Seminal and Exemplary Mysteries

Elizabeth Zelvin

I recently heard that a gentleman with an encyclopedic knowledge of the mystery genre will soon be revealing the seven mysteries he considers “the” books all mystery writers must read. I don’t know his list, but if I’m allowed to guess, I believe he will probably choose works by Edgar Allan Poe, A. Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and Rex Stout. (If I may hedge my bets, I’ll nominate Sheridan LeFanu, Mickey Spillane, and Erle Stanley Gardner as alternates.) As it happens, I won’t get to hear his talk. But before I realized I had a schedule conflict, I had already compiled an alternative list of works that, if not the seven progenitors of the mystery heritage, are a lot more relevant to my heritage as a mystery writer. My feminist dander is up, and I’m ready to charge to the defense of the traditional and especially the character-driven mystery, as well as the matrilineage of mysteries by women. I hasten to add that none of these have been attacked in any way. This is purely speculation on my part. But I had a lot of fun selecting my seven candidates. So here they are.

Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Dame Agatha is perhaps the most likely to appear on a male mystery historian’s list. After all, she is the mother not only of the cozy, but also of the puzzle in which the murderer turns out to be the least likely suspect. Her plots, highly original in their time although they have become clichés through imitation, are widely admired. Having to pick one book, I chose Roger Ackroyd, although it’s not my favorite, but as the exemplar of the unreliable narrator.

Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
The presiding genius of the Detective Club during the Golden Age of mystery in the 1930s, Sayers reached her peak in this mystery without a murder that is also a richly textured novel, which I believe earned her the right to be considered the mother of the character-driven mystery. I’ve posted this opinion elsewhere, but it bears saying again. The key passage is one in which Harriet Vane asks Lord Peter Wimsey for advice about her novel.

"'Well,' said Harriet...."I admit that Wilfrid is the world's worst goop. But if he doesn't conceal the handkerchief, where's my plot?'
[Peter suggests a way to define Wilfrid's character that would give him motivation for concealing the handkerchief.] ....'He'd still be a goop, and a pathological goop, but he would be a bit more consistent.'
'Yes--he'd be interesting. But if I give Wilfrid all those violent and lifelike feelings, he'll throw the whole book out of balance.'
'You would have to abandon the jig-saw kind of story and write a book about human beings for a change.'
....'It would hurt like hell.'
'What would that matter, if it made a good book?'"

I suspect that Sayers and her muse had precisely this conversation in her head, and Gaudy Night was the result. The creation of Harriet and Sayers’s increasingly three-dimensional portrayal of her both in relation to Lord Peter and grappling with her own dilemmas regarding her work and what kind of life to choose ushered in the transition of the traditional mystery from primarily a puzzle to a puzzle embedded in a character-driven novel.

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
Tey’s work falls in the period between the Golden Age and what I’d like to call the age of Sisters in Crime, analogous to the Second Wave of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s. My favorite among Tey’s books is Brat Farrar, a character-driven novel that is both endearing and enduring. But The Daughter of Time stretches the boundaries of the genre by applying modern detection, by a temporarily bedridden British police detective, to a famous historical puzzle, the character of King Richard III and the fate of the Little Princes in the Tower.

Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only
Paretsky was not only chief among the founding goddesses of Sisters in Crime, but also the mother of the American woman private eye novel, along with Sue Grafton and Marcia Muller. Paretsky’s protagonist is not only physically tough but also finds most of her cases in the “man’s world” of business, politics, and finance. Indemnity Only was the first outing of V.I. Warshawski, and it revolutionized the depiction of women in mysteries.

P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for A Woman
All of the highly acclaimed P.D. James’s novels are works of literature as well as British police procedurals in the Adam Dalgleish series and P.I. novels in the works featuring Cordelia Gray, of which this is the first. James is one of those writers who is always being said to transcend the mystery genre, to the annoyance of mystery writers. I was dismayed to find, among the blurbs of the most recent Wexford novel by Ruth Rendell, her closest rival, a statement by James herself that Rendell “has transcended her genre.” Let us say, rather, that both these writers have set the bar high for the rest of us in our chosen form of literature.

Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
King is another superb literary stylist who earned her place on this list by stretching the boundaries of the canon of one of the progenitors and masters of mystery fiction, by giving Sherlock Holmes an apprentice and mate who is not only female, young, and feminist, but just as smart as he is: a worthy partner.

Elizabeth Peters, Crocodile on the Sandbank
A male mystery historian might find this a frivolous choice, but the first Amelia Peabody mystery by Egyptologist Peters (or Barbara Mertz, to use her real name) has it all. It’s an exemplar of the historical mystery, informed by legitimate scholarship and a shovelful of literary license, in a context of romantic suspense. Its protagonist is one of mystery’s memorable characters. And it’s tremendously funny, a welcome and crucial element in the genre.

Kill me, but don't misspell my name

Sandra Parshall

Mystery fans are the only people I know who will happily pay somebody to murder them. If they can’t find anyone willing to bump them off, they’ll settle for being turned into dogs or hookers.

At every big mystery convention – Bouchercon, Malice Domestic, Left Coast Crime, etc. – an auction of items donated by writers raises thousands of dollars for charity. The biggest chunk of money goes for “items” that cost the authors nothing and can’t be carried home in a suitcase: the chance to have their names given to characters in future novels.

I don’t know whether it’s sheer love of the genre, the desire for a kind of immortality, or latent masochism, but the bidding for this honor can be fierce. At the first Malice Domestic I attended a few years ago, I looked on in open-mouthed wonder as someone paid $800 to have her name in a Donna Andrews novel. At Bouchercon in Baltimore this year, the highest bid of the auction was $1,500 for naming rights in a Laurie R. King book.

Reviewer Andi Shechter and librarian/writer Gary Warren Niebuhr, great friends to the genre, have both bought “appearances” in several books. Short, dark-haired Andi got a kick out of being a tall, blonde hooker in an S.J. Rozan mystery, and Gary got a three-in-one deal in Rozan’s Winter and Night: a major character is named Gary, another character’s last name is Niebuhr, and the setting is a town called Warrenton.

Of course, writers have always enjoyed slipping the names of real friends and relatives – and their pets – into fiction, free of charge. (I don’t think the real Spike paid to be immortalized as the lovably disagreeable terrier in Donna Andrews’s Meg Langslow series.) Everything I write includes at least a couple of characters named for friends. But character-naming isn’t always done out of affection. There’s a lot of truth in the warning that you shouldn’t antagonize a mystery writer because you might end up dead or serving a long prison sentence – in the pages of a book.

Honoring friends and getting even with enemies are private pleasures for the writer, usually not shared with readers, but some writers use the lure of naming rights in future books to promote a current release. Karin Slaughter’s recurring Get Slaughtered contest is always deluged with entries. Lisa Gardner named a murder victim in Gone for a contest winner.

Contest and auction winners usually see their names attached to characters who appear in only one book, but it doesn’t always work out that way. Tess Gerritsen’s medical examiner, Dr. Maura Isles, got her name through an auction and was intended as a one-book character, but the fictional Maura grabbed a permanent role as co-protagonist, with Detective Jane Rizzoli, in a best-selling series.

At Malice Domestic this year, I decided, with some trepidation, to try my luck at raising money for charity by donating naming rights to a character. Because I’m not well-known and haven’t published a lot of books, I was afraid no one would be interested. I crept into the room as the auction started and sat near the door so I could creep out again, mortified, if nobody wanted to be in my book. Angie Hogancamp saved me from disgrace. She’ll be one of the good people in my next novel.

For the Bouchercon auction this year, I donated animal naming rights, figuring people would pay even more to immortalize their pets than they would to see their own names in print. The bidding was under way for the right to name a dog, and I’d already offered to throw in naming rights for a cat to raise the ante, when a woman in the audience said that if I would add a guinea pig, she would pay $900 for all three. Sold! Look for Maggie, Lisa Marie, and Mr. Piggles in my next book. Many thanks to Meg Born for her amazing donation to the Enoch Pratt Free Library and Viva House, a mission for the poor and homeless in Baltimore.

I also came away from Bouchercon a winner, after an incredibly thoughtful friend won naming rights for a character in a Thomas H. Cook novel and gave the prize to me because Cook is my favorite writer. So now I'm going to find out how it feels to see a character on the page bearing my name. I'm pretty sure it will feel fantastic.

Do you enter character naming contests? Do you bid for naming rights at conference auctions? Have you ever won, and were you happy with the character that got your name? (I know one cat owner who was miffed when she paid to have her feline in a novel and his name was given to a human.) Why do you think people enjoy this so much?

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Whatever your choices, get out and VOTE on November 4!

Interview with Laurie R. King

Interviewer: Elizabeth Zelvin

At what point in your life did you start writing fiction? What prompted you? And why mystery?

I’ve loved fiction since I was small, an impulse only made stronger by the fact that we moved so often, libraries became my mainstay of entertainment and friendship. So it was probably inevitable that sooner or later I would think: I have a story I want to tell. As it turned out, I’ve had eighteen (so far) stories I’ve wanted to tell.

I work in the mystery genre because I find the structure satisfying, the combination of intellect and emotion, the way a writer can bring in pretty much anything that engages human passion. As a writer, it forces me to work close to the bones of a story, which mainstream fiction doesn’t always.

Many writers have chosen to enter the world of Sherlock Holmes created by A. Conan Doyle. Few have turned the canon on its ear as you did, not only by giving the misogynistic Holmes a wife and partner, but by making that wife, Mary Russell, not only many years younger than Holmes, but also just as intelligent as he is. Where did Mary Russell come from? What were you thinking? How have the books been received by Sherlockians? And has it all turned out the way you expected?

Holmes has always seemed to me less misogynistic than misanthropic in general—sure, he says disparaging things about women, but he does about men as well.

When I started writing about Mary Russell, I wanted to show a young woman whose mind is that of a Sherlock Holmes. And because I thought it would be more interesting if I put the two minds together, I set her down with him.

I took their partnership to its fullest state, that of marriage, for a couple of reasons. First, it’s difficult to envision a non-marital relationship in the 1920s between a man and a woman that wasn’t closely hedged by taboos and limitations. More importantly, it seemed to me that Holmes was the kind of person for whom life had to be all or nothing. Even if Watson had not been a man, that partnership would always have been held back by the doctor’s intellectual limitations: He just isn’t quite up to Holmes. But if he had been? And if he’d been female?

Early reaction among the devout Sherlockians was, understandably, unenthusiastic. Sherlock Holmes meets a girl of fifteen, teaches her his skills, and marries her sounds downright creepy, and without spending a couple or three books looking at how their pairing works, and being reassured that this upstart King woman isn’t writing some kinky kind of Sherlockian romance, the Sherlockian world wasn’t about to clasp Russell to their chests.

That has changed. I have made it clear, in the books and in peripheral writings and interviews, that I have enormous respect for Conan Doyle’s character and that I am doing a very different thing. I now have many readers among the friends of Holmes, and was even the guest speaker at their annual Baker Street Irregulars dinner this year.

But as for expectations? Surely you can’t imagine I knew enough when I began this writing life to expect anything?

Your first Kate Martinelli book, A Grave Talent, features not one but two very interesting women: the brilliant artist Vaun Adams and the police detective Kate, a San Francisco lesbian with a therapist partner who pays a terrible price for Kate’s dedication to her job. What was your starting point for this story? Did you have a particular “what if” or theme you felt compelled to explore? Did the characters take you in any direction other than you intended? Did you originally conceive Kate as the protagonist of a series?

The starting point for the book was the question, What would a female Rembrandt look like? And although I had by that time written two Russell books, this idea didn’t fit into the rather whimsical ménage of Holmes and Russell, so I moved it to a time and a place closer to home, that of the Bay Area in the late Eighties.

I didn’t realize Kate had the potential for a series until St Martin’s asked me for a second, but then, I didn’t realize it was a mystery until they called it one. I thought of it as a novel, but as it happened, she and her crew fit well as a series.

Your characterizations of Mary Russell and Kate Martinelli are both more rounded and more challenging because you chose to make both of them outsiders: Mary is Jewish, and Kate is gay. What led you to make these choices? Are you interested in the particular cultural baggage you gave these women? How it affects their relationship to the larger culture? Or what?

When I wrote A Grave Talent, in the late Eighties, it was very believable that a lesbian cop might prefer to stay in the closet. By the time I wrote The Art of Detection, set in 2004, that choice would have been highly neurotic, but that’s the pleasure in writing a series that spreads out over time.

Few mystery protagonists are well-balanced, well-rounded, undamaged individuals. Or if they are at the beginning of the book, life soon descends on them in a big way. Even a mainstream novel is about tribulation and change, and if the characters don’t suffer and grow, what is the point?

Both Kate and Mary are realistic, that is, complex people. Both are women, both are outsiders, but both reflect and engage with their society in ways that are both accepting and adversarial. Both have to stand up for their right to make choices, but interestingly, in some ways Kate has a harder time of it than Mary eight decades earlier. The Twenties were a tumultuous time, and women (particularly upper class women) in England have always had the option of just looking thoroughly idiosyncratic and doing whatever they damn well pleased.

In addition to the two series, you have written several stand-alone novels. How did that come about? Do you have a preference? Is the process of writing a stand-alone different for you from the way you work on an ongoing series?

Some ideas and stories simply don’t fit into an ongoing series without a lot of corners getting knocked off in the process. When I want to write about a woman who investigates religious movements, or a woman who rebuilds her life along with a derelict house, or a man who rescues children, making them standalones frees me from all the considerations of a series: Is this a likely scenario, to be repeated time and again? What if I need, for the sake of the story, to kill off a character, even the protagonist?

With a standalone novel, the writer is presenting an entire universe, the lives of her characters beginning to end. It all has to be within those four hundred or how every many pages; you can’t return and explain later.

(That said, the novels Folly and Keeping Watch aren’t purely standalones, although neither are they sequels. They have small areas where the stories overlap, and eventually I plan two or three more, all separate novels with small areas of overlap. I think of it as the San Juan Cycle.)

A standalone is more demanding, since the research and development is unique to that book and can’t be recycled for a second and fifth, but it is also more freeing, since it can end up nearly anywhere.

How do you work? Do you need solitude? Do you write every day? Do you outline or write into the mist? How much do you revise? How do you research your books?

I write by myself in my study, with a window nearby to distract me, but without music or much noise. When I’m working on a first draft I tend to write pretty much every day, at the very least five days a week, which gives me a 300 page first draft in three months or so.

My first draft is essentially a 300 page outline, and comes into being with very little conscious deliberation on my part (although somewhere in the back of my mind is a fairly efficient Organizer, who keeps track of what’s going on.) Only when the first draft is in existence can I begin to work on it, to craft the novel I can see lurking in the fits and starts of faulty prose on the page.

The rewrite takes me longer than the first draft, maybe five or six months. The Russell rewrites tend to take longer than the Martinellis, since so much of the effect of those is in the polish—the language and the subtle details, while the contemporary Martinellis are more straightforward.

Research depends on the book. I use the local university library heavily for the historicals, not as much for the modern stories. I usually begin with book-research, then narrow down my needs as time goes by. If it’s a question about modern police techniques, for example, I call a friend on the police department. If it’s about old cars, I have a man who knows all about 1926 Rolls Royces and how to fiddle with their innards. For guns and military, I know someone else, and if it’s about things specific to that book—the parks, for example, in The Art of Detection, I either phone or show up and ask questions. People are remarkably generous with their time and knowledge.

You have spent a considerable amount of time studying theology, with a BA in comparative religion, an earned master’s degree in theology, and an honorary doctorate from a school of divinity. Is theology primarily an intellectual, philosophical, or spiritual study for you?

Theology means god-talk, or the study of god, and it is a human pursuit that embraces the intellectual and the spiritual. The study of humankind’s relationship with the divine is the study of humankind. Some of the characters in the stories I write are similarly fascinated by it. Of course, others have no more time for god-talk than your average man on the street.

Your novels offer the reader a strong sense of place, and you have traveled widely. Do you have a favorite place? Is there anywhere you haven’t been but very much want to go?

I’m very fond of England, no doubt one of the reasons I write about the place. And there’s a deliberate set-up at the beginning of Locked Rooms where I mention Russell and Holmes being brought in to work a case in Japan, because the author really wants an excuse to go there.

What’s up next for you—as a writer and in general?

Touchstone, in early 2008, which we’re calling a “country house political thriller.” It’s a standalone historical set in 1926 England just before the General Strike—although my editor was so smitten with some of the characters, she wants me to bring them back and make a series out of it. We’ll have to see about that, because after Touchstone I’ll be doing the ninth Russell and Holmes, where they get home again to Sussex after far too long.

In a peripheral area, I’m setting up an online book group, where readers can meet and discuss the LRK novels and the occasional related book. It will be on the web site (http://laurierking.com) and in the newsletter (which readers can sign up for on the site, as well) with contests and giveaways and such. Hey, reading is fun, you know?