Cherilyn Parsons is a
visionary, pure and simple. The founder/director of the Bay Area Book Festival,
she also knows how to execute. I offered to help a bit as a liaison to the
mystery/crime fiction community, assisting noted author Cara Black. Later Cara asked
me to moderate a panel. This would be a rather public and literary venue and I
was intimidated. My first instinct was to say no. However, I have made a point
these past couple of years to “lean into” my fear. So I said yes.
I spent
a month reading the work of “my” authors, Laurie King, Catriona
McPherson, and Kelli Stanley. I wrote their intros and prepared the structure
for our panel, “How to Get Away with Murder—On the Page.” Finally, I
selected a passage from one of their books for each to read to the audience.
The event took place the
beautiful weekend of June 6-7, 2015 in Berkeley. We arrived from the Green Room
to find a long line outside our venue, the Marsh Theater, and an already almost
full house inside. This was not surprising given the renown of these three multi
award-winning author scholars. I thought I’d introduce them to you here with my
words of that day:
In his new book, The Golden Age of Murder, Martin Edwards
tells us of the Detection Club organized in 1930 by British crime novelists
including A.A. Milne, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers, who wrote the rules.
There would be no cheap tricks on the reader, no stories solved by recourse to
“Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery,
Coincidence or the Act of God.”
You may rest assured
that all of our authors “play fair” with credible characters grounded in
credible worlds. Their work takes us on surprising journeys through many
cultures and lands. As Mrs. Badger says in The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, “It’s the world, dear. Did you expect it
to be small?” These are large-spirited authors who bring history and place
alive with wit and grace.
Laurie King is a master
of voice with an operatic range, beginning with the acclaimed Mary
Russell-Sherlock Holmes series in which the Victorian detective meets his
match—in every way—in a twentieth-century female and feminist individual. Mary
Russell is her own woman and would not take kindly to being described as
Sherlock’s sidekick, although they are true partners in the best sense. The
Russell stories deal with politics, women’s rights,
religious expression, governmental oppression–as well as being grand
international adventures. Her latest, Dreaming
Spies, takes the couple to Japan and devious intrigue. Set later in
the 1920s, King’s gritty Stuyvesant-Gray novels
explore the turmoil of Europe between the Wars via a gruff American
investigator and his aristocratic British “touchstone.” Her most recent, The Bones of Paris, is a chilling and
atmospheric view of the art scene of the day. King has created another
strong-willed character in Kate Martinelli, an SFPD homicide detective whose
cases lead us deep into the beauty, eccentricity, and squalor of her city.
Catriona
McPherson was born in Scotland and immigrated to America in 2010. She is proud to be the 2015
president of Sisters in Crime. She received her PhD in
Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh, her thesis being “Existence and
Truth in Discourse.” From there it was but a short hop to meeting up with society sleuth Dandy Gilver and, for example, A Bothersome Number of Corpses. On her
website McPherson calls the Dandy series her “preposterous 1920s detective
novels,” but don’t be fooled, they are smart and beautifully written with keen
insight into the social issues of the day, not to mention “Dandy’s drop-dead
vocabulary,” per The Scotsman. McPherson
also writes what Library Journal
calls “tales of modern gothic suspense,” including The Day She Died and her latest, Come to Harm. Whether working in a whimsical or darker vein, “she is,”
according to the San Francisco Book
Review, “a master of dialogue, understatement and slightly twisted humor.”
Which surely describes the author herself.
Kelli
Stanley is the author of the Miranda Corbie detective series set in 1940s SF.
Miranda is a glamorous, tough-talking investigator with a fierce commitment to
justice and an inability to put up with BS. Her cases deal with anti-Semitism,
racial injustice, and in her latest, City
of Ghosts, Nazi art theft. Once you’ve read them, I urge you to seek out
her Roman Noir novels set during the Roman occupation of Britain. Her
protagonist is a mixed race doctor—“native” and Roman—an outsider-insider in
service to Rome’s governor. In the midst of the crime solving, Kelli gives us a
subtext of colonialism and class as well as a fascinating view of a very
distant culture. Formerly out of print, Nox
Dormienda—A Long Night for Sleeping—is available as an ebook. WSJ crime
fiction critic Tom Nolan writes of both series: “Stanley…knows
how to bring the past to life…with a wealth of references…attitudes (and)
dialogue…that seem both true to another time and as spontaneous as right this
minute...”
After their
readings, we moved into the discussion. As these authors all write historical
mysteries, I asked them how murder in “their” periods are different—and the
same—from today. Basically, how are people the same over time and how does our
society and culture change us?
Having recently written
an historical myself, I asked about their thoughts on research, accuracy vs.
“creativity.” And also about the role of geography in a story, the specificity
of place.
The following was for Laurie: You write on your website: “One of the
pleasures of novels is learning about different times, other places, unexpected
ways of seeing the world. Setting aside the minor fact that novelists lie
for a living, a novel can both open windows, and open minds.” You also write,
“Historical fiction is both a window and a mirror.” Can you reflect further on
this?
I had discovered a
similarity between their series characters and posed this one to them all: Mary
Russell, Dandy Gilver, and Miranda Corbie each seems to be writing her own
script about the role of women in her period. Along with Arcturus, the
British-Roman doctor (in Kellie’s Roman Noir), they are all outsiders to some
extent. How does that affect their lives and work?
We discussed plotting
and then took some questions and our fifty-minute panel was over too quickly.
All my anxiety was for naught!
Afterward, my daughter
and I explored the rest of the festival and especially, the “Lacuna” of books.
Tune in next time.
