In Other News

I had a really good time talking to Heather Stephenson (who just happens to live around the corner from Sweeney!) for this Rutland Herald/Times Argus Vermont Sunday Magazine story.

Guest Blogging

I'm guest blogging about Barbie doll bans and Marie Osmond today over at The Lipstick Chronicles. If you're a fan of Marie's music, you may not find this funny . . . Thanks to the Book Tarts for the opportunity to spend some time on their page!

Finally . . .

Thin on the Ground . . .

The posts, that is. I know, I know . . . But I wanted to get back to the blogging tonight by writing about a most remarkable book. I just finished Christine Falls by Benjamin Black (aka John Banville) and I'm pretty much stunned. I love John Banville. I loved The Sea, which has to be one of the most sharp and lovely and haunting accounts of first love, and married love, ever written. I love the way it makes the case for hunting your demons and describes what happens when you do.

I had been looking forward to Christine Falls for a long time. Because, hey, a mystery by John Banville. Set in Ireland, in Dublin, a place I lived for a few years and love in the aching, ridiculous way you love a place you left a little too soon. What could be better?

Banville always struck me as a fan of the mystery. He’s obviously fascinated by crime and he drops clues in a familiar way, and The Sea functions in many ways as a mystery novel. But Christine Falls is unabashed in its embrace of the form and the result is grand and devastating. It’s a heartbreak of a book, detailing the losses and violences of this ensemble of lives in such a richness of sentences you lose sight of how beautiful each one is. I'm half in love with every single character in the book . . .

While reading, I had the experience of rushing ahead, then pulling myself back to read every sentence a second time. Run, don’t walk, to find yourself a copy of this bleak, gorgeous novel.

The Art of Conversation

Check out Julia Spencer-Fleming's conversations with her fellow Agatha nominees for Best Novel. There's fascinating stuff here and it's a great slate of nominees this year.

And The Winner Is. . .

Thanks to everyone who entered the Gravestone Girl "Friends" contest. I'm a bit late, but I'm sending out emails today to alert the winners. Books will be winging their way to the friends soon!

Guest Blogging Today

Stop by Good Girls Kill for Money today to read my guest blog. Thanks to Sara, Laura, Diana, Tasha, and Regina for the opportunity!

Sarah's Picks

A short post today. I just finished Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know. This book is getting a lot of attention and I have to concur with all the lavish praise I've read. It's the kind of book that makes me remember why I love mysteries and why I wanted to write mysteries in the first place. The novel uses the disappearance of two sisters to explore the impact of abduction and assumed murder on a family and the law enforcement community. It's about loss and parenting and identity and how to move on after a tragedy. It's just beautiful . . .

On a similar note, I just saw -- for the third time, I think -- the 2000 Australian film Lantana, directed by Ray Lawrence. The film also uses a disappearance to explore the impact of murder on those left behind. It's a graceful, achingly true piece of filmaking. If you haven't seen it, put it on the old queue.

At the top of my To Be Read pile? Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black, aka John Banville. I am so excited about this one.

Mourning Jewelry

When I was researching Mansions of the Dead, the second book in my Sweeney St. George series, I became obsessed with mourning jewelry, to the extent that Victorian jewelry made from human hair makes a prominent appearance in the novel. I ended up buying some pieces of hairwork jewelry and I’ve since gotten interested in how we use contemporary objects as mourning items. Today you can buy pieces of jewelry that contain the ashes of a loved one or establish a memorial website containing pictures and stories accumulated during a lifetime.

Recently I came across the blog of a Texas artist named Amy Huff. Amy makes beautiful cards and jewelry and after reading the Sweeney books, she made some gravestone-inspired artwork that I absolutely loved. I got in touch and she made me a beautiful charm, with a photograph of a memorial statue on one side and a quote from Balzac on the other: “While seeking out the dead, I see nothing but the living.” She also made me some gorgeous cards featuring gravestone art. Thanks Amy! I’m going to wear my charm in the spirit of mourning jewelry old and contemporary, as a means of remembering death even in the midst of life, and in appreciation for the virtual friendships I've formed with readers since I've been writing the Sweeney books.

The First Gravestone Girl Contest

A lot of my favorite books were recommended to me by friends. My friend Sarah in New York told me about Deborah Crombie and Laurie R. King. Some friends here in Vermont introduced me to Donna Leon. My Scottish friend Mig told me about Ian Rankin. The list goes on and on.

So, in honor of book-recommending friends, I'm holding a contest. Do you have any friends who you think would like Sweeney? Write me an email, telling me a little bit about your friend and why you think he or she would like the books, and I'll send along signed (personalized with your message) hardcovers of O' Artful Death and Mansions of the Dead, as an introduction to the series, to 15 of the friends.

I'll print out the emails on April 1 and pick the 15 at random, so send in your entry any time before April Fool's Day.

Good luck!

Women of Mystery

I just got back from a "Vermont's Women of Mystery" evening at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, part of the celebration of Sisters in Crime's twentieth anniversary. It was a great event and a wonderful opportunity to see some other Vermont mystery writers. I always love to catch up with Nancy Means Wright, who writes a great series about dairy farmer Ruth Willmarth and tells very funny stories about the writing life. I'd been looking forward to finally meeting my neighbor Carla Neggers, who's written an awe-inspiring 50 books, and she was as nice in person as rumors suggested. It was also a treat to meet Vermont's newest mystery writer, Jennifer McMahon, whose first book Promise Not to Tell comes out in April.

We each read a little, which you rarely do at joint appearances, I find. Listening to other writers read is a great experience that I don't have often enough these days. Nancy's work made me think about voice, about how you can use rhythm and limited point of view to develop a character's voice. Carla's excerpt, full of foggy detail, made me think about place and atmosphere. Jennifer's selection, a chilling encounter between two very different young girls, made me want to run right out and get her book as soon as it's out.

So thanks to Robbie Harold and the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. It was a great night of mystery.

Morning Person

I’m a morning person. When I was in college, I pulled “all-mornings,” rather than “all-nighters,” going to sleep around 11 and then getting up at 4 when I had a test or a paper due. I’ve always found that three or four early morning hours are worth eight or nine hours later in the day. I wrote my first book between the hours of 5 a.m. and 9 a.m., before going to work, and I still have rosy memories of that time in my life, getting up before the sun, that first cup of coffee, the way the words just seemed to flow better from a brain still fresh off REM.

But I lived alone then, except for two cats and a dog who slept right through the early morning writing sessions. It’s harder to get out of bed on a cold Vermont morning when there’s a warm spouse still under the covers. It’s harder still when you’ve been up at 3 a.m. with a sick toddler and you know that said toddler could wake up at any time. Over the last couple of years, I’ve slowly given up my early morning writing.

And lately, I’ve really been pining for it. It goes beyond mere productivity -- I find that writing early in the morning gets me in touch with the magical quality of the creative process. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron suggests writing “morning pages,” an early morning journal that you write when you first wake up, before you’ve spoken to anyone, or read the paper, or listened to NPR. I did them for a while, before I realized that I was better off just getting right into the current novel, rather than blathering about my dreams. But it was a powerful experience for me, because it made me realize how much stuff I’m squandering by sleeping in, spending an hour with the paper and the news before getting going. I may be romanticizing it now, but I’m pretty sure that early morning writing is the closest I get to a spiritual practice. And I miss it. So, I’m going to make an effort over the next few months to get up at 5 and go straight to the computer, while everyone’s still sleeping, while the house is quiet and still.

I’ll let you know how it goes. What about you? When do you like to write or paint or compose or dance? When are you most creative?

Sideways Gravestones . . .

I'm not sure why these gravestone pictures keep uploading sideways . . . I didn't take the pictures that way, I swear!

On Nantucket for a few days, doing research, which for me has included lots of trips to the island's old cemeteries. I'm having so much fun. There's great stuff here, lots of captains' graves and headstones marking the graves of other well-known islanders associated with the whaling industry. My favorite thing about cemeteries is the way they distill a place's history and that's so true here. Reading the names of the people who are interred on the island, you get a slide show of its history, the early founders, the sailors who risked their lives at sea for the whale, their wives and mothers and sisters who made the island run while they were gone (and in some cases went along), the hardy folks who stuck it out here after the whaling industry died out.

Here's a picture of the Quaker Burying Ground. Why a snowman and no stones? Because these Quakers believed that stone monuments were a form of idolatry. There are thousands of people buried here. An islander told me that it's now a favorite sledding hill for island children.

The Haunting Dollhouse

There are a handful of books from childhood that I no longer have in my possession and therefore remember vividly and with the passion usually reserved for a lost love. Recently, I’d been obsessed with a remembered book of photographs, spare of text, featuring a heroine named Sarah who receives a mysterious dollhouse as a present for her thirteenth birthday, that I had myself received as a birthday present (It was published in 1982, so I was 11). I'd been thinking of it and went up to the attic to root madly through boxes of books, feeling despondent beyond all sense when I couldn't find it.


As I remembered it, Sarah somehow enters the mysterious dollhouse and finds some bodies and some unusual animals. I remembered that there was a bit of a puzzler about where all of the staff in the house had gone. I remembered -- or thought I did -- specific images from the book, a dark, empty garden and a doll lying alone in a room with peeling paint. I used to look at the book for hours and hours, freaking myself out with the pictures. My best friend in those days was also named Sarah and we used to dare each other to stare at the pictures for as long as we could before we were so scared we had to close the pages

It struck me that maybe I could find some information about the book on the Internet (Oh, the wonders of the Internet!) and within mere minutes I had it: "The Haunted Dollhouse" by Terry Berger and David Berger with photographs by Karen Coshof. I ordered a used copy (it's out of print) and a couple of days ago, it arrived in the mail.

There's always something a little weird about coming up against the reality of a dream or a memory and it was strange to see the book again. For one thing, it had an introduction by V.C. Andrews. Here I was remembering it as some kind of obscure surrealist photographic masterpiece and the intro was by . . . V.C. Andrews, who we passed around in fourth grade for the (really creepy and incestuous) sex scenes. The story was a little different than I remembered too -- Sarah lives in a modern house, complete with Muppets posters on the wall in her bedroom, and gets the dollhouse for her birthday. She goes to sleep, then wakes up inside the dollhouse and spends the day wandering alone around the house and grounds, dead bodies shadowing her all the way. Finally, at her birthday dinner, she receives a key that admits her to a secret part of the house and, it seems, immortality. When her mother wakes to hear piano playing in the middle of the night, she peers into the dollhouse and hears Sarah’s voice telling her that she’s going to live in the dollhouse forever and ever . . .

Karen Coshof's narrative photographs are just as cool as I remembered, particularly the ones featuring random armadillos and glimpses of hands and bodies almost out of frame. But at first I couldn’t figure out exactly why the book mesmerized us so. Then, looking at a picture of Sarah wandering alone around the grounds of the dollhouse, I got it. She’s all alone. The book is about adolescence, about wishing for the autonomy of adulthood, about being terrified of what it will be like when you get there. And, at that point in our lives, that was scarier than a disembodied hand or a floating body.

What books were important to you at that age and why?

Traveling

I'm in between projects right now, meaning I've just finished -- for the moment anyway -- one book and am trying to decide what to work on next. I have a couple of ideas for standalones as well as for the next Sweeney, but I'm at the stage in the process where I'm doing research, going for long walks, jotting down crazy-looking notes in the middle of the night, and taking myself on the road.

My husband had some stuff to do today so this morning, I packed the toddler into the car and headed North to Burlington. I have the beginnings of a book set near our largest city and I wanted some detail. I also just really like going on a road trip at this point in the creative process. Getting in the car (or the bus or the train or the plane) and finding some different scenery, getting myself a little lost, having coffee at a place I've never been before -- It all shakes something loose in my brain. Driving around the little farming towns of the Champlain Valley that are swiftly turning into commuter suburbs, I figured out what I want the fictional town in the novel to look like and sound like. I caught glimpses of people coming out of church and came closer to pinning down one character in particular who had been giving me some trouble, keeping himself a little blurry and indistinct. More importantly, I spent three hours in the car with no phone and no Internet, just my thoughts and a (mostly) sleeping 20-month-old.

There are a lot of different kinds of writing-related travel. There are the exotic vacations that most writers dream of writing off their income taxes some day. An accountant friend once told me about a well-known writer who would take elaborate cruises and resort vacations and, if he couldn't fit them into the main plot, would write the vacations off on the strength of product placement here and there, something along the lines of, "Did you hear? Patty and Mike just got back from the new Palms Resort in Fiji?"

There are research trips like the one I did for Mansions of the Dead, where I spent a wonderfully enjoyable day lost in 19th Century birth and death certificates at the Massachusetts archives. There are trips to scope out new locations. Next week I'm going to spend a couple of days on Nantucket, where I'm pretty sure Sweeney's going to spend a lonely winter in the near future. I've never been to the island and I can't wait to see it through her eyes.

And then there are the trips like the one I took today, sort of aimless, meant just to get new characters moving and talking, new landscapes taking shape.

So what about you? Where do you go when you need a change of scenery and some creative inspiration?

The Monkey Did It

I read the Murders in the Rue Morgue for the first time in seventh or eighth grade. We’d been assigned The Cask of Amontillado, which gave me chills, in a good way, and The Gold-Bug, which I looooooved, and I remember snooping around in the raggedy Finley Junior High School copy of Edgar Allen Poe’s Short Stories and sampling The Murders in the Rue Morgue because, well, it had “murders” and “morgue” in the title. It didn’t do a lot for me, I’m embarrassed to say. That impenetrable opening salvo, the somewhat slow start, the mysterious narrator’s annoyingly sycophantic worship of Dupin. It was all kind of a turn-off.

Somehow I didn’t read it again until college, when I’d already read a lot of detective fiction and on second read I got the same feeling you get when you see a Picasso or a Frank Lloyd Wright, the buzz of seeing something now-familiar and knowing that this was the first time it was done. Of course there were fictional detectives before Dupin, but so many of the conventions of the early detective story are laid out here, the locked room, the seemingly unsolvable crime, the genteelly poor, marginalized detective hero, the parade of witnesses, the dim sidekick, the dim cop, the twist that changes the way you see everything that came before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the solution’s a little hard to believe, and I didn't quite buy the whole thing with the window. But it’s the structure of the story that’s so cool, the way Poe builds the facts up like a pyramid, stacking one brick on top of another, one interview, one fact, one inconsistency, until he gets you where he’s going. The story lives out the promise of the narrator’s weird prologue – it’s not an account of a murder and its solution. It’s an account of Dupin’s process of deduction, a kind of early theory of multiple intelligences. The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the whole genre it spawned depend on the reader being in awe of the detective’s intelligence. This is where detective fiction got its start, a distant regard for a superior brain capable of imaginative reasoning, of thinking outside the box. Of course it continued on in this vein for quite a while until we decided we wanted to close that distance, to see our detectives as flawed and human and weak, as well as capable of flights of near-psychic reasoning.

Rereading the story this past weekend, a couple of things struck me:

1. Poe is brilliant.

2. The description of the room where the double murder has occurred is wonderful. A lot of us owe a lot to Poe for exploring the inherent dramatic power of the crime scene: “The apartment was in the wildest disorder – the furniture broken and thrown about in all directions. There was only one bedstead; and from this the bed had been removed, and thrown into the middle of the floor. On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood.”

3. There’s something about the sailor’s description of the Orangutan’s crime that made me, for the first time, sad. I’m not sure why I never noticed this before, but Poe is treading on Frankenstein territory: “Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the keyhole of the closet.”

4. The window thing is still lame.

In Translation

There are a few truly exciting moments in a writer’s life. There’s finishing the first draft of the book, getting the thumbs up from an agent, signing a contract with a publisher, and opening a box to see actual bound copies of your book. These are moments that writers dream about during the long hard slog of the experience I’ve come to think of as Trying to Get Published. For some, the slog part came in trying to finish the book, for others it was trying to get an agent. Then there are writers who are pounced upon by agents, but can’t find a publisher.

I’d dreamed of all of the above moments but the one I’d never even thought about was the day I’d open the mail and find a foreign edition of one of my books. It still seems amazing to me that someone would want to print my words in English, and it’s even more amazing that someone would go to the trouble of translating them. So holding the Italian and German editions of my first book in my hands (I haven’t seen the Japanese edition, but I’m sure it’s beautiful) was a pretty incredible feeling. I’m embarrassed to say, though, that I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the people who translated them, the human beings who had to figure out all my strange references and colloquialisms.

Then last week I got an email from the German translator of my first and third books, Berthold Radke. (The second, Mansions of the Dead, was translated by Nike Karen Muller.) Bert said he’d been meaning to write to introduce himself and asked for my phone number so we could chat. We had the nicest conversation. Bert and his wife and their two kids live in Munich and he translates mysteries and mainstream fiction. It was fascinating to hear about how he loves translating dialogue and how my gravestone epitaphs present a bit of a problem in that he has to decide whether to translate them or leave them in English. It was so much fun to talk to him. He signed off by saying that he had to go “take care of Sweeney and Pres” and I hung up feeling that they’re in excellent hands.

So a huge thank you (or should I say Danke/Grazie?) to Bert and to Nike Karen and to Grazia Maria Griffini, for taking care of my characters.

Anything for Those 1,500 Words

Thanks to Dooce for this link, about the lengths to which authors will go to keep themselves chained to the desk.

James Whitcomb Riley, America’s "Hoosier Poet," had his friends lock him up in a hotel room to write, naked, so he wouldn’t be tempted to go down to the bar for a drink.

This approach would never do for me, since I live in Vermont, in an old drafty house, and often have an impressionable toddler around when I'm working. But I understand the impulse. For me, the biggest distraction isn't the hotel bar, but the Internet. I used to get good results writing in coffee shops, but now that they all have free wireless, it just doesn't work anymore. I think there's a lucrative market for a new product to address my problem. I once knew someone who froze her credit cards in a block of ice so she couldn't spend impulsively, or at least had to work really hard to spend impulsively. I'm thinking of some kind of contraption guarding the Internet connection, kind of Raiders of the Lost Ark, so that I'd have to escape a rolling boulder and survive a pit of snakes in order to check my email. Patent coming soon . . .

Swedish Children Stealing Bicycles

I was talking to my parents recently about my 19-month-old son’s likes and dislikes in literature (likes: tractors, dislikes: fairies) and the conversation turned to the books my brother and I had really liked as young children. “There was this one damn book,” my father said. “About a girl who wants a bike. You wanted to read that book over and over. I got so tired of it.” (It must be noted that he did, in fact, read it over and over, quite cheerfully as I remember.) The book was Of Course Polly Can Ride a Bike (1971), by the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren (of Pippi Longstocking fame) and illustrated by Ilon Wikland. His description gave me a Proustian jolt. As soon as he jogged my memory, I remembered the whole thing, Polly (Lotta in the original version and the subject of a series of books set on "Troublemaker Street"), the maligned youngest child, her stuffed pig Bamsie, the exotic Scandinavian home furnishings in the illustrations . . . her crime. The set-up is that it’s Polly’s fifth birthday and though she wants a real, two-wheeled bicycle, she gets instead a perfectly nice assortment of birthday presents. But she’s angry, and she swears that if she doesn’t get a real bike she’s going to steal one. She goes next door to visit the kindly Mrs. Berg, who just happens to have a bike in her shed. After Mrs. Berg gives her a pretty jeweled bracelet as a birthday present, she encourages her benefactor to take a nap (“If I were you, I'd take a nap now")and then lies in wait in Mrs. Berg’s shed, stealing the bicycle when she thinks the old woman has gone to sleep. I loved that part of the book. I knew what Polly was about to do was very, very bad. And I knew she knew it too.

The bicycle’s too big and Polly gets going down a long hill, flying over the handlebars and ripping up her knee, and losing the bracelet in a moment of poetic justice. The book ends up okay. Polly’s father comes home with a bicycle for her, a late birthday present, and she gets the bracelet back, showing that crime does pay. But there's a strange last Icaran moment when Polly tries to "no-hands" it on her new bike and falls again, then lies about it. What's so delightful about the book is the premeditation of Polly's crime. She plans it out and it goes horribly wrong . . .

It makes me wonder if the book would be published today. The best children's literature is deeply subversive and I remember lots of dark, challenging children's stories from my childhood. But though there's some really edgy YA lit out there right now, it seems to me, as a new parent, that it's hard to find newer picture books that flirt with crime and punishment, issues of the utmost importance to children.

What about you? What picture books do you remember? Why?

The Strange Sickbed Confluence of Oedipus Rex and Jason Bourne

I've been sick this week, which means I've been turning to my comforting old sickbed favorites -- Agatha Christie short stories and James Herriott. I have a friend who rereads Jane Austen when she's sick, and another who makes her husband buy her People, a magazine she'd never read healthy.

This week, though, in addition to a fever-addled turn with Hercule Poirot's Casebook, I decided to reread Oedipus Rex. I read it for the first time in junior high and loved it. Aside from the fact that Greek choruses are soooo 7th grade, there was something about the boomerang arc of Oedipus' detecting that gave me chills the first time I read it.

He starts out the smug, optimistic, hard-charging head of a cold case squad, proclaiming that he’s going to go back and finally solve the mystery of just who it was who killed King Laius, in order to lift the plague on his people. No expense will be spared, no witness left uninterviewed. He’s so confident, so sure of his abilities: “Nay, I will start afresh and once more make dark things plain.”

I love how when the blind seer Teiresias tells him that he, Oedipus,is the killer, Oedipus starts taking apart his story, impeaching the witness. He asks Creon, “how was it that this sage did not tell his story then?”

He's a great detective, if an impulsive, self-deluding one. He asks the right questions and then there's a kind of parade of witnesses, each one bringing him closer and closer to the truth, that not only is he King Laius’ murderer, but that he is . . .gulp . . . married to his own mother. He's the model of the flawed detective; the same rashness that leads him to kill Laius leads him to denounce Tereisias and strike out blindly looking for the truth.

So I was thinking about Oedipus, and what a modern detective he seems. Then yesterday, huddled in bed with a box of tissues, I watched one of my favorite sickbed movies (thanks MacBook!) -- The Bourne Identity, the 2002, Matt Damon version. I know, I know, there are people who resent the simplification of Ludlum, the Carlos-ectomy, other people who like the Richard Chamberlain version better, but I love this one. It's oddly comforting to someone in a diminished state and it's just cool. Still fever-addled, it struck me that what I love about Ludlum's Jason Bourne (or whoever he is) and Sophocles' hubristic king is that they're both detecting within. Right? The mystery to be solved isn't just Whodunit?, but Who am I? How did I get here? What dark deeds am I capable of?

Like Bourne and old Oedipus, some of my favorite contemporary detectives -- Harry Bosch, Alan Banks, Andy McLoughlin -- aren't just looking for murderers, but for just how deep their own propensities for violence go. It's one of the qualities that elevates the best crime fiction, to my mind, the sleuth looking beyond the crime at hand and focusing on how the act of detecting turns inward, leading, always, back to the self.