An Interview with Carole Nelson Douglas -- Part I

Carole Nelson Douglas has written 60 novels, many of them in three different mystery series. Today she talks a little about her writing process and how she approaches the Victorian era series that stars Irene Adler. (You can read a review of the first book in that series, Goodnight, Mr. Holmes, HERE. )

E.V.: When did you first become interested in writing fiction?

C.N.D: In grade school I wrote, directed, and acted in plays, but I had to dragoon neighborhood kids as actors and audience. My mother put up a curtain between the living and dining rooms and served popcorn. Some plays were presented outdoors. “Cats on My Back,” was a particular hit. I begged a black cat product poster from my neighborhood shoe repair shop and adapted it into an advertising piece for the play. What a baby impresario! Imagine what I could have done with the Internet and YouTube! I’d always wanted to be an actress. My college majors were theater and English Lit. I always liked to write, but never expected to make writing my career, either in journalism or fiction.

         I wrote my first short story for an inspiring history teacher in high school (and dramatized the whole of Ivanhoe in one classroom hour). No wonder I started a historical novel in both high school and college. That college novel, Amberleigh--finished 11 years later and published three years after that

--was my professional fiction publishing debut, although I’d been a newspaper reporter and feature writer since college graduation.   

         I was moved to pull out Amberleigh to finish and market it because I was frustrated by years of hitting the glass ceiling in journalism, even though I’d been “the first woman” at my newspaper in many areas and had won numerous reporting/writing awards. 

My mentor was the late novelist, playwright, Broadway and Hollywood director and writer, and all-around swell guy, Garson Kanin. He took Amberleigh to his publisher because he was so enamored with an interview and article I’d done with him five years before. Doubleday said they would have bought the book “two years earlier,” but the Gothic mystery genre was now “off market.” The editor added that my novel transcended genre and could “still sell.” The first of several editors at other publishing houses she recommended bought it, along with my second historical novel. I was off and running, but next turned to writing high fantasy. 

E.V.: You’ve written 60 novels, including three highly successful mystery series (Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Sherlock Holmes, Midnight Louie, a cat PI, and Delilah Street, a paranormal PI). How do you manage to be so productive?

C.N.D: My years as a newspaper reporter were a baptism of fire in how to write under any deadline. I’d only worked on the high school newspaper previously, so I had to develop confidence and quickness on the job at a metropolitan daily. I stayed until 7 p.m. the first six months until I got up to speed. After that leap, I came to define a professional writer as one who never slips below a certain level, no matter the situation. And some situations can be insanely stressful.

E.V.: What is your writing schedule like? Do you aim for a certain number of hours a day? A certain word count each day?

C.N.D.: I track word count and date at the top of the working manuscript. That’s more to encourage me to visualize the progress I’ve made than an iron-clad prod to write at a certain rate. I used to write a book over six months, two a year. With the addition of time-eaters like Internet, email, and social media, I work in more concentrated stints, but still do two books a year. I discovered I mimic the pace my newspaper years, when I did interviews and information-gathering in the mornings and wrote stories in the afternoon for the next day’s paper. So I write from noon to five or six.

About Irene Adler (The woman Sherlock Holmes refers to as The Woman):

E.V.: What stirred your imagination to write the Irene Adler series? Did the character just “speak” to you while reading “A Scandal in Bohemia?” Or did the idea come to you little by little?

C.N.D.: What inspired me was reading a publishing announcement of another new spin-off Sherlock Holmes series, and realizing only men did this.

         Women must have grown up with the stories, as I had. Why did none write a woman protagonist from the Canon? Looking for such a woman, I originally rejected Irene Adler. A glamorous performer who slept her way up was not the strong, independent woman I wanted. Finally, I reread “A Scandal in Bohemia” after many years and realized the “Irene” I was rejecting was the stereotypical “Victorian vamp” lesser male authors wrote after Doyle, not Doyle’s character, whose word was “inviolate,” and who had “the mind of the most resolute of men.”  

         Besides, having read and reread Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories as a child, I had played Watson in a high school skit I wrote. In my later journalism career, I was one of only two women to have a weekly column at my metro daily newspaper, “Good Living After 60.” (The other wrote a teen advice column.) Not realizing this was a trivial “beat” regarded as a sop to the older population and a way to guarantee “filler” Monday morning copy. I ran with it and collected some amazing oral histories. My modest interview subjects often made writing the required thirty inches a tough go, though. 

         A courtly gentleman calligrapher for St. Paul Winter Carnival had almost nothing to say. In desperation that Friday afternoon, I put Holmes and Watson on “The Case of the Curious Cursive” to discover who that person was, and won Minneapolis-St. Paul’s most prestigious writing award, for Columnists. I was competing with a perennially winning guy who went climbing in the Himalayas, among others of that all-male cast. And my humble column on an even more humble subject won, for women and for me.     

         Besides, being an actor, I always had those iconic Holmes and Watson voices in my head.

E.V.: The Adler mysteries are so richly textured in setting details; what is your approach to your research? Do you spend time in London and Europe, visiting the areas where Irene and Godfrey and Nell have their adventures? Do you mainly read, drawing from many sources?

C.N.D.: Thank you. I’d had an incredible and educational group trip to Europe for two months in college. My mother was a modestly paid elementary school teacher, but some money from my father’s death had recently become available and I was able to go at the last minute, a horrible, fresh inoculation scab on my arm raising joking comment across Europe. On that trip I witnessed a startling incident of British prejudice against the Irish, which became key to my first novel (Amberleigh, already started). I still deal that issue in my soon-to-be-27-book Midnight Louie mystery series, which has a counterterrorism subplot involving Ireland and the IRA. 

         As a theatre major, I’m familiar with the “voice” of many periods of history. I wanted to be a costume and set designer as well as an actor, and had been drawing my own book of period costume designs since high school. I call myself a literary chameleon, because I love to change voices and I evoke writers from Oscar Wilde to Damon Runyon in parts of my writing. Reading poetry aloud from childhood, and then later breaking down the techniques of my favorite poets—Poe first, then Elinor {that’s correct} Wylie and Amy Lowell, the Metaphysical poets, John Donne and the Cavaliers (sounds like a rock group) and finally Yeats, Eliot and Auden, must have contributed to my writing voice.

         I researched Good Night, Mr. Holmes in London, while attending the annual World Fantasy Convention. I particularly wanted to see Chelsea, because the original row houses were still standing and was thrilled when we happened on Bram Stoker’s former residence, because it was labeled, but not in any of the guidebooks. 

         I also traveled to Paris for Adler research, but couldn’t get into the Opera house performance area because of a rehearsal that day. That was the hoped-for heart of my trip. Then I had to cancel an opportunity to visit Prague several years ago because I broke my arm. I’ve always said I’ll probably see Prague after I’ve finished writing about it. A friend took a lot of photos, and I’ve researched everything historical forever in books, and now also on the Internet. 

         A memorable moment at my first guest author stint at a writing conference was when a woman there to get advice on writing a memoir about her years of sailing in the Caribbean heard me read from a 17^th-century sailing scene in the Caribbean, and was astounded that I knew the sea conditions so exactly. I’ve rarely even been on a boat, so it was an encouraging endorsement of my research by someone who’d been there.

EV: Thank you so much for this interview. Irene Adler is one of my admired sleuths.

Part II of this interview in a coming post will focus on the other two series that also feature strong women sleuths whom Irene Adler might admire. Meanwhile:

You can visit the author at her website: Carole Nelson Douglas Official Author Site 
Follow her on Facebook: Carole Nelson Douglas (and I’ll give the url for both)

And her books (all three series) are available at:

Amazon.com: carol nelson douglas - Paperback: Books

carole nelson douglas - All Product Search - Barnes & Noble.com

The Only Woman to Outwit Sherlock Holmes

 I love mysteries set in the Victorian Era, and I am a fan of “all things Sherlock.” So I was doubly delighted to discover Carole Nelson Douglas’s witty mystery series featuring Irene Adler, the opera singer in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia.” In Doyle’s adventure, the King of Bohemia hires Sherlock Holmes to retrieve a photograph from the singer that would compromise his coming marriage. Adler turns the tables on them both and gets away with the photograph. 

Goodnight, Mr. Holmes, the first book in the Irene Adler series, traces the years leading up to that adventure through the diaries of one Miss Penelope Huxleigh. Miss Huxleigh, a Shropshire parson’s daughter and former governess, loses her employment as a clerk at Whiteley’s Emporium in London  after a jealous employee falsely accuses her of stealing. Penelope is soon penniless on the  streets. A street urchin is trying steal her carpetbag when the book opens.

Irene Adler, a struggling actress/singer from America, quickly rescues her. She whisks Penelope to her bohemian flat in Saffron Hill, a rundown district in Central London, and the novel is “afoot”. Penelope—“Nell” to Irene—becomes the faithful chronicler of their adventures. Her quiet, prim, unassuming personality is a perfect foil for Irene’s ebullient, theatrical flair. 

While trying to forge an opera career in London, Irene makes a partial living as a Pinkerton agent. The famous American jeweler, Charles Lewis Tiffany, hires Irene to track down the Zone of Diamonds, a jeweled girdle last worn by Marie Antoinette. The “Zone” disappeared from France after the Revolution and is thought to be in England. (Tiffany approaches Sherlock Holmes with the same request, and Irene’s competition with Sherlock is one of many humorous touches in this book.)  

Irene’s singing career takes off. Nell is enjoying her own steady employment as a typist for a barrister at the Temple. (Her employer is a significant figure in the story, but no spoilers here: you’ll have to read the book to find out why and how.) The Zone of Diamonds case is still unsolved when Irene is lured to Europe to sing at La Scala, and from there to the National Opera Theatre in Bohemia. Then one morning Nell, left in charge of  the Saffron Hill flat, receives a strange message from Irene: “Nell—come at once to Prague! I need you.” 

There are so many things to like about this book, as the plot gets thicker and thicker with gypsy fortunes, daredevil disguises, breath-taking escapes. A vein of sly humor runs through it all. Tension is high right up to the last scene. Famous real life characters and famous fictional ones make cameo appearances: Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Tiffany, Lillie Langtry. Jefferson Hope, the ill-fated victim-turned-criminal in Doyle’s Sherlock adventure, “A Study in Scarlet” appears in an early scene. 

For those who like their mysteries spiced with history, glamor, and lots of humor, this is a must read. And -- good news -- there are seven more in the series.

You can visit the author at her website: Carole Nelson Douglas Official Author Site

Follow her on Facebook: Carole Nelson Douglas

Her books (there are three series) are available at:

Amazon.com: carol nelson douglas - Paperback: Books

carole nelson douglas - All Product Search - Barnes & Noble.com

An Interview with Stephanie Cowell

Stephanie Cowell, author of Claude and Camille, a Novel of Monet, graciously gave me an interview and shared some insights into her writing process and her love of history.

For those who missed the review of Stephanie's wonderful book, you can read it here. In addition, for lovers of the Impressionists and their world, Stephanie has a special set of 70 posts on her blog Everyday Lives of the French Impressionists that you can read HERE.

And now, on to the Interview:

EV: When did you first start writing?
SC: I first started writing at about the age of seven in black- and-white school notebooks. I printed in clumsy block letters and I have no idea what I wrote. I had decided early that other worlds and lives were much better than mine and I belonged there. I was drawn to young adult novels set in England or Europe…A Little Princess, Heidi, etc. I taught myself to type on my mother’s portable typewriter. By thirteen I was writing little novels which I read to my girlfriends at my sleepovers.

EV: What is your next book about? 
SC: I’ve almost finished a novel on the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and I am sure, as you love Victorian England, you know a lot about her! She was a very gifted woman but due to terrible tragedies in her family and her own bad health, she was an invalid in her father’s house in Wimpole Street until the gorgeous poet Robert Browning met her and fell in love with her. She recovered her health and ran away to live in Florence with him until his hidden past and her broken promises to her family and addiction to laudanum began to threaten their perfect love. It’s very romantic book about a brilliant, idealistic Victorian woman. I went to Florence where you can visit their apartment and stand on her balcony.

EV: Have you always been interested in writing historical fiction or have you experimented with other genres? 
SC: I wrote two novels about my New York City and still hope to revise them. They are about the New York I know which is a world centered around music, museums, old churches, neighborhoods, etc. Oddly, though I adore historic New York City, I have no desire to write about it. Several friends have done so: they travel here to research what is right outside my door. Lynn Cullen’s Mrs. Poe will be published in September; Stephanie Lehmann’s Astor Place Vintage is out now.

EV: You seem to understand the world of painters so well, and you've mentioned you were the child of artists. Do you paint yourself? 
SC: Oh no, I have no talent for drawing or painting but I see like an artist; I see perspective and color, and the changing light just drives me wild with joy. The way light falls on brick buildings and over the river and through trees. But I grew up with artists and the easel and canvases and delicate paint brushes. I love these things. My mother used to teach at the Art Students’ League and when I was about four or five the baby sitter didn’t come for me, so she took me to the school where I wandered down the hall and into a studio where a nude female model was posing. I was greatly shocked and ran back to my mother’s classroom babbling about it, much to the amusement of her students. Art is wonderful to write about; it’s so visceral.

EV: It seems to me that much of the research needed for this book would have been in French. Do you speak and read French?  
SC: I studied French during the writing of Claude & Camille and learned to read it at an intermediate level. I loved it. I never spoke it much and I have lost it a bit because I switched to Italian. There is a wonderful site in French written by one of the guides at Giverny who observed the gardens and house in every weather and season. It’s at http://givernews.com Her French is pure poetry. I made out what I could and read it every day when I was writing the novel.

EV: What advice do you have for beginning writers? 
SC: Write what you love and understand it may takes years and years before you really have completed a book which expresses your story and speaks to others. I sometimes rewrite a scene 75 times. And it may take many years to get published. The writer C.W. Gortner took 14 or 17 years before he was published and now he is doing very well. I wrote 4 novels in seven years before the first one sold and then I was so shocked that I took the next day off of work and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. I kept calling the publisher every week on some pretense, but really to make sure they had not changed their mind about publishing the book.

EV: Since you mainly write historical fiction, how would you advice writers to go about their research for a historical novel? Do you research as you go, once you have the idea for a story? Or do you do most of the research ahead of time, once you’ve decided on your story? 
SC: I generally am not drawn to a particular story or character or period unless I know something about it first. I research while I am writing and while I am revising. It happens at the same time! There is a scene in CLAUDE & CAMILLE where he finds her again in an upper class restaurant where he is trying to sell quick sketches of the patrons; he has come with Renoir because they are broke as usual. I can’t remember if when reading about the period I discovered the life of a restaurant or whether the scene came first. I think I saw some paintings by Degas and Manet with waitresses and patrons etc. and that inspired the scene.

EV: Do you have a favorite period in history?
SC: Yes, the Elizabethan. I have an odd feeling part of me lived back then. I was an actor (which means I would have been a man as there were no actresses allowed on the stage then) or a writer. But I love all periods in which I set my books.

EV: Are some historical periods that interest you easier to write about than others?
SC: I think the further back you go in history, the harder it is to hear people speaking and to present their speech to the modern reader. What was natural formal speech in 1600 can sound too formal to our ears and the casual can be incomprehensible!  I have been working a long time on a book set in 400 AD Alexandria and it was hard to make the people come to life as I wanted them at first. Then I discovered books of letters between ordinary people written on papyrus and dug up a hundred and fifty years ago in Egypt. Their concerns and subjects were the same as ours: difficult travel, letters of complaining schoolboys, love pleas, exchanges between sisters, requests for money, birthday greetings. They may have worn tunics and lived under an aging Roman Empire, but they were more like us than not. 

EV: Do you have favorite historical novels that you return to again and again? 
SC: Oh yes,  many! To name a few Girl with a Pearl Earring (Chevalier), I am Rembrandt’s Daughter (Cullen), Take Heed of Loving Me (Vining, long out-of-print but a masterpiece about John Donne, the worldly political young man who became a great priest). For a long time I read and reread Mary Renault again and again. There’s also Mary Sharratt’s The Vanishing Point and Vreeland’s Girl in Hyacinth Blue.  Some of the other novels I had read to pieces (not historical) are The Gift of Asher Lev (Potok), The Lost Madonna (Jones). I am forgetting most of the books I love here! Apologies to the gifted authors! Your work is so precious to me! And there are so many books I have only read once and desperately want to read again!

EV: Thank you so much, Stephanie for sharing your writing life with us. I'm sure many who read this will take heart and encouragement from your insights.

You can contact Stephanie at her website:
https://www.facebook.com/stephanie.cowell.14
stepaniecowell@nyc.rr.com

Your can order this book at:
Random House
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

A Brief Time Out

Dear blog friends, my husband and I had to have our dog euthanized last Saturday. I will not be posting for a few days. Please come back next week.

Thank you.

Book Review, Claude and Camille, A Novel of Monet

To read this gem of a novel is like entering an Impressionist painting and becoming immersed in its vibrant colors, glistening hilights, and hidden shadows. As a love story, it traces the arc of Claude Monet's life-long passion for Camille Doncieux, the woman who was his sweetheart, his muse, the mother of his two children, and, later, his wife.

The author, Stephanie Cowell

But Claude and Camille also captures the love of art that drives artists to pawn their few possessions for tubes of paint, borrow repeatedly from friends and relatives to stave off creditors, suffer repeated evictions from lodgings, stay outside all day in freezing temperatures in order to capture the play of light on waves or snow covered fields.

In his early painting days, Claude and his friend Fédéric Bazille share a studio in Paris that quickly becomes the hub of activity for several artist friends, among them, Renoir, Pissarro, Cezanne, Degas. All the young painters are filled with visions of a new way of painting. The future seems promising, despite the fact that most of them are in debt. Almost all of them are artists against family wishes: Claude's father wants him to take over his nautical supplies shop in Le Havre. Bazille's family wants him to become a doctor.

Claude first sees Camille in a train station in Paris. Arrested by her  beauty, he makes a quick sketch of her before she vanishes. Then he comes across her by accident in her uncle's bookshop four years later. It seems destiny. Accepting his invitation to pose for a painting, Camille brings her sister to Fontainebleau as a chaperone. Later, in Paris, Camille poses again for Claude, and the portrait is accepted by the Salon in the Palais de l'Industrie. When he takes her to see the exhibit, convent-educated Camille decides she's in love with him and leaves her family and her fiancé to become Claude's lover and the darling of his circle of friends.

But Camille—Minou to friends and family—is a bundle of mysteries and contradictions: She wants to go on stage. She wants to write a novel. She wants to have lots of children. She has moods. A devoted muse and passionate lover, Camille's life centers around Claude. Or does it? Her own mother whispers to Claude in one scene, "There are things you don't yet understand about our Minou . . ."

This book was so good, I read it twice. The author's rendering of the Impressionists' world reflects her thorough research. Characters and settings come alive. The lives that unfold are entirely believable. This is a must read for history lovers, art lovers and anyone who just likes a good story.

You can order this book at:
Random House
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

For more information about Stephanie Cowell and her other books,
visit the author's website:

You can also contact her at:
https://www.facebook.com/stephanie.cowell.14
stephaniecowell@nyc.rr.com



How about you? Do you have a favorite novel you've read more than once? Do you like fiction based on famous figures in history? (Share titles, please!)

Robert Louis Stevenson, A World Soul

I've been thinking lately about Robert Louis Stevenson, or, as he is often referred to, RLS. Born in Scotland (a land he never stopped loving), he transcended culture and geography: He loved France; in the USA, California boasts tourists sites where he and his wife lived; and he ended his days in Samoa.

 As a child, I loved his poetry collection for children,  A Child's Garden of Verses, and for many years I thought his poetry was mainly for children. But his poetry for adults was appreciated, too. Familiar lines shine in anthologies:

" Home is the sailor, home from sea,/ And the hunter home from the hill."

"Gather ye roses while ye may . . ."

Religious as a child, a rebel as an adult, always deeply philosophical, he was a writer with an unusually wide range in the Victorian Era in which he lived: poetry, short stories, essays, novels, adventure tales—he wrote whatever he wished, and couldn't be pigeon-holed. You can see the independence in his face, the determination to think things out for himself and then perservere until an idea, a plot, a book, is carried out to its conclusion.

For a man with serious ill health all his life, he managed to have more adventures than many healthier people could ever dream of. He traveled. He was married the woman of his dreams (Fanny Osbourne), a divorced woman with grown children. (He collaborated on several books with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne.) He traveled to the continent and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to America, traveled overland by stage coach to California, and ended up in a South Sea paradise, revered by the locals.

Fanny Osbourne, who
also looks like she had
a mind of her own.

Note: Both these photos are in the public domain in the U.S. 


This morning I finished reading for a second time, Treasure Island, an absolutely brilliant book. It's no more bloodthirsty than the slew of popular YAs published today, and it's a fast-paced read from beginning to end. I won't be a spoiler here and give away the ending for those who haven't read it, but, trust me: the ending was perfect. Stevenson's wife, Fanny, may not have liked the book, but 130 years ago this man knew how to begin a tale and end it with no let-up of suspense. I have to think that pirate ships were the original dystopian universes—worlds in disarray peopled with complex characters, all with their own backstories, offering great opportunities for heroism and malfeasance.

I've read that Stevenson achieved more and more mastery over his writing and that his surprising death caught him mid-sentence while writing the novel that would have become his greatest book, Weir of Hermiston (an event that sounds like every writer's nightmare). But the world is far richer for all the books he wrote on the way to his unfinished masterpiece.

You can read a full biography here and a great resource site can be found here . There is also a rather dated, but good, children's biography of Stevenson, by Forbes Macgregor, ISBN 0-7117-0320-5, put out in 1989 by Jarrold Colour Publications in Great Britain.

How about you? Have you read any of RSL's books? If so, which one is your favorite?

I DISCOVER TENNYSON: PART II

For the past month, while working on a rewrite of my middle grade historical mystery, I've been indulging my new found love of Tennyson's poetry. A great discovery for me is In Memoriam, a book-length elegy which is really a series of elegies in 131 poems, to his friend, Arthur Hallam, along with a prologue and an epilogue in verse.

Tennyson met Hallam at Trinity College in Cambridge and they became fast friends. When Hallam unexpectedly died of apoplexy on a trip to Europe with his father, the death deeply affected Tennyson's family. Hallam was engaged to Alfred's sister, Emily, and Alfred lost his closest friend. Devastated, Tennyson began writing the poems as a way to cope with his grief.

But the poems evolved into more than elegies to a lost life. Tennyson wrote them over a period of seventeen years. During that time, he was wrestling with scientific discoveries of the day—discoveries that presented challenges to one's Christian faith, something the Victorians took quite seriously. Edgar Finley Shannon, Jr., calls In Memoriam, "that monument to the religious questioning of the nineteenth century . . ."1.  T. S. Eliot called it a religious poem and wrote, "It is not religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality of its doubt." 2. 

Through the successive elegies, Tennyson worked through questions of whether the soul persists after death, whether there can be a loving creator if the creations simply become buried under geological strata through the ages, whether evolution suggests man is higher on the evolutionary scale, whether the future will usher in a superior being to man as we know him now, and so on. Tennyson finally made his peace by recognizing the validity of scientific reality in Nature, and the validity of spiritual reality in God, deciding that they worked by different laws.

Because In Memoriam addressed concerns of the Victorian Age at so many levels—including the Victorian attitude toward mourning—it was hailed as a masterpiece when it was published in 1850. Soon after, Tennyson became England's new poet laureate. (Wordsworth had passed away, Queen Victoria was looking for a successor, and Prince Albert read In Memoriam and admired it.) 3. In later years, after the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria told Tennyson, "Next to the Bible in Memoriam is my comfort." 4. 

The success of In Memoriam brought financial security and enabled Tennyson to wed his long-time sweetheart, Emily Sellwood. 

As I've been reading through the poems, I was amazed at how many famous lines I recognized: 

"Tis better to have loved and lost/ than never to have loved at all."

"Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky/ . . . Ring out the old, Ring in the new . . ."

"Our little systems have their day; / They have their day and cease to be . . ." 

"Theirs is not to reason why, / Theirs is but to do and die . . ."

"Nature, red in tooth and claw . . . "

Some of the above information has been taken from a fine biography of Tennyson at Poetry Foundation HERE, and some (including the four foot-noted quotes) has been taken from a book I would highly recommend:

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam
Authoritative Text, Criticism
Second Edition
Edited by Erik Gray, Harvard University
W. W. Norton & Company, 2004
1. p. 110
2. p. 138
3. p. xiii
4. p. xiii