writing Archives - Laurie R. King

The Business of Writing: The Editor (2)

February 28, 2023 by Laurie King 2 Comments

Last day of February, the last of February’s posts celebrating

30 years of A Grave Talent.

About a year after Grave Talent came out in 1993, St. Martins Press published The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. Two months later, in April, 1994, Grave Talent won the Edgar award for Best First Novel. Nonetheless, the sub-editor in charge of the SMP paperback division decided they didn’t want to keep the paperback rights for this new, mid-list author, so they put them up for sale. There was not so much of an auction as a “best-by” date, for any houses that might want to take a chance on them. Any interested houses had a tough time even finding the books.

Kate Miciak, at Bantam books, was interested. She was so interested that she got into her car and drove all over New Jersey and Connecticut in search of copies (this was 1994, long before Jeff Bezos took over the world.) She found them, she read them, she bid, and voilà, I was a Bantam AND St Martins author.

The original hardcover rights for A Grave Talent had sold for an advance of $3,000,

$3,000 meant our old farmhouse now had central heating!

and Beekeeper’s Apprentice for not much more. But because of the potential Kate saw in the two books—the potential she saw in me, one very new author—Bantam handed over $18,000 for the right to publish Grave Talent for ten years, and $29,500 for Beekeeper’s Apprentice.

This was actual money. This made it Not-Laurie’s-Hobby, but an income.

Bantam put Grave Talent front and center in an enormous Summer Reading promotion, built around an Edward Gorey illustration (and if you haven’t entered my drawing for the t-shirt, which closes midnight tonight, Feb 28, you can find the signup here).

A year later, they did the same for Beekeeper. (Yes, I have a t-shirt of that campaign, too, ready for next year’s 30^th anniversary.) And both did so well in building my numbers that one Friday afternoon a few months later, I had a call from my agent to say that St Martins had decided to retain the paperback rights going forward, wasn’t that good?

And it was, really. It always creates difficulties for an author when their backlist and their new hardbacks are from different publishers. I knew this. And yet…

Bantam really made an effort with the promo…

On Monday, I had my agent call my editor and tell her that I really, really would prefer to keep things as they were. To be clear here, my contract stated that the decision was ultimately theirs, not mine. And to be equally clear, turning down this offer would have repercussions. But my editor, as I’ve said, was a gem among women, and she did not want me to be unhappy. So she passed the word on to Kate—who, I later learned, had spent a very depressed weekend at the thought of explaining to her bosses why she’d dedicated so many of Bantam’s marketing dollars on promoting me—and after Kate had picked herself up off the floor, I stayed with my two divided houses.

St Martins Press hardback, Bantam Books paperback: first of many covers.

A few years after that, I moved over to Bantam for both hard and soft, and have been with them ever since. Kate retired a few years ago, and she’s always been notoriously shy about having her photograph taken or published, so I won’t show you what she looks like.

But I’ve been blessed in my editors, from Ruth to Kate to Hilary now. Three women with heart, and tenacity, and the sharp eye to what makes a writer better. When I was named Grand Master last year, only one of my editors was at the dinner, but the other two were definitely there at the table with us, hoisting their champagne.

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

or order a signed copy.

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.

The Art of the Review

February 18, 2023 by Laurie King Leave a 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.

One of the things I had fun with in writing A Grave Talent was crafting a series of reviews of the work of Eva Vaughn, the artist at the center of the story. It’s a specialized language, that of magazines like ARTnews and Art in America: puzzling, arrogant, and at times amusing (and not deliberately.) I also needed it to give insight to what she was doing—insights that my cop protagonist wouldn’t have noticed—and beyond that, to give a hint of what’s coming, both in the revelations about her past and in the plot as it unfurls.

Her images are classically simple: a man, a woman, some children, a kitchen. Landscape is background, allegorical in its overtones but secondary to the humans who dominate all her work. The figures are generally unposed, or informally so, and so intimately known as to embarrass the viewer.

Aside from that, it is difficult to reduce the Eva Vaughn style to mere description, even to say that she belongs to one school or another. The lesbian lovers of Quiet are caught in a shaft of light from a window, two fresh bodies pinned into the still, silent moment of a Vermeer,

Vermeer, The Lacemaker

a suspension of movement before life sweeps in again to animate and discomfit. Her farm laborers—Strawberry Fields, Three P.M., and Green Beans— rival Van Gogh for lumpen grittiness. The surface beauty (how seldom does a critic use that word in a review!) of Cas, Asleep could have come from Bouguereau’s brush,

Bouguereau, Le Secret

and the voluptuous pleasure of the woman’s sprawl could be an early Renoir, but whence comes the vague sense of unease? Is there menace in the shadow that falls across the bed, or is it merely the drapes? Is that a man’s shoe in the corner, or the arm of a chair? Is the scarlet stain a part of the multicolored bed cover, or something more sinister? Is Cas actually asleep? Or does she lie there, murdered in her bed?

This is not an isolated fling of imagination in viewing Eva Vaughn’s work, for emotions are her forte, particularly the dark and disconcerting ones.

Dark and disconcerting, indeed.

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

or order a signed copy.

The Author Photo: a work in progress

February 14, 2023 by Laurie King 4 Comments

Part of February’s celebration of A Grave Talent, the Edgar-winning first novel that started a writing career.

If you have ever tried to take a good picture of yourself—not just a grinning selfie with friends but the kind of photo that says “thoughtful, intelligent person with a trace of humor and wit”—well, all I can say is, it’s a lot cheaper to try it now than it was when every click of the camera cost money.

I had a friend who took nature photographs, and they were nice, so when St Martins Press asked me for my very first author photo, I thought, Well, she has a camera. So we took a few photos, and one of me at the blank wall of the house wasn’t completely awful, so there it went, onto the cover flap of A Grave Talent.

I didn’t quite realize that converting our color shot into black and white would make it look as if I was standing in a lineup, so for the next one, I asked the photographer who’d taken my daughter’s high school photos. And ended up with something that looked rather like a high school photo. (Don’t you love those 80s glasses?)

Next came a photographer who arranged to meet me in San Francisco for some location shots, and told me not to worry, he’d touch up the chin. I later discovered he told every one of his clients this, even the size 2 women. (Men with full beards maybe got out of it.)

At some point I graduated to color photos, and did a photo shoot with a crew of three—photographer, assistant, and makeup person—that took up a huge amount of the day, made a sore place on my cheek where the makeup brush had tried its hardest to get rid of a mole, and left me with a stiff face the rest of the day (and a lot of curious glances) when I had to rush off and pick up the kids from school with foundation and powder and mascara and the lot. This one I couldn’t find a copy of, but if you spot it in one of your books, stick it into the comments.

Then, my daughter had a friend who was setting up a photographic business, Red Bat, so she was next. I liked hers a lot.

(She took a few with the cat, as well, which I didn’t use because he didn’t look terribly happy with the entire-grab-and-clicking-lady routine…)

There have been others, but the one I use now, by Josh Edelson, still looks like me, just with different glasses. I’ll probably keep that one for a while.

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

or order a signed copy.

The Business of Writing: Your Friend, The Agent

February 11, 2023 by Laurie King 9 Comments

Part of the 30-year anniversary celebration of A Grave Talent.

Like most first novelists, I had no clue about how to run my life as a business.

My vanity projects, e-book version.

In 1993, the only people who did self-publishing were the desperate souls who just HAD to have a volume to put in the hands of family and friends. The publishers who would do this for them were called “vanity” presses, which shows the scorn with which “real” published writers held them.

At the time, there were (as memory provides) only two actual, New York publishing houses that accepted manuscripts from the writer herself, rather than through an agent. These unsolicited manuscripts were called “over the transom” submissions, meaning that you had to (figuratively, at least) climb up and thrust your manuscript into the little window over their firmly shut door, listening to it thump down on the floor with a whole load of similar thick envelopes.

A transom.

A junior editor described to me the way publishers dealt with them (those houses that didn’t automatically stamp them with RETURN TO SENDER.) Every few months, on a Friday night, the editorial assistants (all of whom wanted to grow up and become real editors with the budget to buy actual books) would send out for pizza and beer and sit around the storage closet with piles of thick manila envelopes, and start to read. Some manuscripts got a fair try, and got passed on to The Editor. Others would either have a typo that irritated the baby editor, or was not to their taste, or would have the bad luck to show up towards the end of the evening. Those rejects would be thrust back for RETURN TO SENDER with a printed “Thanks-but-no-thanks” slip. (Or just be tossed, to save the cost of postage, and “Oops sorry I guess we lost it.”)

Very occasionally, like the girl in the soda fountain who became a star, the stars would align, and the envelope would make its was to an Editor, who nine times out of ten would write a personalized “Good job, not for us” rejection note.

Those that I sent in myself got rejected. Or “lost”…

…and THEN rejected. An agent was clearly the way to go. Agents held the key to that locked door. But how did I get one of them?

As I said in an interview a few years ago (2015)—

How did you get your first literary agent?

I looked in the back of Writer’s Market, back in 1987, and found five agencies in San Francisco. (I didn’t believe in New York. Still not too sure about it…) I wrote to each of them, sending a couple of chapters of the two books I’d finished. Agency one said their client list was full up. The second said they liked the one but not the other. Number three said they liked the other, but not the one. Number four said they’d be happy to read the books if I’d send them $385 for each. And the fifth was Linda Allen, who liked the books, thought they needed work, and ended up representing me until her retirement last year.

Or, as I put it in my Really Long Autobiography, Linda was—

The first professional to look at my work and see it as—well, my work.

She’s also been a friend all these years, although we didn’t really bond until she came to England for the 1995 Bouchercon in Nottingham, and stayed with us, visiting nearby Blenheim Palace

And venturing into cold, wet, windy Dartmoor, helping my two kids and me research The Moor.

Agent and author, hard at work.

(I nearly lost her in the fog, but fortunately, she heard me calling….)

She was a fairly new agency then herself, and the partnership went through some really great years, with this simple, small beginning.

She’s retired now, but I talked with her the other day, and she remembers how thrilled she was at the sale to St Martins Press.

A contract. An actual contract!

And how much did I get from that first book? Well, more than the £25 Arthur Conan Doyle got for his first story, but in modern terms, maybe about the same. But hey, I was in business!

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

or order a signed copy.

When Intellectuals Read Crime

February 10, 2023 by Laurie King 2 Comments

Part of February’s month-long celebration of A Grave Talent.

A writer tosses books out into the world without much clue about where they will wash up or whose hands they will end up in. Naturally, this is especially true with a first book. What, people who don’t know me will read it? Wow.

(Personal note from the publisher. Common Knowledge was a new journal then, from Duke University, whose articles still “challenge the ways we think about scholarship and its relevance to humanity”.)

With A Grave Talent, one of those who picked up the book was a gentleman named Richard Rorty. A philosopher who taught at Princeton, Wellesley, and Stanford, won a MacArthur fellowship, wrote books with titles like Consequences of Pragmatism, Essays on Heidegger, and What’s the Use of Truth?, and developed the ideas of antirepresentationalism, Ironism, and Epistemological behaviorism (and no, I have no idea what any of those are)—this gent took time out of his Big Important Philosophical Ideas writing to send in a little review to Common Knowledge about my little book:

(Click on the image to read it.)

I particularly love the way he hedges his bets so thoroughly. Granted, there were other fictional Californian lesbian cops out there, but as fields go, that one is fairly small.

Still, thanks, RR!

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

or order a signed copy.

The Fans

February 6, 2023 by Laurie King 4 Comments

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

In addition to actual, print reviews, my first book brought letters from people from all over who liked A Grave Talent enough to go to the trouble of writing me about it, buying a stamp, and finding an address that might reach me. Who knew?

They came in from all over, and not just the USofA.

They were written on embossed cards, postcards, scratch pads, or—high tech in 1993—faxes.

Most of them got the title right.

As for where to find me, well, that could be anywhere (though the publisher was a pretty sure bet.)

I got letters–FAN letters!– from actual booksellers!

Some letters were from people who seemed awfully…committed?

Nowadays, the vast majority of messages from readers comes electronically, in blog comments, social media posts, or just through the web site. But some still drop into my PO Box…and if you’ve written me there in the past couple of years, and I didn’t answer, I will, some day, I promise.

Especially if you get my titles right.

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

order a signed copy.

Starting Anew

August 30, 2022 by Laurie King 54 Comments

[Note, please, that in one week, Back to the Garden will be on the shelves–in the USA, at any rate. You can find a long excerpt here. ]

I turn 70 this year. The world is literally burning around us, I’ve had some energy-draining health issues, and there are books more than one series that I really really want to write before I become too decrepit to figure out what’s going on with those characters I love but have left on the shelf, bemoaning their abandonment.

So isn’t it…irresponsible of me to turn my back on Kate Martinelli and Harris Stuyvesant and Rae Newborn and the rest? Certainly the fans of those characters are justified in grumbling.

Still, I’ve flitted between fictional worlds from the beginning. My first fiction was a stab at SciFi, left half-finished to spend a couple books with Russell & Holmes, before moving from 20s England to the modern world of Kate Martinelli (which became the first one in print.) For most of my career, I have alternated—a Russell or two, a Martinelli or a standalone, two Stuyvesant & Grey books—because I hated living with one set of characters for too many years in a row.

(It’s no accident that Garment of Shadows, in which our heroine Mary Russell wakes with injuries so severe she has amnesia, comes after an unbroken string of three other Russell & Holmes novels plus a novella. When I realized the pattern, I pointed out to my editor that while it was nice to have a popular series, if I didn’t take a break from those two, one of them was going to wake up dead…)

But readers love the others—at pretty much every event I do, someone asks when Kate Martinelli is coming back. And I love them too, so I did write and self-pub a novella three years ago (“Beginnings.”) However, when I talked to my editor about a new Martinelli novel, she didn’t say no, but she did gently point out that while loyalty was nice, a series that tries to start up after a nearly 20-year gap does make for a marketing challenge.

But “Beginnings” did remind me that I liked writing about my own time and place. And with Covid shutting things down, it would be a while before I could travel for research. Plus, there were some other things about “Beginnings” that I enjoyed, such as the dual time line of Kate’s own personal cold case. And I’d always wanted to do a book set in the 60s or 70s.

So…

Enter Raquel Laing. Of Kate Martinelli’s world, but only connected to her through their mutual partner, Al Hawkin.

Still, it’s going to be a series. You never know what other SFPD Inspector is going to wander through in future days.

Find my upcoming events here.

You can order a signed copy from Poisoned Pen or Bookshop Santa Cruz, or unsigned from your local bookshop, Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle.

When Surf City was the Murder Capital

August 26, 2022 by Laurie King 9 Comments

Santa Cruz, California, is a quiet town even now. In the 1970s, it was a community of retirees, Italian fishermen, and people associated with the brand-new University of California. It was (and is) a beach town that attracts year-round surfers and summer visitors to the beach and Boardwalk.

John Linley Frazier

In October, 1970, in the hills south of town, a resident named John Linley Frazier bound and murdered an eye surgeon, his wife and secretary, and the couple’s two children, in an attempt to usher in World War III.

Herbert Mullin

Two years later, in four short months between October 1972 and February 1973, another local resident, Herbert Mullin, brutally murdered 13 people: a girl hitchhiking, a priest in his confessional, a man outside his home, a couple he knew. A woman and her two young sons. Four teenagers camping in Henry Cowell state park. (I’d camped there myself, the previous summer. Alone.) He was caught and arrested when a neighbor of his last victim spotted his license plate.

And yet the deaths continued. Not because the police had the wrong man, but because in May, 1972, Edmund Kemper—a wannabee cop who’d been turned down because he was 6’ 9”—had turned from giving girl hitchhikers rides to abducting, raping, and dismembering them. One pair of girls, then a 15 year old who had missed her bus to dance class, an 18 year old student, another pair of girls—ending with his mother and her friend in the spring of 1973.

Edmund Kemper

Kemper phoned the police to turn himself in—although when they recognized his familiar voice, at first they didn’t believe him.

Both men went undetected, primarily because there seemed to be no pattern in the victims, who were all over the place in age, sex, profession. And yet, pattern there was.

Under the impetus of these and other multiple killers of the time, the FBI started up a Behavioral Analysis Unit, interviewing convicted serial killers in search of patterns and setting up lines of communication between local jurisdictions. Those developments, in addition to profiling, DNA, crime scene analysis, nation-wide databases, and other investigation techniques, mean that instead of the more than 180 US serial killers estimated to be operating in the 1980s, there are now probably fewer than 20.

One of the men mentioned in Back to the Garden is Joseph DeAngelo. A cop and investigator during the early 1970s, he turned from investigating burglaries to committing them. Soon he escalated to rape, then murder, tormenting his surviving victims with mocking letters and phone calls. His last murder was in 1986, although the cruel phone calls continued until 2001. Slowly, the FBI and far-flung Californian jurisdictions put information together, narrowed suspects, and finally identified his DNA—in 2018.

DeAngelo remains in prison. Frazier committed suicide in 2009. Herbert Mullin died last week, on August 18. Edmund Kemper is still alive, at a prison medical facility in Vacaville, where he records books for the blind.

And Santa Cruz, “Surf City,” tries to remain as quiet a town as possible.

In Back to the Garden, published September 6, SFPD Inspector Raquel Laing hunts for traces of a serial killer of the 1970s. Excerpt here. Order signed copies from Poisoned Pen or Bookshop Santa Cruz, or unsigned from your local bookshop, Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle.

(Photos thanks to Wikipedia.)

Writing the Past: Free Love, Thumbing Rides, and Other Incomprehensible Habits

August 19, 2022 by Laurie King 5 Comments

People think of Laurie King as a writer of historical mysteries, especially the 1920s, a time of short skirts, fast cars, and that exciting new tech, radio.

Back to the Garden is set more recently than the 20s. It has two timelines: one now, the other flashing back to the 1970s. In 1972, a main character, Rob Gardener, comes home from Vietnam; in 1975, another character goes up to Rob’s Oregon commune to tell him of his grandfather’s death; and in 1979, the commune Rob started up in his inherited California home hosts a rock festival.

And while it’s hard to think of times that many of us actually remember as being “historical,” in fact, four decades ago make for a foreign country indeed.

It should be a simple task, for an author to describe a life she has lived through. Communes and long skirts, folk rock and organic gardens, VW vans and cannabis growing in hidden corners.

But even to someone who was there—and as the joke goes, does actually remember it—parts of the time are hard to believe.

Take “free love.” I was too busy (and yes, naïve) for a complicated social life, but I thought nothing of people who slept with anyone around. After all, the Pill was a thing, and herpes and AIDS didn’t hit the headlines until the 80s, so sharing bodily fluids was just natural, right?

But talk about naïve: during this era, in a time and place that two different serial murderers were at work, solitary women would walk up to a freeway on-ramp and put out their thumb.

I often did, hitching rides from the Greyhound bus stop after a weekend with my boyfriend, heading to the community college where I had classes and a job. Amazingly, I only had one problem, when a guy in a pickup drove off with my backpack in the back—and he later dropped it off at the bank whose checkbook he found in the pockets.

Now, the Internet would scream out the dangers, but then, I was blissfully unaware. I had no television, my radio was mostly tuned to classical, and I can’t remember anyone talking about the murders going on around us.

“The past is a foreign country,” as the writer says. I’ve been known to argue that the past can be more mirror than foreign land. But sometimes?

Sometimes the habits of the past can be utterly incomprehensible.