first came out, and kept meaning to read.

Arsenic and Adobo, Mia Manansala

Still, these were the paperback edition, and returns are processed at a different desk, and anyway, I hate to mess my bookshop around when something is my fault. So I told myself I’d give one to somebody.

I got to the med clinic, tucked a copy of Arsenic and Adobo into my shoulder bag, and wandered down to the x-ray clinic.

Twenty or so pages into the story, my name was called. I followed the technician in her vivid purple scrubs, laid my things down on the table, sat for the x-rays, and was getting ready to go when the young woman nodded at the book and asked what I was reading. I told her I’d just started it, but it was a mystery novel about a Filipino family and their restaurant. She brightened up and told me she was Filipina and loved cooking, so she’d have to read it.

Problem solved. That second copy of Mia Manansala’s book had a home.

(Read about Arsenic and Adobo here—and try the recipes!)

Noblesse Oblige

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I’ve been putting together a book discussion guide for the Castle Shade book club kit (like the ones we did for Riviera Gold and Island of the Mad) and wanted to include a question about the idea of noblesse oblige.  So I did…but I have to wonder what kind of conversations that one will prompt.

Queen Marie of Romania

The phrase refers, of course, to the obligations inherent in being a noble.  Those born into the “upper” classes, whether aristocrats or royals, hold the power, but they also (speaking ideally, of course) hold the responsibility.

Without giving any spoilers, I can tell you that the idea permeates Castle Shade, for good and for bad.  In 1925, Romania was still a land of peasants and monarchy.  Its Queen (in many ways more ruler than the king) was a granddaughter of Victoria, raised to the idea of service.  She lived in mind-boggling luxury, yes, with palaces and jewels and servants for every need; she expected her people to literally bow and press her hand to their foreheads when she approached; she never doubted that even the nations’ rulers meeting to divide up Europe after the War would receive her and do as she commanded —and yet this same woman spent her War years nursing the sick and wounded, and did not retreat to England even when her young son died of typhoid as enemy troops approached.

In feudal times, the survival of a region depended on noblesse oblige.  If a duke or king felt no responsibility for his people, they wouldn’t make it when the next kingdom over invaded.  Over the centuries and millennia, boundaries have expanded, until now entire countries are looking at their neighbors and realizing that responsibilities reach beyond national identity.

If you’re reading this, you are almost certainly one of the world’s aristocracy, born into a degree of power and luxury that vast swaths of the world’s population can only begin to imagine.  If bombs are not falling on your head; if your children and neighbors are not wasting from malnutrition; if you need only flip a switch to push away the night; if your brother disappears into a prison you still feel he has rights—then you, like me, are one of our globe’s aristocrats.

So, is all that too much to inflict on a book club discussion?

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.

A Visit With Old Friends

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Last month I posted a couple of questions on Facebook—both the author page and the Beekeeper’s Apprentices group—wondering what people had been reading in the past year.  I wasn’t really surprised to find that many of you, like I, have been reaching for old friends.  In 2020, reading was heavily re-reading.

“I hang out with my literary friends instead,” one of you said.  Another put it, “rereading…is like paying a visit to an old friend in a time of isolation.”  “When I had no courage for new books and not much of an attention span, rereading Mary Russell’s adventures kept me sane.”

Courage is a good word for it.  I did read new books—I bought a whole lot of new books—but frankly, it’s only since the end of January that I’ve begun to pick up those that I know are going to be challenging, either mentally or spiritually.

Too many challenges in 2020.  Too much spiritual and mental battering, too much noir—where the hero probably loses, and the villain walks away unscathed—and not enough cozy—stories where the reader knows that things will be solved and the right people win, in the end.

Which may be why my re-reading also inclined toward humor.  Silly or dark, slapstick or subtle, humor has been a lifesaver.  Keeping Terry Pratchett, John Scalzi, Jodi Taylor, and Ben Aaronovitch on my night-stand let me sleep, secure in the conviction that smart, funny, and humane people are out there, and that those of us who love smart humor will prevail.

It’s been a long, dark twelve months, stupidly and unnecessarily long, and claustrophobically dark even for those of us who managed to get to 2021 without direct tragedy and loss. It’s a wound that will take time to heal.

And fiction helps.  The community of book-lovers helps.  Writers who make us grin and even laugh aloud help hugely, returning air to our lungs and perspective to our minds.

So this is a thank you, to all of you out there who kept in touch, who kept reading, who used my work to find community, find sanity, even used it to find inspiration for projects of your own.  My thanks to you all, let me know in the comments if you have recommendations for smart, funny, humane writers I may have missed—and I’ll end this with the sign-off I’ve been using on many emails over past months:

Keep safe, keep sane, keep reading.

The making of HRF Keating

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What makes a writer? How do skill, circumstances, and determination come together in a lifetime of shaping stories?

I’ve met a lot of fine writers, during my 27 years as a published author. One I am most grateful to have called a friend was H. R. F. Keating.

I met Harry and his wife Sheila in 1995, at a Scottsdale conference put together by our mutual friend Barbara Peters.  AZ Goes Classic (there was a book of the papers we presented, currently out of print, alas) was an amazing get together, where I met Mike Connelly, Harry Keating, Val McDermid—people I love and have worked with ever since.

Harry died nine years ago. I wrote a post about missing him, and about his amazing influence in both fiction and nonfiction, and about how I hate that he was never named Grand Master by MWA (the post, with a very brief reading list, is here). If you’ve never met his creations—Inspector Ghote, perhaps, or “Hard Detective” Harriet Martens, or perhaps his analyses of Golden Age Crime—please look out for him. As I say in that post:

His work, as his  person, is characterized by a gentle eccentricity and humor with an enduring  interest in the mystery as morality story.  However, as with the best  English crime fiction, his willingness to face the stark realities of the  murders he writes about means that even his more “cosy” books (and could a  title such as  Mrs. Craggs: Crimes Cleaned Up be seen as  anything but cosy?) often contain grim touches.  The Detective series  go further, into the frankly gritty, and he has ventured into the realm of  the thriller (The Dog It Was That Died) and the macabre (a number of  his short stories.)

Now his wife, whom I equally adore, has written a biography of Harry.

Some of you know Sheila Mitchell from various conferences, or from her audio books, or from performances you’ve seen (she toured a one-woman play about Dorothy L. Sayers that played at several conferences) but here, she offers a unique insider’s view of one of the most influential writers of the late 20th century.  It’s charming, it’s comprehensive, and it’s clear-eyed when it comes to the state of publishing in the 21st century.

I highly recommend that you order a copy from your local Indie, for a look through a partner-wife’s eyes at the making of a great writer and an even greater human being: here.

Yes: Black Lives Matter (2)

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“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.

Publication Day!

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HAPPY PUB DAY!

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!

**

Riviera Gold is available signed from Bookshop Santa Cruz and Poisoned Pen—or from your local Independent bookshop, Barnes & Noble/Nook, Amazon/Kindle, or pre-order CD and audio. Or these Indies 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.

Organizing the spines

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What do your shelves look like? Do you organize your books like this–

??

One particular blogger & Russell fan  (hi, Katie!) likes to look at the spines, although she does admit to a hitch:

It’s especially fun when a friend asks about a book: let me see where that is. Oh, yes, the cover is blue, but the spine might be red. Some series, like Laurie R. King’s excellent Mary Russell mysteries, are scattered all over the place.

I can only assume that Katie has a much better visual memory than I do.

(Read the rest of her Shelf Awareness post here.)

The many faces of Beekeeper

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When you have a book that’s been around for 25 years, especially if it’s the first in a gratifyingly long series, the publishers tend to dress it in a lot of different ways.  Funnily enough, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice didn’t strike the imagination of the in-house reader, who decided to pass on the paperback rights.  They put both Beekeeper and A Grave Talent up for bid, and Bantam Books bought the rights.  Those were given covers that were very different from their St Martins Press hardbacks, first in a bright mass market edition, and later in more subdued trade paperback.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

England gave Beekeeper its own faces—in hardback, then trade,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and now the Allison & Busby paperback.

And although there’s the occasional reversion to the earlier YA sensibilities–

they also manage designs that are simply classic.

So as we celebrate Beekeeper‘s 25th anniversary this year, this gorgeous one is the cover that’ll be around the halls of Bouchercon.

Califia’s Women

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Califia’s Daughters is one of the most unique, inventive, thought provoking, dark, disturbing, pseudo-violent, feminist-based, post-apocalyptic/dystopian novels I have read in a long time, if ever.  (Goodreads review)

I wrote Califia’s Daughters back in the 80s and 90s.  My original impetus for the story was, as I’ve said here before, to push back against Margaret Atwood’s dystopian vision of women who stand and watch their power fade away, without reacting. Those weren’t the women I knew.  Her women look at the threatened fertility of that society and let their money be taken, their individuality cropped, let themselves be made small, weak, and obedient.

I couldn’t help thinking that the women I knew would see that falling birth rate and say: okay, I have this power of reproduction, so what are you going to give me for it?

Also in the 80s and 90s, the idea of Eco-feminism was all the rage. The term was coined by a radical feminist French writer in a book called Feminism or Death (which pretty much says it all) but as time went on, the movement became less political and more imbued with California’s touchy-feely Gaia worship: if we do away with patriarchy, the earth will be healed and inequities banished.

Again: not so much the women I knew.

So maybe, somewhere in between? Women who were good and gentle stewards of the land, but also women who were greedy warlords?  Women for whom children were the center of their life, but also women who just wanted to beat the shit out of someone?

And sometimes, women who could that be both?

I’d be interested in what you think. If the male population were drastically reduced, would society change? Or would women step into the roles that are mostly occupied by men now, for good and for bad?

(If you’ve missed the past week or two of Califia posts, scroll down on Mutterings for some excerpts, and for earlier posts. The e-book seems to still beon offer for $1.99 through Bookshop Santa Cruz, Nook, and Kindle, though you’d like a signed paperback, Bookshop can get you one any time.

Threat or Promise? Califia’s Daughters (5)

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Any society must be stable and unchanging to survive—and yet, the society that does not change both dies and kills its more adventurous spirits, a little at a time. Sometimes a door looks like a wall.  Some days an opportunity presents itself as a threat.

I’m more of a Judith than a Dian, but I know people like Dian, and I can see the chafing caused when their gifts and needs don’t fit the culture they live in. It’s a blessing when a door opens to them.

Califia’s Daughters (5)
By “Leigh Richards” (Laurie R. King )

It was nearly dusk when Susanna burst through the door of the veranda where Judith was trying to rest, to deliver Jeri’s message that the wagons had cleared the last hill before the Valley entrance. Judith pushed her daughter gently back out the door and went to find Dian, only to meet her halfway to the house. The two women, walking shoulder to shoulder, came through the gate beneath the walnut tree and made their way down the once-paved road in the twilight. The noises of the night were starting up, the whir of crickets filling the Valley; the sun’s final rays were brushing the tips of the highest trees on the cave’s hillside. The night air lay sweet and dusty and warm around them. The dogs that flowed around the two women were attentive and glad for an evening out, knowing only that some form of excitement was in the air. Dian whistled them back from the millpond but let them run on ahead to the lights and cooking smells that waited on the other side of the bridge.

Culum alone stayed with Dian, walking at her hip so her left hand brushed his massive shoulders. It was their usual position, especially when something was up, as if physical contact was a necessary element in the partnership. Judith, glancing over at Dian’s expression and then down at Culum’s equally intent face, hid a smile. The dog would not move from Dian’s side all night. Unless his teeth were needed, she corrected herself, the smile fading. A hundred eighty pounds of muscle, teeth, and brain made for a weapon more effective than the bow in Dian’s other hand.

In the meadow, the lamps were lit and hung, the big boilers gurgling to themselves. Dian checked the defenses, adjusting the arrangements slightly to her satisfaction: a half-circle of women with Judith in the center, Dian and the other archers to the sides, the rifles above and behind. As she took up her own position to the right of the greeting committee, bow strung and arrow nocked, she wondered if the others were as conscious as she of the uncomfortable overtones of meeting here, in the ground where the messiest of slaughtering tasks were done. The echoes of pig squeals and the whish of knives over whetstones seemed to tremble in her ears.

Silence gathered and spread across the meadow. A huge orange moon raised its head over the protecting hills, lighting the road beyond the reach of the lamps. The women took up their positions, the dogs arrayed for maximum effect. The short wait began.

Suddenly the sound of harnesses and hooves rang through the still air. As they drew near, Dian was hit by a spasm of apprehension: they had made the wrong decision—they should have remained in hiding until these people declared themselves. Culum whined softly, searching for the enemy she was feeling; she nudged his side comfortingly with her knee and fought the urge to step back into the shadows. One of the women beside her had unconsciously moved until she was slightly in front of Judith, protecting her and the life she carried. The strange outriders were staying close to their wagons, although they could undoubtedly see the lighted welcome party ahead.

Dian moved into the center of her dogs, the better to control them. They were alert now, aware of why they were here at this strange gathering. They sat on their haunches, the five animals, and waited with their humans.

The wagons were only a hundred yards away when Culum reacted. Culum, who left Dian’s side only when commanded, who formed her other half, who had not disobeyed a command since he was six months old; Culum rose to his feet, hunch-shouldered and intent, staring at the first wagon as if he could see through its sides. His hackles bristled huge across his shoulders and down his spine, and Dian readied her bow: in a moment he would begin his war-croon, and then all hell would be loosed, but abruptly, with Dian’s warning shout nearly to her lips, his head came up, his ears pricked, and his ruff began to subside; his tail even waved experimentally. Dian told him to sit. He twitched one ear and ignored her—Culum ignored her. And then, to her utter disbelief, the dog set off at a brisk, swinging trot down the road and got as far as Judith before Dian found her voice. Her outraged command cracked through the air like a whip.

Culum stopped, looked over his shoulders at her, and slowly, reluctantly, settled down onto his haunches, giving an audible sigh as he did so. He sat with one eye on her, head cocked, deliberate patience in every line of his powerful body. He was humoring her, she saw with amazement, putting up with her human shortcomings. Okay, he was saying. She had the right to order him around, but in his opinion she was being very stupid. Dian, meeting his gaze, only half- heard the approaching wagons. She had trusted Culum with her life before this; she would trust him now.

“Okay, if you say so,” she told him. He stood with an air of satisfaction and trotted off eagerly to meet the strangers. Dian kept the other dogs where they were.

The first of the riders had come within hailing distance of the standing half-circle when her words of greeting were strangled by the sight of this huge animal trotting down the center of the road. Her horse shied and cribbed against the bit as Culum went past, but not until he neared the wagon did the rider reach with an oath for her rifle scabbard, then in the next instant draw back her hand and shout in an unnecessarily loud order to her people that nobody was to move.

Culum stared up at the now stationary wagon, completely ignoring the white-faced driver in his interest at what lay within. The woman nearly fell off her perch to the ground five feet below when Culum, tired of waiting, rose up easily onto his hind legs to rest his front paws on the driver’s seat, peering into the closed canvas interior behind her. Dian had a moment to wonder at the woman’s dedication to duty before a movement within shifted the wagon and caused Culum to draw back and thump down on all fours to the ground, looking up expectantly, tail wagging furiously. The wagon shifted again, and a low murmur came from within. Dian’s nocked arrow raised itself marginally, and in the trees around her, the fingers on four triggers tensed.

One arm lifted the flap, and the driver hastily moved aside. The top of a glossy black head of hair appeared, followed by a large booted foot, a trousered leg, and a pair of startlingly wide shoulders. Then the rest of the figure emerged, unfolding itself until it stood upright on the front of the wagon, where it raised a face to the armed women and the lights.

A face that was dark with stubble.

“Holy Mother of God,” someone whispered hoarsely into the shocked silence.  “It’s a man.”

To read the rest of the story of Dian, Judith, Kirsten and the others, you’ll need to get a copy of Califia’s Daughters. The e-book special of $1.99 ends today, Feb 1, through Bookshop Santa Cruz, B&N/Nook, and Amazon/Kindle. If you prefer a signed paperback edition, Bookshop can get you one.

 

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