Before you go, by Catriona

Which author(s) (living or dead) would you like to meet one-on-one to talk about the writing craft? What is it about their writing or life that most interests you?

I can't lie: I don't want to have dinner with any writers, living or dead, at the moment. I'm trying to wrangle a second draft into a third draft and hoping it's a final draft, and I want to have dinner with editors. I don't even want to have dinner with them (look at that; I can lie). I want to lock them in a basement and force them to fix this book for me. I'll pay them the advance and all the royalties in perpetuity. They can have their names on the cover instead of mine. Anything they want, just so I don't have to plug these plot holes and make this nonense hang together.

I really hate being a pantser.

Okay, now that's out of the way. I was fortunate enough to be nominated for the Bill Gottfried memorial award for historical fiction this year, and it got me thinking. As the years pass, this award will become like the Anthony, the Bruce Alexander and the Sue Feder, in that the award will continue to be coveted but the name won't resonate with the winners and nominees. I feel extremely lucky to have overlapped with Bill in the American mystery community. To know him as a salty, peppery, sometimes vinegary presence at literary salons and a wise and kind man all round.

So for my dream dinner party I'm choosing some writers I wish I had overlapped with a wee bit more than I did.

First, Mary Higgins Clark. I did meet her once or twice and I was in the same room as her a few more times, at the Edgars, while not winning the Mary Higgins Clark award, but I only heard her speak at length one time, during a librarians' tea at Bouchercon. She was a pistol: good without being sweet and sharp without being harsh. I'd love to sit with her and talk about her debut novel WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN and the upcoming sequel, WHERE ARE THE CHILDREN NOW, by her frequent co-author, Alafair Burke. (Is any of that because she might bring a copy and I wouldn't have to wait the five days till it comes out? I couldn't possibly comment.) 

My first question at this dinner would be "You know how a lot of writers say they can't write (or read) about children being harmed once they become parents? And you know how you were a widowed mother of five, and got up before dawn to write before the children were awake? And your first book was about murdered children? Is that mental toughness the thing that made you such a staggering success?"

I think I just answered my own question.

The first MHC I ever read,
in NYC, at Christmastime.
 

The next seat at this dinner table will be drawn out for Sue Grafton. I met her once too, very briefly, at a convention and couldn't quite believe that this un-grand, un-flashy mystery fan, completely absorbed in perusing the books for sale in the dealer's room was Kinsey Millhone's creator. Another good, lovely (but not sweetie-sweet) woman, as tough as she was talented, I'd love to get the chance to ask her all about keeping a long series up to scratch, I'm on sixteen; she wrote twenty-five and each one was as fine as the first.

The last place at my dream dinner party - it's just four of us, round a card table - is for a writer I admire enormously and feel I know even though she died in 2010, the year I moved the USA, and I never met her. Eleanor Taylor Bland wrote the absoutely stupendous Marti MacAlister series, a light touch on some pretty heavy issues, an odd couple to end all odd couples, and a - yes, okay - kick-ass heroine but one with a believable, complex, nuanced life that matters to her as much as the latest case ever could. What would I ask her? I would be at great risk of just fan-girling until she excused herself and climbed out of the loo window, I'm afraid. I would certainly tell her I named one of my characters Martine MacAllister, in an act of homage, and I'd tell her that my proudest job as Sisters in Crime president was overseeing the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for emerging writers of colour.

That just leaves one writer. After the meal, over coffee and bonbons, and if it was okay with the other three, I'd summon William Shakespeare. It's the law. My question would be "How?" but that's too big so I'd pick one play, a short one, not one of the really complicated ones - Macbeth would be ideal - and ask him to walk me, Mary, Sue and Eleanor through the process from lightbulb-moment to curtain-up. Because seriously, how?

Cx