Laurie R. King

Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries

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The Senses and Riviera Gold

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A recent discussion about my next contract (and how long it would be before I could jaunt off to Paris, sigh…) had me reflecting on how dependent I am on the use of the senses to provide what writers call the “telling detail.”

I have a scene in Castle Shade (no, I’m not going to give you a spoiler here) where all Russell’s senses—the taste of new grapes, the smell of the gardener, the cool dapple of shade on her skin, the sight of Holmes’ long fingers and the cat blinking in the sun—come together in a flash of what she knows is going to be one of those lingering, vivid, Proustian memories we all have.  (Although of course, this being a mystery, the scene also contains a clue.)

Thinking about it, after the conversation with my editor and re-reading that scene in the copyedit, I realized that I tend to be sparing in my use of sensory information, saving it for moments when a smell or taste can underscore some element of the story.  That element may be plot, or a character’s mood or deeper nature.  Unexpected details—jarring, troubling—can be used to undermine the security a reader had up to that point, and suggest that all is not as it seems.  Sensory detail can even foreshadow a larger world, as in the beginning of Riviera Gold, when Mrs Hudson is a young woman arriving at a ball—

The warm air smelled of honey.

The air outside had been sharp with the usual London stinks of horse dung and coal-smoke and rain, making the Duke’s townhouse a welcoming refuge.  Granted, by the end of the night the pleasure would be reversed, with exhausted, footsore dancers stumbling away from the smell of sweat and the stifling miasma of women’s perfumes and men’s hair-oil.  But for now, drifting from portico to cloak-room, hallway to the ballroom itself, all was promise and sparkle and the sweet aroma of beeswax candles.

—since many readers of Riviera Gold are quite aware that in the world of Mary Russell, honey means the beekeeper, Sherlock Holmes, who in that scene lies some years in the future.

When Russell wakes in her Riviera hotel, crisp linen sheets against her skin and the rhythmic sound of a gardener’s rake on gravel assure her (and us) that she’s in a place of pampered luxury.  The odors of salt water and jasmine, the sounds of birdsong, rustling palm fronds, and the music of sailboat rigging in the distance places us on the shoreline of Monaco, while the smell of hot leaves with the drone of cicadas makes the hill Russell is climbing feel even steeper and more exposed to the sun.  When the cloy of death in Mrs Hudson’s home is replaced by the sharp odors of Jeyes Fluid, sunshine, and lemon—the reader’s lungs feel cleared as well.

 

But sensory detail is tricky, and should be used sparingly.  If s sensation is not universal, the writer needs to provide hints: without the sunshine and the lemon, would most 21st century readers know what Jeyes Fluid evokes, or what emotional reaction they should feel at a Charlie Parker record?  It also depends on placement: sand between one’s toes brings up the beach, yes—but does the reader instantly know if the character is enjoying it, or finding it a source of considerable irritation?  It has to be deft: if I can’t find THE exact sensation that provides a missing element, maybe it’s better to go on without it?  And it had to be the right timing: if the plot is moving along briskly, now is not the time to veer into any but the briefest of sensory reflections.

There is nothing like sensory input to provide “the telling detail”—a small thing that casts light on everything around it.  Walking into a room that smells of furniture polish and cigars instantly tells us that we’re in some kind of a men’s club, in a way that a lengthy description of the furniture and lighting cannot.  And warm air that smells of honey—to a woman with Sherlock Holmes lying in her future—can carry with it more weight than simply the presence of expensive Victorian candles.

So I’m curious. Was there any particular “telling detail” that caught your mind’s eye in Riviera Gold?

The Bronze Pour

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One of the joys of writing crime stories is the wild variety of research projects that come along. In Riviera Gold, that includes bronze casting.  And what do you know—there’s a foundry right here in Santa Cruz.

Sean Monaghan and Courtney Scruggs of Bronze Works made me welcome, let me poke around, and invited me to a pour. They even went over my story and didn’t laugh at it (at least, not loud enough for me to hear.)

Here’s what Russell sees in Riviera Gold, with what I saw in Santa Cruz. (Rafe is the sculptor she meets at the house of Sara and Gerald Murphy, M. Ferrant is the owner of the foundry).

***

First, the masonry oven at the back was opened and the hot moulds, empty now of their wax, were transferred to the battered trough in the centre of the room.

While Rafe loaded the oven with a new set of moulds, the other two worked at the trough covering the waiting mouths with small squares of tin…

… and pouring sand from the buckets around their bases.

What followed was a dance between three men and a lot of deadly machinery. First, clamps from the device overhead, lifting the rough, white-hot crucible free of the flames. The young man skimmed the slag off the top with a long-handled iron rod with a half-circle at its end. Casual blobs of thousand-degree metal were knocked to the floor, inches from ill-protected legs, as the chain lowered the glowing stone bucket into the embrace of one of those Medieval torture instruments.

Monsieur Ferrant locked it into place. His side of this pouring contraption had two arms, allowing him to steer the crucible and control its stream.

“Hoop,” he called, and the clamped pot rose, moved, and hovered over the row of plaster mouths. “Là,” he said, and a miniature river of white-hot lava disappeared into an upraised mouth.

Moving down the row of forms, bronze filled one cup, then the next.

The angle increased with the emptying of the crucible, until again came “Hoop” and the pair emptied the crucible’s dregs into a shallow metal tray, then reversed the process with carrying frame and the tongs. The crucible disappeared back inside the furnace.

The slabs of bronze that had been pre-heating along the top were laid gently in.

Meanwhile, the forms were cooling with amazing rapidity, going from white-yellow…

to dull red to barely rose.

While the crucible sat in its nest of flames, slowly melting its new ingots, Rafe began to work the plaster shapes out of the trough and lay them to one side.

The men drank long draughts of liquid—it turned out to be small beer—and resumed their gauntlets. The oven was unloaded, the sand nestled in around these, the tallest of the pieces—but when Rafe moved to assume his handle of the pouring shanks, the older man shook his head and gestured at his assistant. The sculptor protested, but the foundry owner was adamant—and when time came to pour these, the tallest of the day’s works, I could see why. Not only were the young man’s arms nearly ten inches further off the ground than Rafe’s, but his muscles were like iron, boosting the full crucible to chest level with an ease that made my arms ache just to watch.

The pour ended, the furnace shut down, the crucible was scraped out. I was surprised to find how quickly the liquid metal set: already, Rafe was trading his leather apron and goggles for a chisel and mallet, chipping experimentally at one of the earliest moulds filled. He took care not to rest his hand on the surface, and used the chisel handle to shift the piece around. A rough shape emerged, choked with white plaster and wrapped in the octopus- sprues, but one could see the outlines of the sculpture beneath. He then propped it up to bash enthusiastically into its centre, pausing a few times to shake out hunks of broken-up core.

When he had finished, he carried his proto-sculpture in one gauntleted hand along the rope line for the admiration of all—taking care to pull it back from any out-stretching fingers. But when Rafe came to Picasso, he held the piece out as a man might display a new-born son. The Spaniard bent over it, his finger sketching a line some inches above its surface, then reached out to deliver a hearty slap on Rafe’s biceps.

***

You can read more, two weeks from today on the Riviera Gold publication day. In the meantime, you can also see more “Background Research” videos for Riviera Gold on my YouTube Channel.

Riviera Gold (here) comes out June 9, and is available signed from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen—or from your local Independent bookshop, or Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle, or CD or audio.

And—the following excellent Indie bookshops 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.

It never gets old

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I’ve had a lot of my own books hit my hands. With 28 novels and dozens of books containing my shorter contribution, I’ve received a lot of hardbacks with my name on the cover.

But in case you’re wondering, no: it never gets old. I still open the box or envelope and pull the weight of it out with a thrill. Still run my hands over the dust jacket to feel the matte texture or the gloss sheen. Still admire the cover that I’ve been looking at, digitally and on stacks of ARCs, for the better part of a year. Still open it to check on the design of the title page and the look of the dedication and the crisp sharp print on the page.

What I don’t do is settle down to read it. Some writers do, but not me, for that way lies madness, because the moment I begin to read, I spot my first error, my first clunky phrase, my first missed opportunity for some clever plot point or clue….

Other than that, no, it never gets old. And I always take that first copy and write, just inside the flap, the words Author’s first copy. I add the date, and I sign it. That copy then goes into the file box stuffed with all the notes, printouts, articles, maps, and photos I used during the writing. It often contains an ARC, if I managed to hang onto one, as well as the first-draft typescript and what the publishers call the “foul matter”–a printout (what we old-school types have instead of e-edits) marked up with the dialogue between the editor, the copy editor, and me: comments, corrections, suggestions, queries, and quite a few of my own testy STETs, riding in the margins where I do not want something changed, thank you very much.

One of the next copies I receive will get a signature and a place on that shelf you see above (or rather, shelves, since they have now hit the end of my study’s second wall and require a start on the third.) But that first one goes into the master box, saved, to mark the project as complete.

If any of you are writers, tell me–what do you do with your first author copy?

***

Riviera Gold (excerpts and more here) will be out June 9, world-wide, print and audio: you can order a copy signed from Bookshop Santa Cruz or Poisoned Pen—or from your local Independent bookshop, or Barnes & Noble/Nook, or Amazon/Kindle, or CD or audio.

(And have your local Indie write me if they’d like some signed bookplates.)

 

 

 

 

The Quiet

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The streets of the world are still, other than the occasional idiot who decides that the chance of driving 95 mph down the center of New York is just too good to pass up. Citizens look out their windows, astonished, as distant hills come into view, the waters of Venice and Paris are looking weirdly like rivers, and goats are trimming the village hedges in Wales.

My house is on a hill.

I live surrounded by trees, my driveway has been taken over by a flock of turkeys, and the neighbors’ driveway camera filmed a trio of mountain lions strolling past.  So it’s quiet, sure–but I hear the freeway. It’s the one thing I don’t like about living here, that constant hum. I don’t see it, I don’t smell it, but it’s there, from five in the morning until late at night.

Not this month.

This month I have to actively listen to be aware of freeway noise. And in a happy-Easter Zoom meetup with my English family, those who live under the flight path to Heathrow said that it’s weirdly quiet, like the days after the Icelandic volcano when workers at the Manchester airport held a football game on the runway.

I miss things, yes, oh very yes. I hate not snuggling with the grandkids, not meeting a friend for coffee, not going to events that celebrate the book. Though I am so very grateful that none of us are ill, that we don’t have to line up for free groceries, that none of us work in a hospital. And I’m about to start writing the next book without a study (which is currently our community workout studio.)

Wish me luck.

So, how are you doing?

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.

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