Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries
As part of the 20th anniversary Laurie Loves Libraries extravaganza, I’m packing my bags for a Pacific Northwest Literary storm, due to hit WA tomorrow.
That’s right, Thursday, March 14: 2:00 at the Renton library; 4:40 on the Seattle-Bainbridge Island ferry; 7:00 at the library in Bremerton, continuing Friday at 10:00 in Poulsbo.
Whew!
Surely you can make it to one of those?
Cambridge is a town well experienced in repelling would-be boarders. I have never managed to drive directly to any goal in this town, even when I’ve had a GPS, or SatNav as they’re known here. This time I had only some scribbled notes from the map on my new iPad, and although on my second attempt I did spot the road I wanted, I was already past it. Oh well, thinks I, I’ll just turn around somewhere and come back.
An hour later, I found the road again.
Fortunately, once there, I could abandon the car and turn myself over to the insider tracking device of my friend Michelle Spring, who nonchalantly led an unerring way to the store I would have found only after forty minutes of casting about and begging bicycle-mounting students and scurrying shoppers for help.
But find this mythic mirage of a store she did, and we entered the welcoming doors of Heffer’s (now a part of the Blackwells chain, which sensibly kept the name) for their Bodies in the Bookshop event. Sixty three crime writers gathered to sell books and chat with readers and each other, comparing covers, talking about what’s next, catching up on the lives of colleagues we see a whole lot less often than people who work in offices see their colleagues. Just another typical example of the community of crime writers.
Then on Friday I took the tube into London, to drop in and sign books and to meet the writer whose book is the subject of discussion over at the Virtual Book Club this month, China Miėville. I adored The City and The City, and am having a great time with The Kraken, a whole different kind of book but equally stunning in its originality.
The afternoon I treated myself with a quick visit to the Museum of London, one of my very favorite museums, and then over to the Marylebone library, a stone’s throw from 221b Baker Street, which appropriately has a collection of Holmes material. I slanted my talk towards Holmes, although they seemed happy to talk about anything–and to my surprise, nearly half the audience were Americans, on holiday. The librarians were surprised, but pleased that I brought my own audience…
There followed drinks and dinner at the pub around the corner, the Allsop Arms, where the Sherlock Holmes society of London originally met, and remains a place for conviviality.
Another community
(Apologies–I have a new machine that is proving shy about interacting with the blog program, so this post, from Thursday, is just finding its way to light. Laurie King Inc: the place to come for cutting edge technological wizardry.)
…
Romance is gone from the world.
A journey that should be recognized with drama, import, or even just a brief acknowledgment of its globe-spanning scope has become an exercise in hauling easily damaged and irritatingly vocal freight from here to there. Food and entertainment choices betray a desire, not to nourish or amuse, but to make the freight units shut up.
However, not even United airlines can change the essential loveliness and humanity of England. I am here, and until I commit myself again to the gentle ministrations of the air industry, I am free of their cold and corporate embrace.
Today I drive from my family’s house in the western edges of London up to Cambridge, a journey of ninety minutes or nine hours, depending on the humour of the M25, London’s–not ring road, which was long swallowed by suburbs, but the city’s “orbital”, a massive, six-lane Saturn’s ring of a road that takes nothing but a hesitant granny or a stray nail to reduce it to a parking lot ten or twenty miles long.
What was I saying? No! Adventure is not dead in the age of modern travel…
At the end of this (insh’Allah) will be the city on the Cam, and the treasure palace of Heffer’s Books which, under the excellent guidance of Richard Reynolds, holds an annual salon of crime called Bodies in the Bookshop.
A grand way to start off the God of the Hive Tour, UK edition!
So, have you enjoyed our little break from All Things Laurie? Or did going cold turkey disturb your world too much?
I hadn’t actually intended quite such a long break without Muttering at you, but it took me nearly a month after getting home from Portugal/Morocco/France/England/book tour to get my life in some kind of order and the suitcases back in the closet.
And since then, I’ve been writing.
In two weeks the book has gone from the 70 pages of typescript that I did in Lisbon to a bit over 200 pages. I’m beginning the last third of the first draft, grabbing at all the threads and trying to braid them into a story that makes some kind of sense.
This is a Russell book, my third in a row. [Pause for cheers.] I don’t normally like to do the same characters two years in a row, far less three, but my publishers asked me if I’d mind, and although I did in a way, in another way I didn’t.
Because it would force me to do something different. [Pause for murmur of consternation.]
I’ve only repeated one year’s characters the following year a couple of times, and for one of those repeats (The Moor and O Jerusalem) the second one was already written, so it was just a rewrite. With the other pair, The Game and Locked Rooms, they were miles apart—in setting (ageless India versus Prohibition-era San Francisco), flavor (exotic romp v. dark and internal), voice (strictly first person for The Game, several chapters of alternate POVs with Locked Rooms) and, well, everything. That made writing two in a row less noticeable.
Than came The Language of Bees, and because I thought people would throw things at me if I made them wait two years for the continuation of the tale, I dove into The God of the Hive. Which would have been fine except my publisher really wanted another one, and I was faced with the problem of how to live with these characters for a third year without doing something really vicious to them. I mean, I haven’t reached the point yet of Conan Doyle, pushing his protagonist off the Reichenbach Falls, but I could begin to feel the urge stirring in the back of my mind.
So I threw my mind a bone and told it to go fetch.
That bone was the idea of comedy.
Now, I think of the Russell and Holmes stories as somewhat comic to begin with. The books delight in an undercurrent of silliness, while solemnly playing the Sherlockian game of treating it all as God’s Honest Truth. What Dorothy Sayers called a county cricket match at Lords, where outright burlesque can only spoil it.
Except that with the next book, I’m taking a step closer to outright burlesque. A rather large step.
It’s called Pirate King, and yes, it’s a reference to The Pirates of Penzance. Russell gets dragged into the world of Twenties film, with a company making a movie about a movie about the Gilbert & Sullivan comic opera. And although I don’t talk about what I’m doing with a book until I’ve finished the first draft, I will admit that the book has a talking parrot. And a number of unlikely people falling in love.
However, I’m determined to drive through the first draft before I leave for my British God of the Hive tour (watch for details here) in less than four weeks, which means spending my days at work. Normally with a first draft I set myself a goal of 1500 words in a day, trying for 2000 but not worrying too much if it’s only 1250. The past two weeks I’ve managed 2500 most days, and four or five days it’s been 3000. Which amounts to either five hours of feverish typing or seven hours or more labored word production.
So you will, perhaps, excuse me for being a little preoccupied. I do intend to return here more regularly very soon, starting a series of posts called “Writing Tools.”
Thanks for hanging in there, and if you’re curious about what’s going on day to day, I generally fling a quick post onto Facebook several times a week.
Happy summer reading!
I started writing this post in London on Sunday morning, in a family kitchen, listening to the click of the heating system sending warmth towards the radiators. This is a location achieved after one local French train, one high-speed French train, one highly entertaining Paris taxi ride (French/Algerian rap music and a warning about the gypsy pickpocket girls at the gare), one Eurostar chunnel ride (during most of which I slept, although I was awake enough to regret not getting a first class seat), a tube ride on the Piccadilly line (packed with teenagers—I’d forgotten it was the weekend), and a local London bus. From pre-dawn in a village in France, listening to birdsong while the dark gave up its secrets, to evening in a garden in London, drinking tea and listening to the Polish neighbors at their barbecue, twelve hours and 500 miles.
And tonight, I am scheduled to be on a flight to New York. About which, as we have just been strongly reminded, we take nothing for granted.
(UPDATE: Yes, the plane made it, I made it, and I am writing the rest of this in NY.)
However, if everything goes as planned, tomorrow I will be on another train, heading north out of New York towards Boston. Tomorrow morning, people will open their computers and see a newsletter, reminding them that it is launch day for The God of the Hive. Tomorrow, bookstores will display that luscious cover in a prominent place, people will rush in and snatch it off the shelves (one hopes, paying for it before they leave) and dive inside. And tomorrow night, I will stand up in Boston’s public library and celebrate the publication of the book.
I love this book. I am happy with it, and proud of everything about it, from my own writing to the way the characters came to life, from the title we eventually settled on to the artwork on the cover. It has a couple of the characters I’ve most enjoyed writing, both protagonist and antagonist, and it has what I think is perhaps my best-ever ending.
And lest the other new additions to the family feel slighted, this week’s drawing is of ALL THE RUSSELL PAPERBACKS. That’s right, a copy of all nine trade-sized paperbacks, to go to someone who opens the e-newsletter we send out tomorrow.
This week, which is Eighteen of the Twenty Weeks of Buzz, we’ll announce the winner of the Illuminated MyStory contest (after some discussion—there was a question about the validity of some of the votes) and we’ll open voting on the Russellscape contest (one vote per person, please!)
Next week we’ll be posting a readers’ guide to The God of the Hive—although it’s rich in spoilers, so you might want to wait until you’ve read the book.
Thanks to everyone who has participated in these past eighteen weeks, and stick with us for the final two: prizes and surprises to come!
In the early Twenties, BBC (the radio variety) used the phrase “London calling” as its call sign, informing the world that London was still up and active. During the War, the phrase took on overtones that were both poignant and pugnacious: We’re still here, damn your eyes!
I like London, despite there being far too many people, and even its major streets retain their pre-Great Fire (1666) twisting incomprehensibility, when London was a warren of alleyways. Monday was particularly bad, and I seemed incapable of figuring out where I stood even with a map in hand. My publisher’s street—a mews—is not on the London A to Z (pronounced Zed, if you please) which doesn’t help. And Charing Cross tube stop is a spider’s web of exits, so one stands in the main hall and studies the options of Strand (north) and Strand (south) when what one wants is Charing Cross (library.)
But I found it, if ten minutes late for my meeting with Meg Gardiner, who was polite enough to claim that even after years in England she still gets lost in town. I didn’t believe her, but we ducked into the Garrick for a quick drink and had a nice chat about covers, titles, offspring, and British plumbing.
Then into the Charing Cross library, where Nicola had set out civilized bottles of both red and white wine, and little cups of pretzels. She couldn’t do anything about the street noise, other than shut the windows, but the gathered audience sweltered gently and not a one of them dozed off—or if they did, they kept their eyes open.
I was happy to find that the British tendency to reticence was in abeyance, and when Q&A time came, they came up with some good remarks. And not one of them asked what I, an American, thought I was doing writing about England.
Last night’s event was set up by the estimable Lizzie Hayes of Mystery Women. Started in the 80s by my friends Michelle Spring (with whom I have a panel in Cambridge next Monday) and Kate Charles, it’s now run by Lizzie (whose mother is very ill, good thoughts in their direction, please) and Ayo Onatade, and on Monday three of the group joined us: Sara Townsend (MW’s London events manager,) author Mary Andrea Clarke, and Kirsty Long. Mystery Women is a good group, you should think about joining them—especially if you’d like to keep up on UK events. The annual St Hilda’s mystery conference is heavily attended by members of the group, and if you ever find yourself in Oxford of an August, I urge you to register for that conference, if for no other reason than the..I won’t say pleasure, but experience of living in the dorms. It was at a St Hilda’s conference that my punting style was given the classification “stately,” meaning “she’s slow but she doesn’t plant the boat in the nettle-covered banks.”
Sometimes one gets a chance to revisit old friends. No, this is not a paean to Facebook, but mention of a short story, long out of print, that’s going to take another stroll across the stage in a collection of Sherlockiana being published next month.
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes contains a short story I wrote some years ago, “Mrs Hudson’s Case,” about–you got it–a case Mrs Hudson solves. There are a lot of other great stories there, judging by the list of authors. I’m not sure when in September the book comes out, but if you’d like to pre order a copy and have me sign it, drop a line to Crossroads Books or order one from Capitola Bookcafe, and I’ll sign it when I’m there.
Which won’t be in the first part of September, because I’ll be in the UK–doing events for The Language of Bees! Hooray and Huzzah, and all that. Details will be in the upcoming newsletter. Which I will write as soon as I finish the non-Green Man’s rewrite.
Hey Brits, on the first of September, you’ll have your very own Language of Bees–and shortly thereafter, a tour:
That’s right, the pub date is 1 September, and although we’re setting up events now, I can say that I’ll be at the Reading Festival of Crime on Sept 12, talking about Murder in Mind with Sophie Hannah, Steven Booth, Jane Hill and R J Ellory.
If you are a librarian, or you would like to suggest a library for me to do an event, post a comment with their information and we’ll have the publishers add them to the list being considered.
See you then!
Here are some photos of my event at Vroman’s in Pasadena, thanks to Meredith Taylor and and Bob & Jan Winning. (Click on each photo to enlarge.)
One of the odder sides of being a writer in modern times is the way a solitary, dreamy individual is periodically required to become a travelling salesman.
Once a year, more or less, the person who spends her working days in clothing that resembles pajamas folds up her laptop, scowls at her hair, retrieves her jackets from the dry cleaner’s, and walks out the door with her suitcase. Her eyes, fixed myopically on a screen for the past ten months, rise to take in a roomful of people. She clears her throat, long dedicated to indistinct muttering in the privacy of her writing quarters, and gives forth rational speech: She is a writer on the road.
And the really odd thing about it? The book she’s talking about to one group of readers after another is one she hasn’t thought about in months. She opens the book to read an excerpt, and wonders who wrote it. When question time comes, she has to work to recall the plot and characters, and struggles to answer questions about a writing process that has faded into the mists of time.
That’s right: she has moved on, like an adolescent with a new crush.
The new book is what’s exciting, not the old one. The characters she’s exploring, whom cruel fate and Random House has ripped her away from in order to go on this book tour—that is where her mind has been dwelling, not on last year’s tired love. It’s a wrench to have to pull away from the source of her fascination to make sensible conversation about a project that is just so last year.
Once upon a time, writers went on speaking tours, not book tours. Arthur Conan Doyle circled the globe talking about Spiritualism, and sold a lot of books along the way. Mark Twain pocketed considerable speakers’ fees in his day. And some writers still do.
Most of us, however, go on book tour, and while we are grateful for the willingness of our publishers to back the effort financially, it’s definitely a mixed feeling. If nothing else, it’s been a long time since flying has been anything like fun.
However, having recently survived a book tour, I am reminded that touring is A Good Thing. Not just for the selling of books—which is in fact highly debatable, although I’m not going to delve into that question here—but for the writer lurking within that travelling salesman.
For one thing, it forces her to make a break. Yes, there are a few writers who plug in their laptops on the plane and in their hotel rooms and pound out their daily requirement, and all I can say about these freaks of nature is that either their publishers give them a very different kind of book tour, or they’re using their writing as an escape. When a book tour means an airport and a new bed every day, regular nights of three to five hours’ sleep, strange meals, and stranger conversations, anything most writers produce during a tour is best deleted unread.
However, it does mean that when the author is home again, when her laundry is done and her jackets are back at their second home at the dry cleaner’s, when she has caught up on sleep and the mail and finally picks up her work in progress, she sees it with new eyes. Any lingering assumptions or delusions about the book that she might have had before the tour are wiped away, and she can look at her prose and her plot as coldly as if she had put it away in a drawer for a couple of years.
For giving an author a basis for a cold, clear look at what she’s been writing, there’s nothing like two or three weeks of author tour.
But the tour is helpful as well because, somewhere in the back of her exhausted mind, the new book is hanging on by its fingernails. A random question about, say, The Language of Bees makes a tiny ping in that portion of the brain where The Green Man resides. And on the way back to the hotel that night, or the next morning on the plane, that ping makes itself heard. What if, instead of approaching the problem this way, Russell comes at it that way instead? And that remark tonight by the woman in the hat, although it had been about something else entirely—doesn’t that also raise some interesting suggestions, which make one of the characters in The Green Man stir, and look for a new shape…
Of course, two weeks on a sandy beach would probably have the same result, permitting the author to turn the shape of her WIP around in her mind as she sipped from a cold glass and worked on her tan. Perhaps it might even be a more efficient way of getting there, since it wouldn’t involve submitting her to a complete cycle in the psychic tumble dryer.
However, since few publishers can be talked into providing their authors with two weeks on a sandy beach, the author tour will have to do the job.
So thanks, to everyone who came out during my recent tour and gave me someone to talk to, and cleared the ground for the next book…