Book talk Archives - Laurie R. King

What IS in a Name, Anyway?

August 20, 2023 by Laurie King 7 Comments

Because what I do for a living often seems like magic—I come up with an idea and *POOF* you have the book in your hand—I thought I might do a series of blog posts about the actual process. (Though rest assured—it’s still pretty magical.)

How do we writers name our babies? The ones on the page, that is, not the ones in diapers. How do I get to a title?

Looking back at this book’s history—I tend to email myself every day’s work, which means I have the record at hand—it started under the enticing title of:

Russell 18

That was during the first part of 2022, when the story was little more than notes and ideas that would either bounce around my brain for a while and then lose their momentum and quietly roll into the corner, or that would bounce around and hit another idea with a spark, and they’d join up like a pair of soap bubbles (a terrible mix of metaphors here, but you get the idea) and wait for another idea to bounce up and join them. By the time I actually began writing, in early December (the process I talked about last week in The Beginning) I knew some key things about it—which I’m not really going to talk about until we get a little closer to the book’s actual date, but I did know enough to give it a working title:

The Image Lamp

I’d thought of Zoetrope, since one of those is central to the book, but 1) since “zoetrope” is pretty firmly associated with Francis Ford Coppola, and 2) I’m not convinced everyone knows exactly what it is, Image Lamp would do. But I went back and forth over the word “lamp” (even though, strictly, it is more accurate than “lantern”) because if felt, er, lumpy, and a little nasal. By the end of January, I was calling it:

The Image Lantern

Bugles and fireworks, right? Well, my editor wasn’t convinced.

Here are some exchanges that took place between mid-December and the first of February, when I was told they absolutely HAD to have a title to put into the catalogue. The HER below is my editor at Penguin Random House:

(12/12/22) HER: As for title, I do like the idea of using the zoetrope for inspiration, but THE IMAGE LAMP doesn’t feel very dynamic

(1/27) ME: Since the whole story is constructed around the zoetrope that Russell finds, I really haven’t been able to come up with a better title than Image Lamp or Lantern. Sorry.

You want to have a conversation and see what we can brainstorm?

(1/31/23) HER:

THE LADY IN THE LANTERN?

THE LADY AND THE LANTERN?

I like LANTERN better than LAMP, I think

(1/31) ME: …except the title makes no sense, because there’s no lady in the lantern.

Also I’m not keen on “lady”.

(2/1) HER:

SPINNING LANTERNS

THE SPINNING LANTERN

(2/1) ME: What do you think of the word flickering?

FLICKERING IMAGES

THE FLICKERING LANTERN

…Though the Art Dept would have to take care with the font on the cover so it didn’t look like a Fucking Lantern.

(2/2) She and I decide to have a conversation, for brainstorming the title. From that, we come up with a list:

I decide I like the idea of a dance.

I tell her I could tweak the description a little to play it up.

Then comes the question: with or without the THE?

We agree we prefer it with the article.

(2/2) HER: We’re going to float THE LANTERN’S DANCE to the team.

(2/2) HER: Big thumbs up for The Lantern’s Dance!

Simple as that, right? Which just leaves me the minor matter of finishing the book…

Next episode in the saga of Lantern’s Dance: Feeling the Draft(s)

You can pre-order the end product of all these debates, The Lantern’s Dance, from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed); Poisoned Pen Books (signed); Bookshop.org (supporting Indie booksellers); Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

Lantern’s Dance: The Beginning

August 13, 2023 by Laurie King 5 Comments

Because what I do for a living often seems like magic—I come up with an idea and *POOF* you have the book in your hand—I thought I might do a series of (spoiler-free!) blog posts about the actual process. Though rest assured—it’s still pretty magical.

As with many of my books, The Lantern’s Dance began with words on a contract—a two-book contract, fairly standard for me, signed in the spring of 2021, that said:

Last September, 2022, I published (and was busy promoting) “Work #1: UNTITLED COLD CASE,” aka the first in a new series with Raquel Laing. But after Back to the Garden, my publisher and I had agreed, I would return to Russell & Holmes for #18.

When you’re a new author, your publisher wants more than a number after the series name, but after 30 years, there’s a certain amount of trust, both in my abilities and in the interests of readers. For this one, as usual for a series novel, my editor left it up to me to conjure up an idea that a book could be built around.

Perhaps because I’d enjoyed doing so in Back to the Garden (and in others, such as Murder of Mary Russell) I decided it would have two separate timelines. And because certain questions about one of my main characters had been niggling at me for a long time—been niggling at every reader of Arthur Conan Doyle, for that matter—I decided I’d like to explore the past of one Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

As it happened, life gave me plenty of time to mull things over, since I broke my wrist in early November and typing was difficult.

But that was okay (well, it was okay for the book) because I could do loads of the kind of hopping-around research this sort of story entails, from Paris to India to Cairo, from cryptograms to whale-oil lamps to zoetropes. And then there were the Vernet family….

Without giving away precisely how all those ideas came together in my fevered brain (for that, you’d need the actual book, unavailable until February) I can say that I envisioned an intriguing old journal that incorporated a series of linked images. And, as part of the way to build that theme, Russell finds, as the description now up on my web page says:

…a tarnished silver lamp with a rotating shade and dozens of strips of paper. On each strip is a sequence of fifteen progressing figures, which dance into motion when the shade is spun: an antique, charming, yet highly sophisticated form of zoetrope.

Deeper down in the same crate is what Russell suspects to be an old journal, although it is written in a nearly impenetrable code language. Intrigued…she sets about deciphering the intricate cryptograph. There appear to be fifteen entries. Each, she slowly discovers, is built around an image.

Here’s the period when that vague idea is taking shape:

December 4: I have barely 3000 words of the story written, mostly in the journal’s entries. I won’t be able to type easily, two-handed, for another two or three weeks.

December 7: I have a conversation with my editor about the book. She likes what I tell her, and asks for “progress materials”—it’s in the contract.

December 12: I send her a page and a half of plot description and the first four journal entries. That works for her (and, also nice, triggers their sending me a check) and I hunker down to work.

December 14: 4,014 words

January 1: 7,532 words

February 1: 34,400 words

March 1: 47,821 words

On April 1, I send her my first draft: 58,947 words, some 220 pages of typescript. Ridiculously small for a novel, even by my first-draft standards. But she and I know that I tend to write short for the first draft, and we have faith this malnourished creature will flesh itself out.

Next time: naming the baby.

***

You can pre-order The Lantern’s Dance from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed);

Poisoned Pen Books (signed); Bookshop.org (supporting Indie booksellers); Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

Hitting “SEND”

April 11, 2023 by Laurie King 1 Comment

I hit the SEND button–wahoo! First draft, hence short, untidy, and incomplete…but it’s sent, out into the editorial world.

Now I wait, and see what she thinks.

(*sound of chewing fingernails**)

I think I’ll reward the newsletter subscribers with the first page this weekend. Or if not reward, at least give them something to talk about. (If you don’t get The Buzz, you can sign up here.)

The Business of Writing: The Editor (1)

February 27, 2023 by Laurie King 1 Comment

Part of February’s month-long celebration of A Grave Talent, the Edgar-winning first novel about SFPD Inspector Kate Martinelli that started a writing career.

I wrote a few days ago about my beloved first agent, Linda Allen, the woman who got me started as a writer. The agent is the person who knows the industry, who knows what house might be looking for this kind of book, knows how much to ask and when to push for more. The agent is the writer’s primary cheering section—and only partly because they’re getting 15% of the royalties.

Not much money, for this first contract, but such pride!

But what about The Editor? The Editor is the person who buys a writer’s book, edits it, shepherds it through the publication process, fights for attention from Sales. The Editor is the primary reader, indispensable when it comes to improving the book. The Editor can be madly supportive, wildly enthusiastic, can bleed with failures and buy champagne for triumphs—even though, unlike the agent, The Editor is always and primarily an employee of the publishing house.

My first editor was Ruth Cavin, may untold blessings be heaped upon her. Ruth bought A Grave Talent, for the Thomas Dunne imprint at St. Martins Press, and when it was in production, asked me if I had anything else…and thus brought Russell & Holmes into the world. She and I started our relationship via the Post Office, graduating to faxes when I entered that exciting world a few years later—and then burst into email when our technological prowess had reached that advanced state.

Her faxed note with an email address.

Ruth left us a dozen years ago, but wherever you find gray-haired mystery writers, you find fellow admirers of Ruth.

As I wrote, in 2011:

Yesterday morning, news reached me that the woman who had picked me from a pile of obscurity had died. 92 year-old Ruth Cavin, the legendary Ruth, who started her career at the age of sixty and overnight seized the heart of the publishing industry; whose eye went to the essence of a book’s strengths—and weaknesses; who held court at conferences by claiming a table at the bar, cigarette and drink to hand, while attendees came and paid homage; who made her writers feel loved even as her editorial pencil left them bleeding.

Ruth, publishing’s grandmother, the kind of woman you just knew had A History, the kind of woman who would toss off a remark that made you do a double take, because she looked far too innocent to have said that. The kind of woman who could be a lady and have a wicked sense of humor.

The kind of woman we need more of, and now have one less of.

Blessings, Ruth. I can just hear that great laugh of yours, when St. Peter grins at you from the pearly gates and says, “Of course you can smoke here, for God’s sake! Would you like a drink as well? And not to hurry you, but once you’re settled in, we’ve got all these great young writers…”

Read about A Grave Talent (with order links), see the other Martinellis,

or order a signed copy.

Passing It On

July 18, 2022 by Laurie King 1 Comment

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

May 31, 2021 by Laurie King 6 Comments

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

March 2, 2021 by Laurie King 15 Comments

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

September 17, 2020 by Laurie King 8 Comments

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 20^th century. It’s charming, it’s comprehensive, and it’s clear-eyed when it comes to the state of publishing in the 21^st 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)

June 23, 2020 by Laurie King 10 Comments

“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!

June 9, 2020 by Laurie King 8 Comments

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.