Fangirl Stuff

 Q: 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?

 

-from Susan

 

Lucky me, I’ve met, dined with, learned from, and listened to many wonderful crime fiction writers working today, thanks to our conferences, conventions, and pandemic zoom sessions. There are other authors, many outside of the genre, that I’ve also heard and met. In fact, Catriona and I are going to a talk by the fearsomely talented Leila Mottley (Nightcrawling) later this month. 

 

Writers have become accessible, partly as a way for us to promote our books, and talking one-on-one with them via email after meeting them is also possible, as long as we’re not shy. I’m going to turn my focus toward the harder to reach writers I’d liked to share a day or evening with. They’re dead bodily, although their writing keeps them alive to me. 

 

I’d love to know how Agatha Christie plotted her mysteries. Did she start with a clear sense of the victim and the murderer, draw a mental straight line between them, and then muddy things up so readers couldn’t figure out who did it until all was revealed at the end? The Body in the Library is as good an example as any – she even withheld the victim’s real identity and had a devilish answer to the whole business. They may not meet current standards of deeper character development, but she really knew how to contrive a tricky plot and keep readers guessing.

 

When I need to step back from the current crime fiction tropes, I look for the old mass paperback editions of Nero Wolfe by Rex Stout. Yes, I know, sexist; I plead it was the times. Stout wrote 33 Nero Wolfe novels and 39 novellas. I guess I’d like to know if he ever felt he’d had enough of the fat man and Archie, or if new ways to set them in motion kept him engaged as a writer? Were they fun to write? Did he want his characters to grow (they didn’t) or was he content with having them behave in the same predictable ways as new plots swirled around them? Was that his magic potion for success?

 

Aside from crime fiction, I’d relish time with Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) to hear how he managed to embed serious social criticisms into superficially entertaining stories without turning off readers? He needed to make money from his writing so he had to think about seducing his audiences, but he made a personal decision not to avoid thorny topics, even as he disguised the bitter within classic storytelling. He also kept his sense of humor in his work. I read he was privately impatient at times, though, so he might not respond to my invitation to dinner.

 

Will Shakespeare, of course, but he was quick-witted, gregarious, dramatic, and always writing. Even if I could snare him for coffee, I expect I’d be tongue-tied and awestruck, and he’d show off a bit and then tell me he had to run because he was overseeing the production of a new play, something called As You Like It. Maybe he’d offer to leave a ticket for me at the Globe door. Anyway, what could I ask him? “How can I bring a character to eternal robust life using only dialogue?”

 

As I think about this, I have a hunch they would end up thinking they’d wasted good writing time talking with me, even if the roast beef, Cabernet, and chocolate mousse had been delicious. 

Note: Photos of these long gone authors that I found are owned - have been, as they say, "monetized"  - by large companies that suck them up, so I can't include them, even in a short, editorial tribute. I can share this so I will: Newest book out to some very nice reviews. If you're up for an armchair visit to France, please consider: