writing Archives - Page 2 of 15

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 55 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.

Who IS This Person on My Page?

August 14, 2022 by Laurie King 6 Comments

In the spring of 2021, it was time for one of THOSE conversations. No, not with my kids; with my long-suffering editor.

I’ve never been a writer who was satisfied with writing one set of characters, even if they are Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes. Plus that, the Russell series generally involves foreign travel research, and covid was making that pretty tough. So, I said to my editor, what about something closer to home? I’d played with an idea for another Kate Martinelli story, but the last full novel was published in 2006, which is long gap for maintaining a series. Plus that, by now Kate had to be getting close to retirement age for the SFPD, right?

What about Martinelli’s world—but with someone new?

Kate Martinelli was a cop. Granted, she was not entirely comfortable with the somewhat paramilitary nature of any big-city police department, but basically, with the help of her partner Al Hawkin, she came to find a home in the Homicide Detail.

This time, I wanted someone who didn’t fit quite so comfortably. Someone definitely square-peg to the Department’s round hole, but whose abilities made her fellow officers, albeit grudgingly, willing to put up with her quirks, because she could do things no one else could. Things like notice details no normal person would. Or catch a fleeting microexpression that betrayed a lie. Or use those subtle betrayals to manipulate her suspect into giving himself away.

But maybe this young cop could also use a mentor like Al Hawkin, who had always been a much rounder peg and was now comfortably semi-retired into the SPFD Cold Case unit. In fact—why not make her mentor Al himself? Her opposite in so many ways, he even tended to break suspects using warm sympathy rather than prod them with analytics.

Sounds great, says my editor—go for it! So I went for it, diving into these new characters and their cold-case investigation.

I finished the first draft of Back to the Garden, sent it off, let it sit for a while. But when I sat down for a cold read before the rewrite, I found myself puzzled by Inspector Raquel Laing. My first drafts always lack detail, because I write by letting the story grow unedited. But in this case, Raquel’s almost complete lack of backstory, her elusive personality, even the reason she’s in the Cold Case Unit to begin with were all things I had set aside to fill in when I knew more. And now that the time had come to do so, I couldn’t find the right way to do so.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have a personality—she was every bit as complex and colorful as a writer could want. However, she didn’t really want to talk about it.

It took a while to dawn on me, although I imagine many of you reading this are already there.

The reason Raquel Laing was playing hard to get not because I didn’t understand her, but because I understood her so very thoroughly. After all, I’d been writing her in a different guise for more than thirty years.

Readers are told next to nothing about the character Arthur Conan Doyle spent the most time writing. Sherlock Holmes has a brother, a vague family, an even vaguer past. His physical description, education, tastes, friendships are given as quick sketches alone. We learn about his habits and interests only when a story requires it.

In a nice bit of irony, I realized as I looked at my first draft that I had even mentioned Inspector Raquel Laing’s colleagues mocking her as “the Sherlock of San Francisco.”

I guess I didn’t get far from Mary Russell, after all.

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

The Financial Ecosystem of the Writer

October 12, 2021 by Laurie King 20 Comments

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)

July 26, 2021 by Laurie King 6 Comments

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

July 15, 2021 by Laurie King 11 Comments

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

April 25, 2021 by Laurie King Leave a Comment

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 26^th, 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.

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