Laurie R. King

Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries

LAURIE'S NEWSLETTER

The Financial Ecosystem of the Writer

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A while ago on the Facebook group The Beekeeper’s Apprentices, a discussion rose up about the ethics of buying second-hand books.  Not old, out-of-print books, merely used books by active writers who are trying to make a living off their writing.

The discussion in some ways runs parallel to another question I am sometimes asked: which format of book gives an author the most financial support—hardback, paper, e-, or audio?

However, in both cases, my answer is more or less the same: you buy whichever you prefer.  But since that’s not exactly a reply, here’s more detail.

The formats are complicated and vary wildly depending on contracts, number of books sold, and for all I know the phase of the moon:

Hardbacks—10% on the first 5000 copies, 12.5% on the next 5000, 15% of all over that (with tweaks on regular or deep discounts to the retailers)

Trade paperbacks—7.5% (except for promotional, book fair, book clubs…)

Audio—10% of physical CDs, 25% of digital audio

E-book—25%

And so on, for many paragraphs in the contract.  But basically?  Don’t worry about it.  Buy what you like.

As for used books, that depends.  Most of us writers would agree that if your money is tight and that’s the only way you’ll get that book on your shelf, then bless you for indulging your 75¢ on my book.

What matters more to a lot of us is the question, are you buying that pre-read novel from an Indie bookseller, or maybe a charity shop?  Great!  If, however, you’re buying it—or indeed, buying any book—from a huge conglomerate that undercuts the community efforts of Indies… well, you might want to think about whether the hidden cost is worth the savings.

Hence the title of this piece, about the ecology of the financial landscape.  Yes, I absolutely depend on people buying my books.  That people like you have done so keeps me from having to live in my car and use the wifi leaking out of the local Starbucks.  But I’ve been writing for a long time, and I sell a lot of books.  That means there are a lot of peripheral readings of my words that don’t contribute directly to my bank account, but have considerable indirect benefit.  Someone who falls in love with Mary Russell because of the recommended shelf in the library, or a used-book cart in front of the bookshop, or a neighbor’s Little Free Library is someone who is in love with Mary Russell.  They might not have risked $15 for a crisp new paperback by an author they knew nothing about, but once they’ve met the characters, they may well want to fill in the gaps and even, when they’re feeling flush, pick up the new hardback.  That person is also someone who wants to tell her friends how much fun she’s having with the stories, or who asks for the next hardback for her birthday… and there are your book sales.

Where the question becomes more relevant is when it involves new authors.  If you find a new writer you really adore, someone you’d like to see writing thirty years from now, order their books from your local bookshop—and while you’re there, tell the bookseller how great that author is, and suggest that they might like to add them to their shelves.  Pre-order the author’s next one—publishing houses really notice pre-order numbers.  And if you spot their older books in a second-hand shop, buy those—and give them to friends.  Maybe they’ll fall in love, too, and order the next one.

A healthy financial ecology benefits us all.

 

Making Sense of It (the edit)

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As I’ve said any number of times, my first drafts are awful, more like expanded outlines than an actual novel.  Mostly, they’re a way to confirm the machinery of the plot before I buckle down to craft a sensible narrative out of contradictory notes, half-baked characterizations, and half-seen sub-plots.  (No modesty here: they really are that bad.)  In other words, there’s a lot of editing that goes into making a book out of it.

And because it’s REALLY tough to edit at your own work, I depend on the skill and good will of my publishers, who are willing to:

  • Read the VERY rough first draft without instantly canceling my contract (editor)
  • Read a (hopefully) improved second draft (editor, art department)
  • Read a “final” draft (editor, marketing, publicity, copyeditor)
  • Read the copyedited pages (the poor souls inflicted with the task of transcribing the mess for typesetting)
  • Read the proof pages (in-house reads followed by more poor souls having to incorporate various peoples’ remarks, questions, typo notes, etc etc)

After which the book goes public, and various other people send in notes and objections and places where we all missed untrimmed plot snippets, repetitions, and eyes of the wrong color, some of which have to be jammed in at the very last instant before the presses start running.

Some writers of series novels have a “bible” reminding them of the things that they’ve said before.  Mine is not that organized, but the publisher does have a Style Sheet that transfers from one book to the next, so that I only need to explain once that in the Russell books, it’s finger-nail and school-teacher but ash tray and bedsheet; that Mrs, Mr, and Dr have no full stop (period) after them; and that the possessive of Holmes is not Holmes’s but Holmes’.

Individual copyeditors also have styles.  Sometimes I get a remarkably detailed plot-line, page after page of what exactly happens when.  Other times it’s a sort of index with every proper name and its first appearance in the book.

 

But the key element of any story is the back-and-forth with my editor.  And although now, houses tend to use e-edits—

—and I certainly know how to do them, I’m old-school enough to value the dialogue that comes with an actual on-the-dead-tree edit, whether with a copyeditor—

—or the editor herself.  Because there’s nothing like seeing notes like this to let you know you’ve done the right thing:

Laurie’s Writing Corners

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My publisher asked me recently to give them a couple photos of my writing space, along with a short piece of writing, to use for their Instagram (@randomhouse) series called #WritersRoutine. But Insta posts aren’t meant for detail, so, for the insatiably curious (and for those who don’t have Instagram) here’s the photo of where I work, with a longer explanation of what you’re seeing.

My study is in a room that, when I bought the house 9 years ago, was the garage.

The deck outside the windows wraps around the back of the house, and is surrounded by trees—the most immediate leaves are a black bamboo, in a large pot.

What the picture shows, left to right:

The day bed I use to write on. It was built to fit into a window-well in the last house I lived in, as were the shelves—I brought them all with me when I moved, since what normal person shelves 3000 books in their master bedroom?  The two drawers under the bed are filled with files of things related to the books—clippings, fan letters, articles, catalogues, etc.

Sitting on the bed is a small chest of drawers that I bought at the BSI weekend one year—its two drawers have handles shaped to look like the head of Sherlock Holmes.

I plug a wall-mounted external monitor into my laptop, so I can write without my neck seizing up.

On the window are large PostIts listing things I need to ask my informants about, for the work in progress (WIP).

My laptop, sitting on folders containing notes, printouts, etc to do with the WIP, and several of the pads I use for notes.  I mostly use the kind that Levenger sells, with lines on the right and a section of empty space on the left, to put notes about the notes.

The small pillow and bolster are covered with alpaca fabric woven by my mother.

On the windowsill is a mug saying: When God created man, she was only joking.  It contains a magnifying glass I received as a gift, and a (rather crooked now) beeswax candle stolen from the monastery in Wadi Kelt, described in O Jerusalem.  Behind the mug is a decorated gourd from a trip to Mexico City when my daughter was 7 months old.

Under the day bed: the file folder holds printouts of the current WIP.  It will be filled with more printouts, notes, maps, etc—and at the end, the first copy I receive of the book.

Leaning against the day bed: an oversized artist’s clipboard I use as a lap desk when I write, a habit that started when I wrote with a fountain pen on pads. (This is the second clipboard, the first one is a bit frayed now.)

My father made the three-legged Shaker table out of spalted maple. (Look it up.)  On it is a clipped-together version of the current manuscript, since it has a complicated structure—I tag each chapter with one of three colors, and shift them around to see how they work together.  Not my usual system, by the way, which is to just have the WIP in a folder like the one on the day bed.  Also on the table is a mug painted with Medieval characters, from a pottery somewhere in southern England.

Books: top of the shelf are my sets of Kittel (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament) and the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, from the days of my theology degree. The next three shelves are general Biblical studies and theology, much if it to do with feminist themes.   Then a shelf of Ordnance Survey maps, modern and old, and various books to do with England.  Below that, England and a variety of guide books, mostly Baedeker’s. The other books are reference material for Britain, the Twenties, and writing.

The narrow cork-board, formerly used for images to do with a WIP, currently shows book covers: useful as a Zoom background.

Top shelf: ceramic skull intended to place in a fire so it glows: small print of Folly Bridge, Oxford, from 1906 (I owned a house one street away); dragon figurine (from a Medieval manuscript illumination) I bought thirty years ago at one of my favorite museums, the Musée de Cluny in Paris.

The shelf underneath it has Twenties references (including a Mrs Beeton) and books used while writing Castle Shade.

The next shelf has the 3D model of Bran Castle my grandsons helped build—or rather, that I helped them build—and a stack of my books published in the past year.

The armchair used to be my father’s, covered with a horrible scratchy green fabric.  My mother had it re-covered back in the nineties, and I now use it for Zoom events, pulling around the white table to hold the laptop.

The framed painting is by my friend Jean Lukas, who did the pen-and-ink drawings used in the maps for Garment of Shadows, Dreaming Spies, and Island of the Mad, as well as several pieces of Beekeeper art over the years.

The red stove keeps me warm in the cold weather. (Propane—the pilot’s off for the season.)

And yes, the carpet and curtains are both purple.  And that bit of empty shelf at the top of the picture is one end of the shelf of LRK Books that wraps around three sides of the room, more than 2/3 filled with various editions of my 30+ books.

…a picture illustrating that at the moment, my study is also a workout studio…

And that’s where the words take place.  I like having a full study, with my own books and research material, surrounded by books I love.  However, I’m not a fussy writer.  When I need to, I can turn out words pretty much anywhere.  After all, my first ventures into fiction (Califia’s Daughters) were in Oxford during the kids’ nap-times.  Later I moved on to scribbling longhand on an oversized clipboard propped against the wheel of the Volvo during the kids’ piano lessons or soccer practice.  And before the purple carpet went down and the shelves got fastened to the walls, while that garage was undergoing its transformation, my writing place (for The Bones of Paris) was the circular seat in a corner of the bedroom, with the sound of hammers and Skil saws to keep me company.

The Wisdom of 71 Writers

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I’m a self-taught writer, in that when it comes to fiction, I mostly learned by reading a million stories.  Naturally, I took the basic writing classes in school, and I do have a lot of How-To guides on my shelves, but I’ve never done any advanced courses in how to be a writer.

So it always astonishes me, when I’m asked to teach a class or give a workshop on mystery writing, to find that I do actually have something to contribute.

I’m not sure I’ll ever write my own handbook, beginning to end, but I have been involved with two handbooks now, and have loved both of them.  More of my own words made it into the 2013 Crime and Thriller Writing, but that doesn’t mean I’m not on every page of the new MWA handbook, How to Write a Mystery.  After all, I first proposed the book, back in 2017.  I helped MWA’s Publications Committee choose Lee Child as editor, I worked with Lee and the committee to narrow down the list of invitees, I edited all the pieces and helped shape the “Tips” contest.  And yes, I wrote one of the chapters, on The Rewrite. I’m amazingly proud of it, this collection that Booklist starred and called

“a writing guide that readers and writers will turn to again and again.”

We’re holding various group conversations about the handbook over the next few weeks (see the times and participants here) but on Monday the 26th, the day before How to Write a Mystery publishes, Lee and I will be talking on our own with Barbara Peters at the Poisoned Pen about this amazing book.  Do join us, on the Pen’s Livestream (register here) or on their Facebook page.

And if you write, or know someone who does, you can get a copy from Bookshop Santa Cruz (which I’ll sign, if you like); your local Indie; Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.

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.]

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