New Kid on the Block

by Sheila Connolly


Poe’s Deadly Daughters are delighted to welcome Sheila Connolly as our new blog sister. Sheila is the author of the Orchard Mysteries, the forthcoming Museum Mystery series, and, as Sarah Atwell, the Glassblowing Mystery series, all from Berkley Prime Crime. Her debut novel as Sarah Atwell was nominated for an Agatha award for Best First Novel. The new Orchard Mystery, Red Delicious Death, is due out in March. Sheila has been an art historian, an investment banker, a non-profit fundraiser, and a professional genealogist as well as a mystery writer. Welcome, Sheila! We hope you’ll find being a Deadly Daughter as rewarding as any of your other “hats.”

Starting in February, Sheila will be blogging on the fourth weekend of every month. Liz Zelvin will continue to blog on Thursdays (except for today).



I am delighted that the writers of Poe's Deadly Daughters have invited me to join them.



That makes me the New Kid–again. Being the new kid is something I have a lot of experience with, because my family moved around a lot when I was young. No, my father was not in the military, but he frequently became impatient with jobs and bosses (like the one at duPont who told him he wasn't a big enough fish at the company to drive a Buick), and since his area of specialization–fluid mixing systems–was in demand, he could always find a new job. I don't even remember the early moves (at age one and three), but I can definitely recall the ones in pre-school, kindergarten, fourth grade and eighth grade.


As an adult, I've added a lot more moves: going off to college, then graduate school; getting married and moving to North Carolina, then California, Pennsylvania, and finally to Massachusetts. In all these places I held a variety of jobs, short- and long-term, and for a time I went back to school. As a result, I was always walking into new situations, meeting new people.


It's never easy, especially if you're not a gregarious person, which I am not. I was the shy kid but I was also the brainy one in any class. But I made friends and did well in school, and survived it all. Maybe it made me a stronger person, but that doesn't mean I liked it.


Only recently did I realize that I've become part of yet another group, thanks in large part to the Internet: the writers community. This time the entry was almost painless. I feel like I have a lot of friends, some of whom I've never met face to face and possibly never will. But in cyberspace we all share our triumphs and our disappointments, and even a lot about our lives–we "know" each other. And if you go to writers conferences you will see clusters of people gleefully greeting each other, trying to cram a whole lot of friendship into a very short time.


And there's one more community I hadn't even thought of until now. When we moved to our current house, we built in a wall of bookshelves in one room, and for the first time in many, many years, my husband and I had the space to unpack all our books. We'd been collecting mysteries since we first married, back in the Dark Ages when there was no Internet and no Amazon and you had to seek out second-hand bookstores and hunt for paper copies of the books you wanted. And we collected series–too many to mention, but you can safely assume I have all the classic mystery writers, in complete sets. Yes, I read them all, but the collecting part was fun too. The result, however, was a lot of linear feet of books, which for a long time had no place to go.


Here we finally unpacked them all and lined them up on the shelves (which quickly overflowed, but that's another story). But what hit me when I started writing this post was: I have my own little piece of shelf now, something I never expected when I started collecting mysteries. Five books of my own (plus large-print copies) have joined all the great names on my shelves. I'm up there next to my idols–Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and more. I'm the New Kid on the bookshelf block–and I like it!

Dorothy L. Sayers, Men, and Lord Peter Wimsey

Elizabeth Zelvin

Over on the DorothyL e-list, they’ve been discussing Sayers’s Gaudy Night, in which Lord Peter Wimsey courts Harriet Vane amid the dreaming spires of Oxford, while she struggles with her ambivalent feelings not only about Lord Peter but also about love and work. Someone inevitably mentioned the widely held belief that Sayers herself fell in love with her protagonist, a charge often used to criticize the high ratio of romance to mystery in this book and its sequel, Busman's Honeymoon. If so, I’d argue that it doesn’t hurt the book. Besides, it’s understandable, given what we know of Sayers’s life, that she chose to create an ideal mate for an intelligent and independent woman.

Sayers’s husband was an unemployable invalid and an alcoholic whom she cared for and supported during their 25-year marriage. Co-founder of the Detection Club with G.K. Chesterton, she evidently ruled the group of Golden Age mystery writers with an iron hand. The juxtaposition of rescue and control in Sayers’s life makes perfect sense to me as an alcoholism treatment professional with 20 years of clinical experience and publication credits on the subject of the spouses and partners of alcoholics. Or I could explain it in terms of family systems dynamics. When one partner (in this case, Sayers’s husband) is increasingly dependent and incapable of responsibility, the other becomes overresponsible: a caretaker and enabler. Sayers put a lot of energy into propping her husband up, which could only have increased his dependence. At the same time, she developed her taste for being in control and exercised it in other areas of her life, like being bossy about the rules of writing detective fiction.

Sayers’s marriage was not her first bad relationship. She had an affair with a man who refused to marry her, claiming not to believe in marriage but later admitting he was “testing her,” like the lover Harriet Vane is accused of murdering in Strong Poison. She also had a child with a man who left her when he learned she was pregnant. Wish fulfillment through fiction is one of the rewards of writing fiction. I hope Sayers got some satisfaction out of killing off Philip Boyes—and skewering him again in Busman’s Honeymoon, when Lord Peter has the opportunity to observe that Harriet has not experienced sexual generosity before.

How can any reader resist a passage like this:
“He knew now that she could render back passion for passion with an eagerness beyond all expectation—and also with a kind of astonished gratitude that told him more than she knew....Peter, interpreting phenomena in the light of expert knowledge, found himself mentally applying to [Boyes] quite a number of epithets, among which ‘clumsy lout’ and ‘egotistical puppy’ were the kindest.”

Why do critics give Sayers such a hard time about making Lord Peter a human being of depth and complexity yet a little larger than life? She’s not the only writer to project a yearning for love—transference, to use a psychoanalytic term—onto a fictional character. If it’s done well enough, the character will become so vivid, memorable, and appealing that readers will do the same. For example, if Diana Gabaldon’s not in love with Jamie Fraser, I can’t imagine why so many readers are. Although her Outlander books aren’t mysteries, a remarkable number of subscribers to DorothyL admitted on the e-list that they’d be glad to go to bed with Jamie. I bet the sentiment is shared by many other readers of this wonderful series of historical time-travel romances. (I won’t say they transcend their genre, which is always an insult to genre fiction, but they are fine and satisfying novels.)

Would Sayers be as popular as she is today, fifty years after her death and seventy since she stopped writing mystery novels, if Lord Peter and Harriet were not in love and their love story so richly and passionately presented? I don’t think so. So stop picking at them, and leave them alone.

And Happy Valentine's Day!

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.

Then and Now . . .

By Lonnie Cruse

Every so often I read a book review about a mystery novel written many years ago. A book long out of print, available only on dusty antique store bookshelves or on the Internet, unless the author is popular enough to be reprinted in our time. Sometimes I'm curious enough (if the book is cheap enough) to buy a copy and read it. My, how things have changed, how writing is different now. Plots are different. Character development is different. Sometimes I'm disappointed because the mystery isn't as intricate as most mysteries today. But there are a lot of authors long gone whose work endures well beyond their passing. Authors like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and many others whose books seem to be timeless.

Agatha Christie's modern day critics sometimes claim she didn't "flesh out" her characters enough, that her books are all about the plot. Hmmm. Maybe, but I've read most of them and I haven't had any trouble picturing her characters as real. Particularly Poirot with his egg shaped head and carefully groomed mustache. Have you? Or Miss Marple, knitting and solving crime? Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter, and his great love, Harriett, aren't hard for me to imagine as real. And it was actually Sayers who inspired this post after I watched GAUDY NIGHT on DVD. I loved all of her books.

Every writer I know would love to not only have readers here and now, but somehow know that our books would be read twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years from now and still be considered well written despite any change in styles. So how did these writers do it? How did they manage to write books that would be read and loved long after they died? I haven't a clue. It's like art, I suppose, I know it when I see it, or in this case when I read it, and I suspect you do as well.

One author in particular comes to mind, Shirley Jackson. Jackson died in the mid-sixties, yet her book, WE SHALL ALWAYS LIVE IN THE CASTLE is still widely read and talked about. I read it twice, something I rarely do because there are "so many books, so little time" as most book lovers complain. Jackson's short story, THE LOTTERY still shocks readers just as much as it did when it appeared in a major magazine decades ago. Back then, many of the magazine's readers loved it while as many others unsubscribed in protest. Wow! And today, THE LOTTERY is still used in many college classes as an example of great writing. THAT is longevity. Having read most of her works, I'd have to say Jackson accomplished timelessness by the way she always surprises the reader at the end. No matter how much I've read her work, I can never guess the ending. She always catches me off guard.

As for the others, like Christie or Sayers? How did they do it? I'd have to say by creating characters the reader cares about, no matter what time period they lived in or were created in. Characters that stick with us. And story or plot lines that while common to any age (after all, there's nothing new on the earth, according to Solomon, and he said that quite a while back) today they still sound new when we read them. And last but not least, creating a place and time that we'd all like to visit or live in, no matter how long ago the book was written.

There are writers today whose works will be read and loved a hundred years from now, and boy howdy would I like to be one of them. But I'll settle for readers today.

Designing a Sleuth

Sandra Parshall

Recently I took part in a writers’ workshop where my job was to talk about creating an appealing and believable sleuth. The assignment made me realize that I’d never given any concentrated thought to the subject. Like a lot of writers, I suspect, I’ve developed my main characters through my plots, and they’ve been whatever the story demanded. However, a writer hoping to create a long-running series would be smart to focus on the character and build stories around him or her.

Editors today are looking for character-driven crime novels. You might think this has always been the case – weren’t Agatha Christie’s books built around Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot? – but the reader is actually given little information about some of mystery’s most famous sleuths. Christie never plumbed the depths of Miss Marple’s soul. She didn’t include flashbacks to Poirot’s tortured past. Her characters remain static, the same from book to book. Dorothy L. Sayers’s treatment of Lord Peter and Harriet Vane probably comes closest to the modern presentation of characters in crime novels who "grow and change" throughout a series.

A novel must have a solid plot, but character is usually more important. Plot problems can be fixed, but if you’ve written an entire novel around a dull, shallow character, meaningful repairs may be impossible. Agents and editors will tell you they “couldn’t connect with” your character, she’s too bland or too cool or too negative, she’s not different enough. We often hear that an editor is looking for series characters “unlike anything I’ve seen before.” This can lead writers to some strange choices, as they try to deliberately construct a rejection-proof sleuth. How about a blind detective who solves crimes primarily with her sense of smell? How about a guy who was in a devastating accident and now has two bionic arms that are strong enough to slay an army of bad guys? How about a flock of sheep that solve a murder? Oh, wait – the sheep mystery is a real book, published not long ago.

If your taste doesn’t normally run to the bizarre, and you doubt that you can carry it off, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to come up with something totally outside the norm. Try instead to create a character who will feel real and whose personality and abilities will win the readers’ affections and keep drawing them back to find out what’s happening in her life.

So what are in the ingredients for sleuth-making?

Above all, you should create a character you like and respect and want to spend a lot of time with – years of your life, if you’re lucky. The reader has to care about this person, but that won’t happen if the writer doesn’t care first. Sanity wears better than a collection of odd habits and extreme opinions. When a story world is populated by wildly colorful characters, the sleuth is often the sanest person in the book. A sense of humor is always endearing and can be used effectively to show the character's clear-eyed assessment of events.

It’s a given that your sleuth must be smart enough to solve crimes. If the character is an amateur, she must be smart enough to realistically succeed where the police fail. If your sleuth is a cop or P.I., she doesn’t have to be inhumanly brilliant, but she must be intelligent enough to make a living in one of those jobs. Do your research – don’t let your character make the sort of blunders that cause readers to groan aloud.

A sleuth should be savvy about people, able to read emotions and detect deception, attuned to the often subtle clues that give away clandestine relationships and unspoken animosity.

Stubbornness is essential. Major stubbornness. This is a person whose determination is fueled by obstacles, threats, and physical attacks. You can’t let your sleuth give up and go home to watch a favorite TV show in chapter 15, when any ordinary person would do exactly that.

A special skill or a fund of specialized knowledge will come in handy if you find a way for her to use it in solving crimes.

Today’s well-rounded and realistic sleuth needs a past, at least a few friends, and a family (even if it’s a single sibling or elderly aunt). Sidekicks abound in mysteries, and you can give a sidekick the colorful quirks that might seem over-the-top in a main character.

No real person is perfect, and a fictional character can’t be idealized either. Your sleuth needs flaws – balanced by virtues, of course. Coming up with something original isn’t easy, but the effort will pay off. The tough cop who’s battling a drinking problem has become a cliche. Drug and gambling problems are less common but no more appealing. Give this aspect of your character a lot of thought. You’ll be glad you did.

Above all, your sleuth needs a compelling reason to wade into a criminal investigation. These days, even the professionals must feel a personal stake in solving crimes. Curiosity isn’t enough for the amateur, and “it’s just my job” isn’t enough for a pro. Some readers still care most about the puzzle, the plot, but the majority want a novel to be an emotional experience for them. It won’t be if the sleuth is either too distant from the crime or is putting her life in danger out of simple curiosity.

That's my take on what makes a successful sleuth. I believe Ms. Christie would agree with me on some points -- but overall, she might be appalled at the lack of privacy afforded modern mystery sleuths!