Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries
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.
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…
One of the earliest sections written in what eventually became Lockdown was a story set in Papua New Guinea. I spent some months there in late 1970s, on my honeymoon (because yes, what else do academics do for a honeymoon than go visit a Stone Age community?) which makes for one of those illustrations that a writer never knows what odd elements of her past will find their way into a book.
For example, the sing-sing
and the pig kill to celebrate a bride price ceremony
and the salt ponds, where logs are soaked in a saline pond in order to harvest the salty ash, and where a waitpela comes to grief in the story.
As proof of my travel, here I am in a motorized dugout canoe on the Sepik River
and admiring a Bird of Paradise in a sanctuary:
I had a Pidgin teacher named Yasmin—that’s my husband in a shirt my mother made him, a rainbow embroidered across the back.
Later, that same cottage, with a rainbow of its own.
And although this isn’t an Air Niugini flight, it is very like the tiny airplane Linda met when she flew up into there mission in the highlands.
Yep: a person never knows what from her past will come back when a story begins.
Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what Lockdown is all about.
***
You can get Lockdown in paper now from your local Independent bookshop; Barnes & Noble; or Amazon.
Whenever I set out to write one of my 1920s novels, I first choose the location, then rummage around to see who was there at the time. I’ve come across some fascinating characters that way–characters in both senses of the word: Sabine Baring-Gould in Dartmoor; Dashiell Hammett in San Francisco; Marshal Lyautey in Morocco—real life, all of them. People I probably couldn’t have made up.
Not that I don’t create characters from scratch. These are novels, not thinly fictionalized histories—but stirring in well-known places and faces can ground a story, giving (as Gilbert & Sullivan admitted) artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.
Then sometimes, one of those actual people elbows aside my own created ones to seize center stage.
Such as Cole Porter. When I started writing Island of the Mad…
[read the rest on Dear Reader, here.]
* * *
Order information:
US edition—signed, from Poisoned Pen Books; signed, from Bookshop Santa Cruz;signed (as tip-in pages) from Barnes & Noble.
Unsigned from your local Indie;from Amazon/Kindle;from Barnes & Noble/Nook.
UK edition—from Allison & Busby;from Heffer’s.
Or download the audiohere.
[A piece I wrote for Crime Reads, an excellent daily blog, about writing Island of the Mad and historical mysteries in general…]
Cole Porter (2nd from right) in the Piazza San Marco, Venice
The historical mystery is a curious thing. Why worry about a crime that took place decades—centuries—ago? Surely it’s been long solved, with both victim and villain moldering in their graves. The past, after all, is a foreign country, one we may not have a visa for.
But as the writer of historicals, I find it’s not always that clear-cut. Instead, off I’ll set for my own little corner of the Twentieth century—the 1920s—looking forward to a nice long escape from reality as I immerse myself in the mores and customs, fashions and foibles, dusty technology and quaintly simple lives of that sepia-toned world… only to discover the modern age has come along, too, and now stands behind my shoulder, snarling in my ear.
Take the book I wrote last year. I anticipated…
[To read the rest, pop over to Crime Reads.]
I’ll be doing a workshop on Setting for the good folk at Litquake next Saturday (assuming my voice returns–I have to say, conferences like Left Coast are just super for sharing: favorite writers; plot ideas; viruses…) so I’ve been mulling over the settings I use in my books. I haven’t used New York (yet…) even though I’ve been there a bunch–
but I no sooner set foot in Fez than I knew this was a place for a story:
And I have to wonder, how would a character’s story change if it took place in a London mews
or in the southern reaches of London
or even the warm, crowded, watery city of Venice?
So I’m asking, what setting in my books resonates with you? Russell’s Japan, or Kate Martinelli’s visit to the central valley? Harris Stuyvesant’s Paris, the Fool’s Berkeley, or…? What place/character interaction most appealed to you?
(Oh, and if you’re interested in the Litquake workshop, there may be one or two places left, here.)
The summer theme at the Santa Cruz public library this summer is Reading by Design.
Come join us at the downtown branch on July 20, 6:30-8:00 PM, as I talk about the design of a mystery from idea to final publication: how does research work in, how much do I know about a story before I write it, and what does a writer do when outlining isn’t their native language?
I’ll mostly be talking about The Murder of Mary Russell, but also this year’s Lockdown and…maybe… next year’s Island of the Mad.
The Lockdown tour begins tonight, at the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale. And it’s making me realize that talking about Lockdown during this tour is going to be tricky.
You can’t miss the suggestion that it’s about a school shooting—if the title doesn’t give it away, the cover art will—and yet, that’s not what it’s about. Yes, there is a school. And yes, the reader learns early on that a gun comes to school this day. But when it comes to the story, the gun is the seed, the gun is the shadow, the gun is a brief stutter in the book’s steady heartbeat.
Lockdown is about a community. It’s about children who function as adults, and about adults wrapped up in childish concerns. It’s about the wealth of the poor and the poverty of the rich. It’s about how we can help each other, and how we really haven’t a clue what drives our kids, our husbands, our best friends. It’s about unexpected strength and unseen weaknesses.
It’s about a school community, and all the worlds contained therein:
Its tiled walls had once been a mosaic. Under the years of filth, felt pens, and chewing gum lay a mural somebody had spent a lot of time on. Up at the top (beyond the reach of student arms) was a row of surprisingly ornate hand-painted tiles—a sort of picture frame, wrapped around a sky as blue as the afternoon beyond the archway.
Linda studied the brutalized surface, trying to pick out the design. The tiles themselves were a mix of tidy rectangles and anarchic shards: a long rectangle evoked the school’s façade; in the blue sky, a spatter of chips made for an Impressionistic, breeze-stirred flag; ten thin triangles shaped the circle of a wheelchair. Some of the tiles were painted, rather than pieced: a woman’s face here, obscured by felt-pen beard and horns; a cluster of high-top shoes there; a brown hand sinking a basketball.
Linda stepped closer, her attention caught by that face: a woman with an expression of authority, captured in a few deft lines. Wasn’t that the school secretary? Bemused, Linda let the Señora drive her back to the elementary school, all the while composing a refusal, polite but firm.
The job would be thankless. If Guadalupe’s new principal man- aged to get test scores up five points, the school board would demand to know why it wasn’t ten. If absenteeism and violence fell a notch, why not two? Playground bloodshed, drugs, and student pregnancy would be daily concerns. It would be terrifying and exhilarating and the mere thought of it made Linda want to take to her bed.
But that night, she had a dream of using her thumb-nail to scrape the felt-pen from that tile face. The next morning, Gordon asked why her sleep had been so restless. The next day at school, her thoughts kept going back to that mosaic. And when the final bell had rung, Linda picked up the phone and called the district office with a list of demands—a very long list.
**
Lockdown goes on sale June 13, but you can pre-order a copy from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed), Poisoned Pen (signed), your local Indie, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.
Lockdown is a novel
built on a foundation of six short stories that were published between 2001 (“Paleta Man”) and 2008 (“The House.”) Some of them appear almost unchanged in the novel, while others were divided, transmuted, changed in stress and mood. Two stories disappeared almost entirely, with mere vestiges in character.
What I found fascinating, from a purely craft point of view, was how immediately the stories insisted on changing. The instant I put them together, they began to push towards a new balance. In part that’s because a short story is entirely different from a novel: tight, simple, with one plot point and an aftertaste in the mind. But when these chapters were merged, even four out of my original six, the purity of the individual stories evolved, becoming an interrelated community of tales—which, indeed, is what the book is about.
Some of it was fairly basic: I had too many names starting with B, so Bradley became Nick, and Bonita changed to Olivia. Some of it reflects the needs of building drama, since a short story’s climax may not fit the needs of the overall narrative: hence a dog doesn’t die, and a son becomes a daughter.
But some things are set in stone—or rather, by stone:
6:58 am, Career Day
Linda
Linda McDonald looked at the mirror in disgust. Why on earth had she thought this was a good week for a new hairstyle? Her exercise in self-loathing was interrupted by an English drawl from the next room. “Have you ever considered how odd it is that the word career as a noun refers to the methodical choices of a person’s professional life, while as a verb it means to veer wildly out of control?”
“Thanks, Gordon, that’s just what I need to hear on this particular morning.” Linda bent over the bathroom drawer, crossly flinging around the contents as if a choice of eye shadow might improve matters. When she straightened again, he had moved with his usual disconcerting silence and was standing right behind her. His arms reached out, and Linda caught back her immediate impulse to pull away, exclaiming You’re all sweaty-we don’t have time-oh my blouse! Beyond that initial twitch, she did not resist. Gordon was rarely demonstrative (he was English, after all) but he had a way of knowing when nothing but physical communication would do.
In any event, exclamations over clean blouses—and, below that, the mistrust of touch that she had worked so hard to kill and bury deep—belonged to the surface Linda, the woman she should have been, and still looked like.
Besides which, she’d idiotically put on the white blouse with the dangerously loose button. If Gordon hadn’t forced her to look at herself, she might have raised her arms in the assembly and . . . Smiling for the first time that morning, Linda closed her eyes and leaned back against this man who was her husband. He tucked his unshaven face into the soft skin under her ear, and she stood, breathing in his smells: male sweat, shoe polish, fresh coffee. The odd suggestion of hut-smoke that always seemed to cling to his person. All the pheromones that were Gordon. Her thoughts ceased to throw themselves against the cage of her mind as she leaned, and breathed. After a while, she let her eyes come open, gazing at their two-headed reflection in the mirror. His irises today were more gold than green.
His voice rumbled in her ear. “You will do just fine. Your talk is perfect.”
“They’ll be too busy gawking at my hair to notice what I’m saying.”
“You look lovely.”
“I look scalped.”
His stubble made a sound against the blouse fabric as he shook his head. “No, I’ve seen scalped people. You look nothing like them.”She frowned at the crinkles beside his eyes, then noticed that the expression made her look a lot older than fifty-three. “Four years since you showed up on my doorstep, and I still can’t always tell when you’re joking.”
His face relaxed fully into a smile, his arms fell away. “May I shower now?”
“Make it quick, if you’re going with me.” She shoved in the drawer, gave a last glare at the too-modern haircut, then ducked out before his T-shirt came off and his back came into view. Her fingertips might find that intricate ritual of scars bizarrely compelling, but her eyes saw only the slow pull of a stone blade through flesh.
**
Lockdown goes on sale June 13, but you can pre-order a copy from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed), Poisoned Pen (signed), your local Indie, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.
Every two years, Venice explodes in art. Even more art than its usual visual treat, that is, with the opening of Biennale, when every decaying palazzo is turned into a gallery, every house overlooking the Grand Canal has a blue man on a balcony or a huge hand holding up its wall.
I hadn’t intended to come for it, any more than I intended to go to Japan a few years ago right at the height of cherry blossom season. If I’d had a choice, in fact, I might have avoided this, since the crowds are beyond ridiculous, edging into the daunting. But when I read an article in the Guardian about a new Damian Hirst…show? Exhibition? Installation? I decided I had to go.
Understand, I’m not a huge fan of modern art in general, and I draw the line long before dead calves in formaldehyde. But this one sounded unmissable.
Here’s what the Guardian said about it:
Inside, in perfect Discovery Channel pastiche, the tale is told of a freed slave named Cif Amotan II (solve that anagram)*, who accumulated an immense fortune which he spent on the sunken treasures divers are now dredging up on the screen before you. This is quite obviously hokum. One glimpse of the synthetic blue coral, or the Versace bling of the golden head gingerly dislodged from the sea floor, should give the game away, even before you see the amazing “hoard”. But then again, these are in a true sense buried treasures: buried and then rediscovered for the sake of this footage. The joke is already more subtle than many of the objects; this is art for a post-truth world.
Adding in a second review:
The astounding thing is not the insider’s joke, nor even the breadth of the things: It is the combination of intricate detail and stonking, mind-blowing scale and quantity that makes this collection so beguiling. By the time you get to a room full of gold objects, including a majestic-looking cornucopia (horn of plenty) and a gold replica of one of the sculpted portraits of life in west Africa, you feel drugged with history and art.
What astounds is the scope of the world-building here, ending up with a universe so complete in all its details, it feels true. After all, what kind of artistic maniac would first make a vast set of sculptures, then cover some of them with sea life like barnacles and corals from the spiky to the tumor-like? Some of the sculptures have three versions: the “discovered” form, with growths and centuries of damage; the “cleaned” one; and a third to show how it must have looked before losing a limb or head to time.
And who would then think to blow up some of the sculptures, going so far as to fill the entire center of a Venetian palazzo?
But that’s not all, folks. Loads of those finished sculptures–finished in the sense of coral etc attached, not in the sense of the clean original–were then carted onto a large recovery barge, with cranes and tanks and dozens of workers, many of whom are in diving gear, so the show could include dramatic Cousteau-esque videos of the “recovery” efforts.
These madmen apparently lowered a whole slew of these enormous statues over the side, in order to show them coming up with water dripping off. I’m less certain about the close-up filming of the divers gently separating things from the sea floor, which could have been done by hiring some aquarium’s tank for a few days–but even then, the amount of work!
I do suspect that one of the sponsors is Disney: the joke skirts the very edge of tastelessness when not only Goofy,
but Mowgli, Balu, and Mickey himself are among the treasure. That point in the exploration of the rooms is as dangerous as an unbelievable plot turn in a crime story. The willingness to suspend disbelief would shatter entirely were it not for the next rooms, bursting with spot-on imagery and yes, beauty.
As an outsider to the world of modern art, I can’t even begin to analyze what I saw there. Few of the pieces could be from the actual hand of Damian Hirst: apparently his workshop for this included 250 craftsmen from all over the world. Much of the humor is more heavy-handed than deft. And many of the pieces are frankly derivative, if not outright plagiarized (accusations of cultural appropriation center around an African head, although the same protest could be lodged about half the pieces there, from Mayan calendar to Buddha.)
But that’s not the point. All the images are rooted elsewhere—the conceit being that this is a shipload of treasure collected by a first-century lover of world myth—but the genius lies not in one or ten or even a hundred of the pieces. The genius lies not in the idea of sticking bits of coral on a sculpture. The genius lies in doing it again and again and again. Then adding not one or two but three rooms of Roman coins and agricultural implements and weapons. Then making that video. And blowing up some of the original pieces to huge, HUGE pieces like the figure that greets you as you step into the Palazzo Grassi, filling the entire inner courtyard up to the ceiling in what looks to be solid, massive, bronze. And displaying a drop-dead gorgeous, gleaming silver sculpture of a woman warrior facing a many-headed snake in one setting, then placing a massively blown-up version of that same sculpture, complete with detritus of the sea, in the second of his warehouse settings on Venice’s Salute.
But my own personal favorite item? The piece I’d adore owning beyond the battling woman, past the malachite Medusa, more than the unicorn’s head? This:
A stunningly perfect reproduction ship, complete with sculptures in the hold
(and a heiroglyphed stele on deck.) Oh, what I would give for that.
Because that’s the story there, all potential and mystery. As I said earlier, the presence of those jarring Disney images makes me suspect funding, and possibly a movie. A Disneyland theme ride, maybe? And that anagram* mentioned earlier? The slave’s name when scrambled around reads, “I am a fiction” while the name of his treasure-laden ship—Apistos—translates as “unbelievable”.
The only thing missing here (so far…) is the novelization of Cif Amotan’s story.
Damian? I’m available.