My Weblog

The Mother of All Tours

By Elaine Viets

Book tours are where readers get to meet their favorite authors, right?

Partly.

But we also get to meet you, and promote a favorite cause, see interesting places and eat good food. Let me tell you about some of the top stops on my upcoming tour for "Board Stiff," my twelfth Dead-End Job mystery. The book comes out just in time for Mother’s Day.

"Board Stiff" passed the first hurdle and got a good review in Publishers Weekly. I hope there will be more, but I breathe a little easier once the verdict is in from the first major review. Publishers Weekly says "Board Stiff" is "entertaining . . . Viets shines at evoking Florida’s vibrant landscape and even more colorful characters."

This is the ultimate beach book. I want you to feel like you’re sitting on the sand when you read it. Newlywed private eyes Helen Hawthorne and Phil Sagemont must solve a murder at a crowded beach – with no witnesses. The trail leads to Helen’s hometown of St. Louis.
"Board Stiff" debuts at the Malice Domestic Convention in Bethesda, Maryland. This is a big family reunion for traditional mystery lovers. Stop by the noon signing at the Hyatt Regency Hotel Saturday, May 4, for your copy.

Sunday, May 5, I’m signing with Femme Marcia Talley, and mystery writers Anne Cleeves, Denise Swanson and Frances Brody at the Five Dangerous Dames cocktail party at the Eastport Yacht Club. Treat yourself to mysteries and an amazing view.

Monday, May 6, I head up with the other dangerous dames to the Festival of Mystery in Oakmont, Pa. The festival is an international event with some fifty mystery writers from around the world. Sponsored by the Mystery Lovers Bookshop, the proceeds go to charity. Mystery readers arrive by the busload – and I’m not exaggerating.
Thursday, May 9, I’m in downtown St. Louis signing at the newly renovated St. Louis Central Library. Designed by Cass Gilbert, the same architect who did the U.S. Supreme Court, the redone library is supposed to look spectacular. I can’t wait to see it.
Friday, I’m speaking in Festus, which used to be a country town. My, how it’s grown. It’s now a city-sized suburb of St. Louis with rabid book lovers. Festus took an old store and made it into a modern library.

Friday night, May 10, is a benefit signing for the St. Louis Regional Chapter of ALS – that’s Lou Gehrig’s disease. I’ll personally donate 40% – $9.58 – for every copy of "Board Stiff" sold at the event, to the local ALS chapter. Diana Wunning, a friend and reader, has eleven people in her family with ALS. She chooses not to know if she has the gene, but campaigns constantly to find a cure for ALS, even traveling to meet with lawmakers in Washington. Can't make the event? Order your signed copy in advance from Diana at  [email protected]

 

Saturday afternoon, I’m talking at Barnes & Noble Ladue. That’s always a party.

On Sunday, Mother’s Day, I’m at Left Bank Books in the Central West End, one of the handsomest sections of St. Louis.
Then it’s back home to South Florida for more signings.  You’ll find the details at

http://www.elaineviets.com/new/Events/default.asp

 

 

Can’t make the signings?

Contact any store and order your autographed copy. Buy yourself a slice of summer.

 

 

 

Rediscovering Deadlines

by Dana

I've had two or three springs so far this year, in small doses.  Since I've been traveling to promote my Fangborn novel, Seven Kinds of Hell, I've had warm spring in Houston, visiting Murder by the Book, a chilly Milwaukee pre-spring signing at Mystery One and hanging at Castle Crimespree, and a lovely Californian weekend at Mysterious Galaxy and WonderCon, which I described here.  I'll be discovering what the weather's like next week at the Edgars Symposium in New York (where I'll be moderating the panel “Creatures We Write” with Femmes Toni and Charlaine (who is currently MWA president), my E(vil) T(win) S.J. Rozan, and Edgar-Nominee Ben H. Winters).  And then to Malice Domestic, in Bethesda, MD where so many Femmes Fatales will be attending, and we'll be rooting for Femmes Catriona and Hank, who are both nominated for Agathas!  (My own “Mischief in Mesopotamia” is nominated for Best Short Story!  You can see all the nominees and read all the short story nominees here.)

At home, New England spring is traditionally on-again, off-again, and but the trees and flowers are finally starting to bloom.  Alas, I'm on deadline, so the only time I see it is when I stick my nose outside to get the mail.  I've taken pictures to gaze at, while I eat my writer-gruel, and it may be warm enough to crack a window, but for now, I'm chained to my desk.  I've become withdrawn, obsessive, and immersed in several of my own little worlds.

This is a good thing.

For the first time in a long time, I have deadlines.  Not self-imposed “would be great if I could finish by Bouchercon” deadlines.  Real, publishing deadlines. 

This is also a very good thing.

It's been a while since I've had a multiple-book contract, and I haven't had to schedule so much of my life around someone else's deadlines.  Sure, there've been a few short stories that I had to get in on a certain time, but there's a big difference the occasional busy month and knowing three years in advance what you have to have done.  Novels...also a lot different.  Not just in that they're so much longer, but you need to think out the story arcs so far ahead.  And because I'm writing three Fangborn short stories to alternate with the novels, I'm plotting many different aspects of the Fangborn world I'm building. 

Plus, there are other projects I'd already agreed to.  Plus convention travel.  Plus, occasionally, Real Life.  That's a lot of juggling, a lot of planning.

Because I'm a plan-aholic, at one point late last year, I took a look at my giant wall calendar, with all this year's travel and deadlines.  I hyperventilated for five minutes, then went and ordered a notebook computer, which has been traveling with me.  You can see it below; it's decorated appropriately (and if you're going to Edgar Symposium or Malice Domestic, I'll have “Fangborn” and “Fill in your own fanged creature” stickers to give  away).  It's worked out well; when I get home and get back to work, that half hour jotting notes for a story or blog in the airport is like a gift from the elves (the shoe-making kind, not the archery kind).  It might not have seemed like much at the time, but getting the ideas down gives your subconscious a chance to work on it.  Every little bit helps.

Busy is good, when you're a writer.  I'm more than happy to be getting into the deadline-rhythm again, as long as I have Giant Wall Calendar and Very Small Computer on my side. 

How do you cope with deadlines, writing or otherwise?

Keep Calm And Adore British Crime Lit

 

from Mary

 

April has been a fantastic reading month, mainly, once again, due to the exquisite, delightful and oft-times gruesome imaginations of those crazy Brits. Oh, the erudition. The latent Latin in their genes. The turn of phrase o'er heath and moor. The turn of stomachs of modern autopsies. The monstrous cruelty of medieval hangings.

 

 

(crewel-ty is much less disturbing, photographically speaking, don't you think?)

 

I'd read the first two books in C.J. Sansom's excellent Matthew Shardlake series a while back. In the third book, SOVEREIGN, Shardlake, a humped-back lawyer who worked for Cromwell during the dissolution of the monasteries, must travel with King Henry VIII's entourage from York to London.

 

 

His job is to ensure the humane treatment of a prisoner, one allegedly involved with a group of anti-Henry conspirators and now on his way to the Tower. The nice gentlemen there just want to ask him a few questions. Heat up a few pokers. Crank the rack wheel, just to make sure it's working right. Shardlake isn't so sure he will make it to London alive himself after several brushes with death.

I enjoyed being in the world of the story so much, I read the next one in the series too. REVELATION takes place in London in 1543, two years after Shardlake's traumatic experiences on the York trip. He has vowed he will never again work on a case that involves the royal court, and he takes a lower-paying, zero-adventure job at Lincoln's Inn.

 

 

Religious factions are still at each others' throats, the poor are getting poorer, and Henry VIII has a new Catherine. When an old friend is found dead, his throat cut and his body submerged in a fountain, Shardlake and his assistant Barak search for the killer. 

I'm reading the next one, HEARTSTONE, now. Can you tell I'm hooked? I even found a special coffee mug that has Henry and his disappearing wives on it. 

 

Fast forward several hundred years to Victorian London ....

 

CLOCKWORK PRINCESS is the third in the Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare. It's actually a paranormal adventure romance, so not strictly historical. And it's more of a Young Adult type. And, well, although the books are set in London, I don't think the author is actually British. Still, I am absolutely crazy about these books. 

The young heroes are Shadowhunters, a race descended from angels. Their job is to protect and defend humans against the warlocks, demons, evil gigantic wormslug things, and all other mean creatures of the underworld.

Trust me, buy and give the series to the teen readers in your life. After you read them and brush the cookie crumbs off the pages, of course.

Last month, I talked about a new author to me, Benedict Jacka, and his first book FATED. When I bought it, I also bought MIDNIGHT RIOT by another new-to-me author, Ben Aaronovitch.

 

Woo-weee, great cover, great book. And, you'll notice our own wonderful Femme Charlaine gave it a blurb. This is the first of a series, modern-day setting, about Peter Grant, a young constable just out of police training. At a crime scene, he meets a witness and realizes he's the only one who can see the guy. YAY - more paranormal London! This would make an excellent TV series. I sure hope the producers of the new SHERLOCK will take it on, so fans (me) will have something fun to watch during those long stretches of nothing much between Sherlock episodes.

That's me for now. What's new and exciting in your reading world?

 

 

Where the Bodies are Buried

I sent an email to a friend last week, telling her a reporter wanted to talk to her about me, and I added, “Just don’t tell her where the bodies are buried.” Of course, this was a reference to the saying, “Friends will help you move. A real friend will help you move bodies.”

Just to clear the air on that issue, I’ve never buried a body, and unless my friends and readers are much more adventurous than I am, I’m willing to believe none of you have, either. So why are we so fond of that saying?

I’ll tell you where the real bodies are buried: in our memories. All of us remember something painful, something we should feel remorse over, something shameful, or some incident that evokes all three of those reactions. I’m not going in for true confessions, here, but I’m willing to bet that something popped into your mind just then, something you’d rather not have in your memory bank.
Perhaps you can’t even absolve yourself of something: but your best friend can do it. You don’t have to be a hero to your true friend. I think your true friend will see you, warts and all, and still stick to you.
Maybe we should say, “Friends will help you move. A real friend will help you move a body. And the best friend will still like you afterward.

My favorite movie illustration? “Grosse Pointe Blank,” where John Cusack’s hit man is assisted by his high school buddy (Jeremy Piven) at their high school reunion, in disposing of the body of another hit man Cusack has dispatched with a ball point pen. (Maybe I have a macabre sense of humor, but that’s my favorite touch, the ball point pen.) (Oh, and I guess there’s no "maybe" about my sense of humor.)
So I wish all of you a friend close enough to absolve you of your less-than-noble moments, because I assure you . . . we all have them.

And by the way, if you need a body buried . . . I have a shovel. Just saying.

Charlaine Harris

A Bouquet of Roses

It's flowers instead of words because words fail me this week.  These are from my garden today, with love, to innocent victims of hate and heartlessness anywhere:

Paradise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All-american Beauty

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rainbow Sorbet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Moondance

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perfect Love

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Passionate Kisses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

California Dreamin'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Limoncello

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cinquo de Mayo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and Eternal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now all together, with irises:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If only the people who name roses could just be in charge of everything.

 

(On Monday: Charlaine)

Vacationing with your characters

by Kris Neri

One of the great joys of writing a novel series is that, over time, you get experience new challenges right along with your protagonist. With each encounter that I share with my series protagonist, Tracy Eaton, I also learn more about the past that shaped her. You see, while we writers write these books, it’s truly the characters that reveal what they want us to know about their lives.

I first met Tracy when she and her daffy mother, movie star mother Martha Collins, walked onto the page of one of my early short stories, “L.A. Justice (MURDER BY THIRTEEN/My first Derringer Award winner!).” Tracy presented herself to me as a mystery writer who desperately wanted to be an amateur sleuth, such as the one she wrote about. 

Martha tossed a doozy of a first case into Tracy’s lap. After learning she’d been framed for the murder of her latest boy toy, Martha begged her daughter, not to solve the murder, the way other amateur sleuths do, but to obliterate any connection to her before the police, the mob, the media, and her husband could learn of it. The way Tracy accomplished that task was highly unusual, to say the least.

Well, given the reality-challenged background that her mother provided, what else could it have been? I learned in that short story that Tracy’s approach to crime solving was going to be highly unconventional. It has continued to be off-the-wall, although highly effective, in each of the four novels that have followed. I wouldn’t have thought she
could top herself, yet she always has.

It’s the past that shaped Tracy into the unconventional sleuth that she is that continues to intrigue me. In the course of this series, I’ve learned about the circumstances of her unusual birth (DEM BONES’ REVENGE), the cause of the feud between Tracy’s mother and her uptight mother-in-law (REVENGE FOR OLD TIMES’ SAKE), and so much more.

And now, in the just-released REVENGE ON ROUTE 66, she has finally given me a look at the special times she and her father shared on their Route 66 road trips.

This book features various characters’ memories of earlier outings on the Mother
Road, and I especially loved what Tracy shared about her second jaunt on Route 66 with her dad, aging Hollywood hunk Alec Grainger, when she was six years old, a trip that included a stay with his friend Lucy Crier in New Mexico, a woman who has now served many years in prison for murder.

I sat beside him, my little patent leather Mary Janes barely stretching beyond the deep bench seat. On my lap I held a lunch pail—the kind with the dome lid that workmen carry—beautifully painted, but with a misspelled Hollywood sign on an artificially green hill.

Dad beamed down at me. “It was nice of Lucy to give you one of her precious lunch pails for your birthday, wasn’t it, Tracy? I’ve never known her to part with one of them for anyone. She couldn’t very well give away all her decorative lunch buckets and still call her restaurant The Lunch Pail.”

Moments later, Tracy asked…

“Why did those policemen keep coming to see Lucy?”

Dad hesitated. “That was because of her friend Billy Rob. You remember him from when you met him last year, right? Well, something bad happened to him the first night we were there, when all the police cars came and woke us up. Remember that, Tracy?”

I remembered his trying to distract me from the reason why all those police cars showed up that night.

“You see, honey, Billy Rob went to heaven. The policemen wanted to talk to Lucy about that. That’s why they kept coming back.”

Went to heaven. Sheesh! I was six, not stupid. I knew all about death—I had goldfish. We were always having toilet bowl funerals for them. I did wonder, though, where they would find a big enough toilet to flush Billy Rob.

Well, I’d always known Tracy had a unique take on things, and I saw now that it had started early. Then I learned something fundamental that shaped the person Tracy was to become:

“Daddy, Lucy didn’t just give me the lunch pail, she gave me money, too.”

While staring through the windshield, he shook his head. “Now why would she do that? She knows she can’t afford it. The lunchbox was enough. How much did she give you?”

“Five…”

“Five dollars? That’s too much.”

“No, Daddy, it’s—” I broke off suddenly, making an instantaneous choice not to correct him. The rush of keeping that first secret gave me a lifelong love of them.

Secrets and lies…the girders of Tracy’s life, a vital part of every novel we’ve created together. I’d always realized she’d had a love of secrets, but I’d never known why. I might never have learned if I hadn’t agreed to take this Route 66 jaunt with her.

Vacationing with your characters — I recommend it to every writer. You can’t imagine what they’ll show you. 

 

The Case of the Squeaking Cat(s)

Toby, my male rescue cat, was roughly 12-15 months old when I took him in, and he's been with me and Pippa, my female rescue, six months now. He's a big, cuddly guy, probably about 12 pounds, gray and white, with interesting gold marks around his eyes. He looks like he's got a light line of golden kohl around each eye -- perhaps an Abyssinian or a Siamese in his gene pool?

He's a cuddler, when he's in the mood. Most of the time he's a laid-back kind of guy, although he and Pippa (who weighs about 4 pounds) do like to wrestle, chiefly after I turn out the lights and try to go to sleep. Unlike Pippa, a calico who is the poster kitty for high maintenance, Toby is much more relaxed.

Until I sit down at my desktop computer in my office, that is. That's when the squeaking starts. And I do mean squeaking -- little high-pitched sounds perhaps designed to make me think he's in terrible danger and must be rescued at once. (Like a responsible pet owner, I had him neutered, but he had a high-pitched voice before that...)

Naturally the only thing that quiets the squeaks is some hearty head-rubbing. And, yes, I do know I'm enabling him by rewarding such behavior ... but what ya gonna do?

The only other times I hear such a chorus of squeaking ... in which Pippa joins of course ... are at breakfast and dinner. Then I get a duet of operatic proportions by duelling lyric soprano and countertenor. Renee Fleming and David Daniels could get a few tips from Pippa and Toby.

So if my editor wants to know why I'm running late on my latest book, well ...

Creative Destruction

 

By Elaine Viets

"Board Stiff," my twelfth Dead-End Job Mystery, will be published this May. My editor sent me the first copy yesterday. I took my new book out of its bubble-wrap swaddling and admired its perfectly formed fingers and toes.

You’d think after a dozen mysteries in my South Florida series, I’d be used to the first look. Ho-hum. A new book. Yawn.

But I still get a thrill when I hold my latest mystery for the first time. I pick it up, admire shiny cover and carry it around. A lot of long days and sleepless nights went into making that book. And this baby was special.

I’d an easy time starting "Board Stiff," once I figured out Helen Hawthorne’s newest Dead-End Job. I got the idea after I saw an article in the paper about cutthroat practices at the beach concessions. The struggle for tourist dollars is fierce in Florida, and some parasailing, surfboard, Jet Ski, and paddleboard rental operators actually sabotage their rivals. A few go so far as damaging equipment, shredding parasails or stealing boards. The vandalism is timed right before Spring Break, when the demand for beach concessions is highest and the operators will lose the most money.
For "Board Stiff," I took this competition one step farther and had it turn murderous. My character, Sunny Jim, owner of Sunny Jim’s Stand-up Paddleboard Rental in mythical Riggs Beach, believes someone is plotting to ruin his business. He hires the PI team of Helen and her new husband, Phil Sagemont, to investigate.  When an innocent tourist dies in what looks like an accident, Sunny Jim insists she was murdered. Helen and Phil, along with dozens of others, saw the tourist tumble off a paddleboard.

\But the medical examiner says she was murdered. Now the PI partners have to solve a murder with no witnesses and no weapon. The trail leads them back to Helen’s hometown of St. Louis.

Nice plot, right? A sort of outdoor locked room mystery. I’d breezed halfway through the book, when I stopped and reread what I’d written so far.

The novel was going well, all right. Too well.

The story needed more tension. Helen and Phil were partners in life as well as in Coronado Investigations. Their marriage was happy.

Boring. Even the best marriage goes through tough times. The couple needed some serious trouble, but it had to be part of the plot. I couldn’t create a complication just for the heck of it.

I changed the plot so they were on the verge of divorce. Now Helen had made a major mistake, one that could end their marriage and their new business. Would the marriage survive? Well, Helen had survived without a husband before – and so had this series. I’d just have to see.

Things were too easy on the mystery scene, too. Another series regular, Valerie Cannata, the Channel Seventy-Seven investigative reporter, sneaked a video camera out of the station to tape a bribery attempt at a restaurant. Once Valerie succeeded – and this Emmy-Award winning reporter always succeeded – Coronado Investigations could wrap up the case.

Predictable.

But what if Valerie failed?

The Femmes Fatales’ own Emmy-Award winning reporter, Hank Philippi Ryan, told me what would happen to a reporter who "borrowed" a camera without station authorization. Since taping in Florida is illegal without both parties’ consent, Hank explained  silent taping. That’s taking video, but no audio, and it’s legal.

My plot was in ruins. My deadline was fast approaching. I rewrote the entire book.

Is it a better mystery? I’m waiting to find out what you think. "Board Stiff" will be out as a hardcover and an e-book in less than a month.

Have you ever torn up a project that was going too well?

Got 50 seconds? Check out the trailer for my new Dead-End Job mystery, "Board Stiff" here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppzz6vX8jvU  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facts Behind the Fiction!

Hank Phillippi Ryan: You know Hallie Ephron, of course. If you don't, go to her website RIGHT NOW and see what youre missing! (Of course, now, you're no longer missing it!)(She's third from left,(after mysterious blonde, and Jan Brogan) then me, then Bill Landay, and Barbara Shapiro and Chris Castellani.) 

The storied and glorious Hallie has a new book out--fascinating suspense fiction, as always, with a tether in reality. She's getting asked about it all over the country--check her website for when she's visiting near you! But here's the scoop--before anyone else! 

 

Facts Behind the Fiction:

            Hallie Ephron's Inspirations for THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN

Hallie Ephron: Yes, THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN is completely fiction. I made up Mina Yetner, the 90-year-old woman who helps her neighbor's 30-year-old daughter figure out why her mother's house has turned into a hoarder's nest. And yet, and yet... both characters have a fair amount of me in them.

 I made up Sparkles Variety where many scenes take place. And yet, and yet... there was a Sparkles Variety around the corner from where I live; it closed a few years ago (there were spangles in the sign.)

Over and over, writing this book, I drew from fact to create fiction. Here are some of the questions readers ask me:

 Did a bomber really crash into the Empire State Building in 1945? Yes. It did.

Here’s an excerpt from a vivid account of the moment in an excerpt from Hilton Obenzinger’s “New York on Fire:”

     B-25 Bomber Crashes into the Empire State Building July 28, 1945

Colonel Smith lowered the landing gear of the B-25 thinking he was about to land in Newark when through the fog he saw that he was heading directly for Radio City Music Hall. Quickly he began to raise his landing-gear tilting his nose up almost to a stall veering just past the buff-colored Salmon Building.

They say one of the secretaries in the Catholic War Relief Office on the 79th floor of the Empire State Building could see Colonel Smith’s Clark Gable mustache as the cockpit filled up with limestone and chrome mullions from around the building’s windows. Streams of molten high-octane fuel cascaded down the side of the building.

The GIs on the deck of the troopship on the Hudson shouted, The Japs are bombing New York with V-2s!

Why do so few people remember that crash?

Just a week later, the U.S. bombed Hiroshima.

Did an elevator operator survive an 80-story fall?

  She did. The photo is of her recovering in the hospital. Here is an excerpt from Betty Lou Gower Oliver’s obituary: "As a young 20 year old bride, Betty Lou Oliver was the elevator operator of elevator #6 in the Empire State Building when Lt. Col. Willian F. Smith’s B-25 hit the north side of the building between the 79th and 80th floor on July 28th, 1945. Seriously injured, she was put in an elevator for evacuation to medical help. … "

The car and elevator operator plunged 1,000 feet (75 stories) into a sub-basement. The freefall of the elevator was broken by the massive coils of cables that had fallen to the bottom of the shaft. Despite suffering a broken back and legs, the operator survived. She had to be cut from the mangled wreckage. July 28th was supposed to be her last day on the job. 



She recovered in less than eight months, and returned to Ft. Smith, AR, with her husband Oscar Lee Oliver. She had three children and seven grandchildren. She died November 24, 1999.

Was there a second survivor in the elevator?

 Uh, no. I made that up. And to tell you why would spoil it for you.

Higgs Point in the Bronx, with its view of a marsh and Manhattan sky line -- is it a real place?

 The details of the neighborhood are entirely fiction but geographically the place exists. Higgs Point is based on a neighborhood the Harding Park neighborhood in Clason Point at the southern tip of the Bronx.

It's across the water from LaGuardia, where the East River meets the Long Island Sound, and roughly where the Bronx Whitestone Bridge connects Queens and the Bronx. Like Higgs Point in the book, the real neighborhood has a tidal marsh, lagoons, and an anomalous collection of 1920′s bungalows and summer houses lined up on narrow streets, and a fantastic view of the Manhattan skyline.

A huge bonus was the neighborhood’s history. The indigenous Siwanoy Indians, who were driven from the area in the 1700′s, called it Snakapins, meaning “land between two waters.” At the turn of the 20th century, ferries brought summer-weary visitors there from Queens to swim on its beaches and enormous swimming pool (called The Inkwell because the water piped directly from the East River was that dark), play at its amusement park, and gamble, carouse at its saloons and casino, and rent tents on platforms lined up at the water's edge.

 Did you draw from your own experience, writing a young woman whose mother is dying?

My mother died when she was 56; I was 23. Like the mother in the book, she'd been an alcoholic for decades, sadly at a time before treatments for depression had been developed and at a time when there was so much shame associated with being a woman and an alcoholic. I wanted to write about how complicated it is, losing a mother who, on the one level you love and admire enormously, and on another level you feel so relieved that finally "it's over."

Guilt, grief, anger -- they get all mixed up together. So yes, I drew plenty.

Wuthering Heights meets Afghanistan--?

“In their unsettling romance that crosses small town social lines as well as the oceans and continents between Vermont and Afghanistan, the lovers at the core of Abide with Me strip away all that is unnecessary as they seek the essence of true love: it may stumble, but it will always survive.”

                – Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain on ABIDE WITH ME

 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Okay, is this irresistible, or what?

Here’s how Sabin Willett’s editor describes his newest novel, ABIDE WITH ME: “In this novel inspired by Wuthering Heights, a small town bad boy forged by the fires of Afghanistan returns home, still burning with a romantic obsession nothing can quench.”

But Sabin Willett is not just a novelist, and not just an attorney. In 2005, with colleagues at his law firm, he began representing Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. They were neither terrorists nor enemies Willett explains, but “Muslim refugees from China taken by mistake in the fog of war following the Afghanistan invasion in 2001. They were held for years because they could not be returned to China, and no other country would take them.”

And in Guantanamo, he says, is where his new book was born. So—I wanted you to meet him!

 HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Tell us about the book!

 SABIN WILLETT: What happens when the boys we sent off to war come back? Not the college boys, not the Wall Street set -- the boys who lacked the chances, who went to Afghanistan for want of a better idea? What happens when a girl turns her back on the urgency of love, because the lover is not from the right world? And what if we throw these two questions together?

There is an old house in the town, a mansion in an old family for more than a hundred years. What is the strange pull and fascination of that house on the lovers? And what happens when this all happens in a small, gossipy town, where everyone knows everyone's business? That's Abide With Me.

HANK: What was the inspiration for writing it?

SABIN WILLETT: There were many. I wanted to write a serious love story—I had not done that before. Meeting young soldiers in Guantánamo triggered something in me, and some of the nights there found their way into episodes. The bowl of night, for example. The stars in Cuba are astonishing on a clear night, and I remember on a lonely night there being reminded of the first quatrain in Omar Khayyam—that in turn led me to picture a night in a mountain firebase, where a lonely soldier studies the stars. Williamstown, Massachusetts, suggested to me a look and feel of the Heights itself. Emma I created, but where creations like her come from, I can’t say.

HANK: More about your work at Guantanamo in a minute, okay? You’ve said you love Wuthering Heights—but tell us more about how that percolated into this book.

SABIN WILLETT: I am fascinated by old houses that are in families for generations. With walk-in closets, and back stairs, and sleep porches; with attics and towers and nooks and crannies; with old boxes on shelves in the closets, and in the boxes, old letters, handwritten -- the ink fading. The house has a history; it becomes a character in the story.

I found myself writing a love story of impossibility, at the center of which lay a house. And at some point I said, well, this seems familiar. Why not have Em's sisters be Anne and Charlotte? Why not have the boy's background be mysterious, argued about, never explained? And, well, one thing led to another.

HANK: There’s a level of..romance..that’s not like your mystery novels. Where did that come from?

SABIN WILLETT: There's nothing more urgent than war, unless it be an impossible desire. So I thought, it's high time to write about both.

HANK: On a different topic--What compels you to advocate for the Uighur prisoners at Guantánamo Bay?

SABIN WILLETT: I got into that case mainly because the idea of sanctioned torture was abhorrent to me, and the idea of a prison beyond law equally so. Once I met the clients, the injustice riveted me, and it became very personal.

HANK: If you could make one change to the way soldiers reenter civilian life after returning from war, what would it be?

SABIN WILLETT: I don’t have a good answer to this question. The transition to civilian life is too abrupt for most to manage, but I don’t know what would improve that other than a national resolve never to go to war except where there is an existential crisis. I think what bewilders many soldiers is the idea that their return is unremarked, just as their experience in the war was unimportant to the people back home. That may be the intolerable thing.

HANK: I love thinking about how your brain works—do you think of yourself as a lawyer, or author, or activist? How do you organize your life?

SABIN WILLETT: Well, when you figure out how my brain works, would you send me a memo? How do I think of myself? A little bit of all three, but mainly as the guy with the plates. Remember the old Ed Sullivan show? No, you are far too young to remember the old television variety show, with goofy Ed Sullivan introducing pre-adolescent Beatles, and other acts. One of his familiar ones was the guy with the plates. The guy had a row of rods. On top of the rods, plates. The plates were spinning.

So long as they were spinning, they wouldn't clatter and fall to the floor and smash But when they slowed down, they'd begin to wobble, and then to teeter, and then... So the guy with the plates would race along his row of rods, topping up spin, rescuing wobblers. Plate to plate, spin to spin.

 That's how I think of myself.

HANK: Too young to remember Ed Sullivan? Huh. Yeah, sure. In fact, I’ve described myself as a plate-spinner, too. So—questions for Sabin? And we’re giving away a copy of ABIDE WITH ME to a lucky commenter!