Laurie R. King

Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries

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The Past in the Present

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

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

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

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

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

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 Maybe the Billie Birdsong case is an unpublished oddity from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle, following his own disgruntled visit to SF…)

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

Wouldn’t you say this lady has a secret?

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

Exotic Settings

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(Added note:for a few days, Dreaming Spies will be $2.99 on Nook and Kindle. in the US.)

I always find it interesting to look back at a book I’ve written and reflect on what it turned out to be about, and how it fits into the rest of the series.

While I’m actually writing the things, I’m far too focused on the story—making the plot work and teasing the characters into life—to think much about the larger picture. Then during the editing (Riviera Gold is currently in copyedit, no doubt receiving lots of small tweaks and queries) it’s again a matter of zeroing in on that story and making everything about it… more.

Only after it’s finished—sometimes long after—do I step back and notice links and themes, and how the books fit together in ways that (ahem) readers think I’ve done deliberately.

Such as setting.

Take three of the books set in exotic climes.  The Game started because I wanted to tell a story about India, where my husband had been born and raised.  I’ve spent some time there, and I tried to make the book reflect the flavor of country: strong colors, vivid events, a historical pull between the Indian people and the British raj that, in the 1920s, was beginning to come to the fore. The climate and the food are hot; the streets and the inhabitants are noisy and busy and bright; the place is a sensory overload.

Then there’s Dreaming Spies.  Several books intervened before it came along, but the story begins just as Russell and Holmes are leaving India, bound for Japan.  Dreaming Spies—the half that is set in Japan—was shaped around a hugely different society from India’s.  Intricate subtlety is the hallmark here, and although its social order is also on the brink of vast changes triggered by a relationship with the West, in Japan the moves are tight and deliberate, as the streets are quiet, the colors subdued, and the flavors of foods elusive on the tongue.  Russell found India overwhelming, but she finds Japan baffling, and suspects that deeper meaning lies just outside her perception.   The plot here is filled with layers, felt more than seen.  And when the case later follows Russell to home ground in Oxford, it still takes her a long time to see what is actually going on beneath the surface.

Island of the Mad is also set in two places—England and Venice—but it takes its flavor-notes from Venice.  Warm, friendly, welcoming to anyone with a full wallet, familiar to half the world…and at the same time, full of secret neighborhoods and invisible power-plays.  Like a cheerful public figure secretly going mad…  And that dichotomy permeates the book, where splashy rich Americans unknowingly rub shoulders with brutal Blackshirts, and the craziness of the Twenties touches the desperate madness of trapped women.

Riviera Gold takes place not too far from Island of the Mad—Russell takes a leisurely three week sail around the boot of Italy to the south of France.  1925 finds the Riviera just beginning its shift from winter resort to year-around home for the artistic set, and the thirty miles of coastline that Russell explores here runs the gamut from sun-baked beach picnics with children in the waves, to a dark confrontation with crime and world control.

So: upon reflection, I see a pattern.  Settings, for me, determine the flavor of the book—in all of them, but especially in those like The Game, Dreaming Spies, Island of the Mad—and soon, Riviera Gold.  Exotic places, with problems that are all too universal.  I’ll be posting various things about the four books over the next couple of weeks, and I just wanted you to know what is on my mind as I wait for the copyedit to hit my desk, and I reflect on the place of Riviera Gold among the Russell memoirs.

[Excerpts, discussion guides, buy links, and fun extras can be found on the book pages for The Game, Dreaming Spies, Island of the Mad, and Riviera Gold.]

The Rewrite

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Laurie King is not, as regular followers of this blog will know, a writer who outlines her books before she begins them.  Some people call this being a pantser (as in, by the seat of her…) but I refer to it as Organic, as opposed to the Organized outliner.

(In our writing manual Crime and Thriller Writing, my more Organized co-author and I came up with these terms after starting with more, shall we say, judgmental labels. I had to admit that there’s no point in alienating the outliners by calling them “anal”.)

At any rate, my brain doesn’t work by planning out a story before it starts. I’ll sometimes list a sequence of events, to keep an upcoming section in order, but when it gets more than a chapter or two into the future, I feel the fog descend, the blindfold tighten.

That means, the rewrite is where the novel is actually written.  A first draft is a short, meandering, half-developed heap of paper that no one but an experienced editor can make any sense out of.  Its main job, for writers like me, is to lay out the machinery of the plot, to set its unadorned and largely meaningless pieces in order and make sure that the events and people mesh.  The rewrite is when that….okay, call it an outline, even though it’s a 300-page one—is turned from a list of events involving half-developed characters into a full-blooded narrative with people we care about.

Again, some writers produce a first draft by throwing in everything including the kitchen sink, the cleaning supplies beneath it, and the dirty dishes waiting to go into the dishwasher.  I write a sparse first draft.  The oft-given rule of “Cut every third word” would leave me with short stories.  Instead, my second draft puts on maybe thirty percent of its original length, for a final version of 400-450 pages.

But I do cut.  And often, it hurts to put stuff into the Cuts folder.  Clever asides, interesting speculations, material that develops a back-story… chop.

I do always go back through that Cuts folder, to make sure there’s nothing there that’s really too good, too illuminating, too intriguing to leave out.  And I almost never find anything worth fighting to find a place for.

Every so often, I have a battle with my editor over cutting material.  Sometimes I hold out, and make only the briefest of compromises.  Other times I let them take the argument, because really, was Stephen King’s The Stand a better book once he succeeded in getting its massive cuts put back in?  I sure didn’t think so.  Sometimes editors are right.

But it also means I occasionally have material that can go into the supplemental pages.  I don’t know that I’ll have much from my Riviera Gold Cuts folder—certainly nothing like the vastly whittled-down Testimony that got pulled out of The Language of Bees (which, if you haven’t seen, is the second link here)—but it’s possible.

But if I end up with a scene where Russell dances the Charleston and I have to cut it, I promise to put it on the book’s page.  Just for you guys.

(Other blog posts about the craft of writing are here.)

Hitting SEND

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One of the most satisfying sounds of my earlier years was the rustle and thump of an envelope holding 300+ pages of manuscript as it dropped into the FedEx box.  Of course, now that contracts no longer specify paper copies, the physical thump has been replaced by a tap on an icon.

But it’s still satisfying. Deeply, joyously satisfying, this story that began with a throwaway line towards the end of one book (The Murder of Mary Russell)–

–and was then more or less ignored all through the next–

–but which then started to come to life at my last stop in a tour of Europe, when I arrived at my hotel to find this subtle indication that I was not in Romania any more:

And later looked out my window at this:

Then the next day, when I wandered down to gawk at the Casino–

–Mrs Hudson’s appreciation for Monte Carlo began to take shape, in what would become Riviera Gold.

That’s the rewrite I’ve just hit SEND on.  So although it’s far from finished, since editor and copy editor have yet to push things around, it’s currently off my desk and onto theirs. Which is a beautiful feeling, not least because I’ve been working 8-9 hour days on the thing for more weeks than I can remember, and I have laundry to do and heaps of things that need sorting.

And maybe I’ll even have a chance to see my family, other than through the bleary eyes of a writer on deadline.

Happy December to you, too!

(If you’d like to demonstrate your excitement about the book, it’s always great when my publisher can see pre-orders, from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen books or your local Indie or B&N or Amazon. Just in case you want to show them how much you’re looking forward to June 9…)

Tender is the Prose

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Write and rewrite

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[Sorry all, the rewrite workshop is the 29th, not the 22nd. Brain fever…]

Today I hit the (theoretical) 2/3 mark in the new Russell & Holmes novel!  Not that 201 pages is a novel–even 301 pages isn’t–but there’s a rhythm to a book that I get to know, and 200 is a good, solid mark.

I also want to let you know that there are still some seats left in the workshop I’m teaching on the rewrite process on June 22. I’ll be using sections of my own work, including this very Work In Progress.  If you or someone you know are interested in the rewrite stage, I’m in San Francisco on June 22—signup is here.

Halfway to a Russell…

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The last couple years of my writing life have been a bit like having my laptop set up in front of one of those machines that spits balls down the length of a cage at a person holding a bat.

It’s not impossible, to dodge, hit, or field the missiles and toss them back while trying to create a story, but it can be somewhat distracting. And I do find that  I can handle two or three interruptions in a morning and still go back to the words–although when it comes to four or five, eventually my brain says Hey, look, can we go do something else?

Which makes milestones (if you’ll pardon the confusion of metaphors here) all the more important, either when they’re off on the horizon, or when they’re reached, and falling behind.

Yesterday I hit one of those nice, round, if meaningless and deceptive milestones: the more or less halfway point of a theoretical first draft. My first drafts are a kind of expanded outline, whose purpose is to set up the machinery of the plot and to sketch in the characters.  A first draft is not a novel. Mine are rubbish, utterly unreadable for anyone but an experienced editor.  For this stage, I aim at 300 pages.  Since the final manuscript will be over 400 pages, it gives an idea of how very skeletal the story is in its early form.

(And incidentally, that doubling up of metaphorical imagery–baseballs and mile markers–is not a bad illustration of the difference between a clumsy first draft and a hammered-down final one.)

But: I now have 150 pages that I didn’t have at the beginning of March. Better yet, there are no conferences, Mystery Writers of America workshops, book festivals, or trips to New York coming at me from down the other end of the batting cage. Which means that with a touch of luck, I may be able to keep my head down and write.

Here’s hoping I don’t get knocked off my seat by anything thrown at me by the pitching machine of life.

Beginnings: a Kate Martinelli story

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Only five weeks after I’d hoped to finish it, I now have this:

Beginnings

A Kate Martinelli story by

Laurie R. King

Please note: story, not novel.  See the thickness of that stack of pages? This is a 115 page novella, not a full-sized book. I don’t have a pub date for it yet. But this is how it opens–yes, in Kate’s first person voice:

All stories begin.  A newborn’s wail, a doctor’s news, the scream of brakes on the road outside—with most stories, there’s a place where you can look back and say, that’swhere it started: where I met the guy, where I decided the life, where I took one turn and not the other.

And I heard once (probably from Lee, she tells me most of those things that stick in my brain) that a good story loops together its end with its opening.

I’ve been a homicide cop most of my life.  I know all about stories that are both an end and a beginning, because someone else’s end is where I generally come in.  For the victim’s family, that chapter of their lives opens with a 3 am ring on their phone or doorbell.  But this one I’m telling you about is my life, not my job—which means that I was on the receiving end of one of those moments, too.

Writing retreat

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So, day one of a very brief writing retreat: the good is that it’s gray and cool enough that I’m interested in staying indoors summoning words, at least until the sun comes out this afternoon.

The bad is that the house doesn’t seem to have a coffeemaker.

A writer’s hideaway

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I need to write. I have two short pieces and a lot of thinking to do, and it’s hard to put words on the screen or thoughts in order when life is its usual chaotic self. So I’ve come to the coast for a few days, to write, here:

I’ll let you know how it turns out…