LRK’s Research
One of the things readers love about Laurie’s novels is the close attention to detail and the research she puts into them. If one of her books tickles your intellectual fancy, take a look at her suggested reading for that title.
(For general recommended reading, check out my page on Goodreads.)
- Notes on Research
- Books on writing
- God, Trickster, & The Feminine
- Mary Russell Books
- Stuyvesant & Grey Books
- Kate Martinelli Books
- The Stand-Alone Novels
- Other writings
Notes on research:
There is no such thing as an ex-academic. Decades after leaving grad school, I argue with copyeditors over points of minutiae; I agonize when “what sounds right” conflicts with mere fact; my editor has been known to wrench footnotes out of my hand.
I am a recovering academic, and to call the following “bibliographies” is misleading, since I use dozens, scores, even hundreds of books in researching a novel, and these lists contain a mere handful of titles.
Instead, the books here are a beginning, recommended as either illuminating, entertaining, or basic in some aspect of the book: a soldier’s experiences in Vietnam, for example (Keeping Watch), or the life of an English woman during the Great War (the Russell series.) I tried to pick works that are readable for the non-expert, and are available without too much effort.
The books given do not include topics where any number of titles would do as well—alchemy, for example, or Fashion of the Twenties. Nor do I include titles mentioned already in the books, such as Maeterlinck’s treatise on beekeeping (cited in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice) or the Wodehouse biography of Saint Francis (To Play the Fool.) Nor do they cover online research or videos, many of which are listed on my web pages of the specific novels.
Even with the advent of Project Gutenberg and Google Books, I still depend heavily on actual books rather than online research. Antiquarian booksellers are a trove of unexpected treasures, especially those in London. My volume of Murray’s Handbook for India, Burma, and Ceylon, for example, was originally owned in 1919 by a soldier stationed in Ambala: the margin notes open a window onto his life.
When writing about a place, I usually depend on a Baedeker’s guide published near the time I am writing, or else Murray’s, Cook’s, or even the AA Handbook (research libraries or Interlibrary loans will have them). Vintage guides are far from the sterile Checklist of Sights that followed the era of mass tourism. When the beds of a hostelry had fleas or the guides were villains, the writer did not hesitate to tell you.
The book pages themselves have link to various interesting web sites, although they are by no means extensive, and sites tend to drop out of existence with depressing regularity. Also, whatever you really want to know probably isn’t going to be there. However, the internet can also be of great help in finding an expert in the field (I am constantly amazed at how willing people are to give up their time for a writer!) and in planning a research trip, ensuring that you don’t overlook the antique cars at Beaulieu, the childhood museum in London, or that great collection of historical undergarments in Exeter…
—Laurie
Books on Writing
Every year sees a thousand new books on how to write and on how to get published (not necessarily the same thing.) Since the book industry is undergoing such huge and rapid changes, it is difficult to recommend definitive guides for the business side of things. However, certain books on craft are perennially helpful:
John Gardener, The Art of Fiction; On Becoming a Novelist; On Moral Fiction
Strunk & White, The Elements of Style
Mystery Writers of America guides to writing mysteries
And then there’s always:
Michelle Spring & Laurie R. King, Crime and Thriller Writing
God, Trickster, & The Feminine:
Laurie’s two academic theses, “The Role of the Fool in Western Culture” (her University of California BA) and “Feminine Aspects of God in the Old Testament” (Graduate Theological Union MA), shaped a number of her novels. The text and their bibliographies on Trickster and The Feminine are available in a Kindle ebook, “My Thesis Being…”
The Mary Russell books:
Eight LRK essays about Sherlock Holmes are compiled in “Laurie R. King’s Sherlock Holmes”, here.
On Sherlock Holmes and his creator:
W. S. Baring-Gould, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street
Daniel Stashower, Teller of Tales (on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
On England during and after the Great War:
Pat Barker, Regeneration; The Eye in the Door; The Ghost Road (novels)
Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth; Testament of Experience
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
Robert Graves, Good-bye to All That; (with Alan Hodge) The Long Week-End
Pamela Horn, Women in the 1920s
Lyn Macdonald—any of her myriad Great War titles
Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man; Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
Dirk Bogarde, Great Meadow (a memoir of Sussex in the Twenties)
William Longwood, The Queen Must Die (on the art of beekeeping)
Leslie S. Klinger, A New Annotated Sherlock Holmes
A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary:
(see the above “My Thesis Being…”)
Leonard Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Women
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk
Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality
Judith Ochshorn, The Female Experience and the Nature of the Divine
Sabine Baring-Gould, Dartmoor
William Crossing, Dartmoor
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (a novel)
Linda Osband, ed. (intro by Jan Morris), Famous Travellers to the Holy Land
Bertha Spafford Vester, Our Jerusalem (turn of the century life in Jerusalem)
Janet Wallach, Desert Queen (on the life of Gertrude Bell)
Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House
Jervase Jackson-Stops and James Pipkin, The English Country House
Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes, Shot at Dawn (on wartime executions)
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (a novel)
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (a novel)
Peter Hopkirk, Quest for Kim
Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj
Malcolm Darling, The Hill of Devi; Wisdom and Work in the Punjabi Village; Rusticus Loquitur or, the Old Light and the New in the Punjab Village
E.M. Forster, The Hill of Devi
William H. and Charlotte V. Wiser, Behind Mud Walls
Tahir Shah, Sorcerer’s Apprentice
Jo Hammett, Dashiell Hammett: A Daughter Remembers
Gladys Hansen, Earthquake! A Day That Changed America
Bernice Scharlach, Big Alma (the story of Alma Spreckles tells much about her era in San Francisco)
The Art of Detection (1924 section):
Lisa Benton, The Presidio
Rose Collins, Colonel Barker’s Monstrous Regiment
Jerry Flamm, Good Life in Hard Times
Herbert Asbury, The Barbary Coast, an Informal History of the San Francisco Underground
Kristin Baron & John Martini, Fort Baker Through the Years
Arthur Conan Doyle, Our Second American Adventure
Guy Deghy and Keith Waterhouse, Café Royal
R. Thurston Hopkins, Kipling’s Sussex
Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians
Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt; a Life of Aleister Crowley
Douglas Goldring, Nineteen Twenties
E. E. Fresson, Air Road to the Isles
William Anderson and Clive Hicks, Green Man
Daniel Defoe, A General History of the Pyrates
Fernando Pessoa, Lisbon—What the Tourist Should See; A Little Larger than the Entire Universe (trans Richard Zenith)
Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood
G. W. Bitzer, Billy Bitzer, His Story (cameraman for DW Griffith and others)
Tahir Shah, The Caliph’s House
David Woolman, Rebels in the Rif
André Maurois, Lyautey
Titus Burckhardt, Fez: City of Islam
John Patric, Yankee Hobo in the Orient
Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan
Harold and Alice Foght, Unfathomed Japan
John Man, Ninja: 1000 Years of the Shadow Warrior
- Philip Terry, Terry’s Guide to the Japanese Empire
The Diary of Frederick Bullock on the City of Adelaide
Dressing the late 19th century woman
William Bramwell Withers, The History of Ballarat
Ruth Goodman, How to Be a Victorian
Charles Dickens Jr, Dickens Dictionary of London
John Thomson and Adolphe Smith, Victorian London Street Life in Historic Photographs
Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home
The Stuyvesant & Grey books
The Seigfried Sassoon books, above (shell shock)
Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels
Biographies and autobiographies of all the artists and writers of the period are readily available, but in addition, the expatriate community is the focus of:
John Glassco, Memoirs of Montparnasse
Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Janet Flanner, Paris Was Yesterday
Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation
Alice Prin, Kiki’s Memoirs
Jimmie Charts and Morrill Cody, This Must be the Place
On Paris itself:
Andrew Hussey, Paris, the Secret History
Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol
Vincent Bouvet & Gerard Durozoi, Paris Between the Wars, 1919-1929
Caroline Archer, Paris Underground
The Kate Martinelli books
Enid Welsford, The Fool: His Social and Literary History
William Willeford, The Fool and his Scepter
Howard Schatz, Homeless
Michael David Coogan, Stories from Ancient Canaan
Marvin Pope, Song of Songs
The Standalone novels
A Darker Place (in England: Birth of a New Moon):
James Tabor and Eugene Gallagher, Why Waco? (“cults” and the government)
Tim Smit, The Lost Gardens of Heligen (an exotic English garden)
On depression:
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind
Jay Neugeboren, Transforming Madness
William Styron, Darkness Visible
On the “brutalization process” of abuse:
Elliot Aronson, Nobody Left to Hate
James Garbarino, Lost Boys
Richard Rhodes, Why they Kill
On Vietnam:
Philip Caputo, A Rumor of War
Michael Herr, Dispatches
Ward Just (intro), Reporting Vietnam
John Laurence, The Cat from Hue
Nathaniel Tripp, Father Soldier Son
Other Writings:
“The Salt Pond” (short story): Tim Flannery, Throwim Way Leg (on New Guinea)
