Clay Stafford talks with Andrew Klavan “On Cinematic Storytelling”

Cal Newport interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Andrew Klavan is not only a bestselling author but also a screenwriter. His thrillers in both media are tight, fast, and cinematic, driven by characters who feel real and plots that never let up. I sat down with Andrew to talk about how he crafts his signature style, what novels can do that movies can’t, and why writing at high speed doesn’t mean sacrificing depth. “Andrew, let’s discuss your fast-paced cinematic storytelling style. Your novels are known for their quick pacing, and they’re full of action. How has your background in screenwriting influenced the way you structure your books, if at all?”

“Actually, it’s not my background in screenwriting. It’s my background in watching movies. My great story about Alfred Hitchcock is that I used to watch his movies on TV when I was a little kid. When he died, some of his films were removed from the screen. It was something in his will or a stipulation that prevented them from playing his movies for many years. For many years, my father, who could bring home movies, would bring them home, and I’d see them in our basement, but you couldn’t see them at all. You couldn’t see Vertigo. You couldn’t see Rear Window. They were just gone, these movies that had shaped my mind and shaped what storytelling was. They kind of incubated in me. When this problem was solved and the movies returned, I went with one of my brothers to watch Rear Window in a movie theater because it had just been re-released. We came out, and I turned to him, and I said, ‘Boy, Alfred Hitchcock stole a lot from me’ because it becomes second nature to me, that story structure. And so, even though novels are different than movies, and they are more expansive, I try to keep that tight rope that Hitchcock brought to the movies. I try to keep a tight grip on that plotting rope. If I see, for instance, in my outline that I’m meandering or just going off on a tangent, I stop, cut it out, and ensure that the story remains really tight. That, to me, is the challenge of the American thriller. I’m a writer. I have a vision of the world. I want to put that vision into print, but you must do it at high speeds, and it’s a thrill to do it. One of the things I love about my character, Cameron Winter, is that he’s a thoughtful guy, so it’s implicit in the plot that he will bring that attitude to the story. But the story, to me, is everything in a thriller. You’ve got to keep it tight. It’s got to be fast, and the timing’s got to be right. A lot of what I learned from watching movies is that there’s so much less space in a film than there is in a book.”

“Are we maybe viewers and readers first, writers second?”

“Boy, if you want to talk about advice to give young writers, read everything, and read everything in your genre, and then read everything out of your genre. Sometimes I’ll be talking to my wife about a novel I’ve just read, and she says, ‘Boy, this is like a working holiday for you, just sitting back and reading a novel.’ But I just love them. I love novels more than movies. And I love watching the guy get it right. I can see when a guy gets it wrong, and that teaches you everything. Just watching what works for you on the screen and reading what works for you in books is the way you learn to be a writer, first and foremost.”

“Your books feel cinematic. You can read any of them and think that they could be adapted into a film in some way. Do you visualize that cinematic feel, or is that coming from your past knowledge bank?”

“It’s the way I naturally structure things, having grown up loving these thriller films as well as thriller novels. I often break with cinematic logic because certain things that happen in movies don’t happen in books. Movies are more literal than novels. You can get away with certain things in novels that, the minute you see them on the screen, would look absurd. Novels are closer to the human heart. They get at the inside of the human heart far more than a film can. And so, if I have a moment to expose the human heart without action, or any way—with action, without action, through dialogue, through thought—I will take that road. If I’m writing a screenplay, I won’t do it because it’ll slow down the movie. There are ways in which the movies taught me how to plot tightly, but I frequently break rules, because the novel is a different form, if that makes sense.”

“Your dialogue is to the point. I love the repeating thing: ‘I’m just an English professor,’ or whatever. I love those things. How do you craft this dialogue that’s snappy, authentic, and sometimes pithy, yet keeps the story moving forward all the time? There’s nothing there that shouldn’t be there. It’s tight.”

“It’s all character. You want the dialogue to sing, but you want each character to speak in their unique way. You and I have different ways of speaking. Everybody has a different way of talking that I just try to capture. Once I’ve got the character going, I can capture the way he talks. Once you do that, you can sort of craft the dialogue so that it’s entertaining and snappy and really pulls the reader in, but also expresses character, which is the first thing you want to do with dialogue.”

“The opposite of snappy and quick are these slower moments where you’ve got this exposition or character development that you’ve got to have. What techniques do you use to keep those moving forward at a clipped momentum?”

“My friend, Simon Brett—who’s one of the great mystery writers in England—and I adapted his book Shock to the System for film, and he’s a fantastic writer and a wonderful guy. He said to me once, ‘The terrible thing is that not only can everything be cut, but everything can be cut and made better.’ I’ve always remembered that. I would let a character deliver a monologue for 40 pages, but there is a moment when you think, ‘The audience is ready for about two paragraphs, so I’m just gonna throw out all this beautiful prose out the window.’ Maybe I’ll read it to my wife one day, so she’ll be impressed.”

“She’s like my wife. She can edit quickly.”

“There have been times when I’ve given my wife a pen and said, ‘I can’t watch this, but go ahead.’”

“Has she ever told you, ‘Not your best work, you might just throw this away?’ My wife has.”

“Yeah, mine, too, and she is also. She also saved one of my best books because the first draft was terrible. I can remember, to this day, her waking me up—I was fast asleep—and saying, ‘If you throw this away, it’ll be the biggest mistake of your life. You just have to fix it.’ Yes, I receive great editorial advice from my wife. I’m not sure she enjoys it, but I get it. I always say we have a perfect system. She tells me what I should do, I yell at her and tell her she’s wrong, and then I do it.”

“Same thing here. You always start right at the very beginning with these high stakes, and then things don’t drop, which usually happens after an opening like that. They continue to escalate quickly. How do you determine the right balance between the action-suspense and developing your characters?”

“The characters must move within the story, and the story is going to be tight and fast. That’s the thing. When the Golden Age of TV came and The Shield was on TV, and all those great crime dramas—The Sopranos and The Wire—were all on TV, I tried writing for TV, but it was hard for me, because TV never ends. It goes on forever, so the characters never change. Only the stories change. For me, a story is that one thing that happens to a character that will change him in some way, which is why, with my character Cameron Winter, I’ve extended the line of his journey, so that I can go through the number of books that I want to go through. I’ve been careful not to have him have this revelation and then go back to being who he was in the next story. It’s this idea that the story is the place where he will exist. He’s going to exist at the high speed and the high stakes of a good thriller, but he’s going to be real. I’m very proud of my action scenes. If you asked me if I were a top action writer, I would blush and then say, ‘Yes, I am. I am a really, really good action writer.’ However, when I have an action scene, I always ask myself, ‘How is character being conveyed in this scene?’ These are two people punching each other, shooting at each other, chasing each other. But what is it telling me about these people? And that’s, to me, what every scene should be like, because you don’t have much space. As Otto Penzler once said, there’s no such thing as a 900-page thriller. I think a thriller is going to be tight, so you want everything to express character and express character through his interplay with the plot. It’s not a question of judging how much action, it’s making sure that everything is an expression of character.”

“We were talking about action. Your descriptions are always right on. There’s not too much. It doesn’t slow things down. What’s your approach to writing this immersive, efficient prose that you do?”

“That’s a tough one. I think that it has to do with living in the story. It’s almost a method kind of thing. I submerge myself in story, sometimes painfully. Like actors are always telling you, ‘Oh, it was such a hard role. It broke my heart.’ That actually happens when you write and get into a story.”

“You’re a method writer.”

“It’s an unhealthy way to live. I always say I take a lot of spiritual time putting myself back together every time I write something, but I think that you must be immersed in the story. You must love the story. I think that’s the answer. If you love the story, and you write the story that you love, and you’re honest about it, and you cut out the stuff that shouldn’t be there—as much as you might think it’s the greatest sentence you ever wrote because it doesn’t serve what you’re doing—you’ll write immersive prose because you’ll be immersed, and then the audience will be immersed as well.”

“One of the things that you did, especially in the Winter novels, is these scene transitions. There are two points of view, but it’s almost like three different points of view, because we’ve got the present, and then Winter’s past in italics, and then we’ve got the psychologist’s point of view following each of those sessions. How do you handle those scene transitions to keep the reader engaged and informed, and ensure that the story never loses momentum?”

“That’s the danger. I personally love a slow build. I love a story that just slowly, slowly goes off. Modern readers don’t have as much patience for it, so I can get away with some of it, because I do like to establish a world in which people are living before that world blows apart. Because of the structure of the Cameron Winter books, especially, I have to be really, really careful not to slow build myself into the ground. There’s the story that’s taking place in the present, there’s a story that Winter’s telling in the past, there’s the relationship between him and his therapist, which is part of the story, so you have to be very careful to get where you’re going in good time. It can be a bit of a juggling act because you don’t want someone just sitting around mouthing off when people are going, ‘Wait a minute. Where is this going?’ I’ve worked hard on that. I don’t even know how to describe it, but I work extremely hard before I start writing to make sure that’s not going to happen.”

“Do you ever write with film adaptations in mind as you’re writing, or do cinematic elements come out naturally?”

“I never do that. I never think about the movies.”

“Just stay in the story.”

“I just stay in the story. Yeah, because there are these branches, where you come along, and a movie should go one way, and a novel should go the other. You want to make sure you take the novel path. It really is interesting. I was talking about Simon Brett and Shock to the System. It’s a wonderful novel. I just loved it. It was made into a movie because I brought it to someone and said, ‘You should make this.’ However, as I was writing it, I was constantly discarding content because a movie is a distinct form. It has a different shape and a different structure. I try, when I’m writing a novel, never to fall into, ‘Oh, I want this to be in the movie’ business, because, frankly, I love books more, and I want the book to be what I want it to be, because after it goes to the movies, you’ll never have the same control over it again.”

“Going back to those action sequences, how do you ensure clarity and realism, while still keeping that pacing tight?”

“That is the thing. I read a lot of action scenes where I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t understand where the guy is standing, why the bullet missed him. I try really hard to establish that structure so that the audience can see what’s going on and experience the excitement, danger, and terror of some of those scenes. Part of it is slowing it down. In a movie, to have a fifteen-minute fight scene, the guy has to throw every piece of furniture in the room. But you can write a thirty-page fight scene with three punches in it because you’re experiencing it from the inside, so it’s really what’s going on in the guy’s mind that matters. You don’t have to worry so much about how I'm going to get that wonderful sequence in Die Hard where the guy has to get up on the roof, and then he has to jump off the roof, and then he’s held at gunpoint. You don’t have to get that clever because you’re seeing it internally, and that’s where the excitement comes from.”

“For writers who are trying to add that cinematic Andrew Klavan feel, that fast-paced style, what are the lessons that they can take from film writing or novel writing in their reading, and apply to their novels?”

“I think there are two things. One is, slow it down. Even in a movie, you can slow down the action by just including a lot of little things that keep the scene alive. The second thing is that, in a novel, the most important thing is what’s happening inside the character. It might be fun just to read a description of somebody punching another guy repeatedly in the face, but I want to know what that’s like. I want to know what that does to the guy who’s doing it, what it does to the guy who’s having it done, or whatever position your point of view is in. The question is, what is happening to this guy in the scene? As a kid, I was in a lot of fights. Those are very dramatic experiences that brand you for the rest of your life. I can remember them to this day. I had a karate instructor once who read one of my books, and he came in and said, ‘Well, I can tell you’ve been in a fight.’ I want that to be there, that inner life thing. The two things are, don’t be in a hurry, do the work to make it clear to the audience, and then make sure it’s an expression of character, even though it’s action.”

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Empowering Writers. Creating Stories That Matter.

Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference and The Balanced Writer. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/

Andrew Klavan is the author of such internationally bestselling crime novels as True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood; Don’t Say A Word, filmed starring Michael Douglas; Empire of Lies; Werewolf Cop; and the Cameron Winter series. He also hosts a popular podcast, The Andrew Klavan Show, at the Daily Wire. https://www.andrewklavan.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Joyce Carol Oates “On Being Her Own Person”

Joyce Carol Oates interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I first met Joyce Carol Oates when she was the John Seigenthaler Legends Award winner at the Killer Nashville International Writer’s Conference. She is a prolific writer, a modern-day legend, and a professor at NYU and Princeton, where her fortunate students learn from one of the best living writers today. When her new collection of short stories came out, Flint Kill Creek, I reached out to her to see if we could chat about the new book, writing in general, and how to prepare oneself for a career as a writer. My goal, because she is both a prolific writer and a teacher, was to see if there was some Holy Grail that writers could discover to create a successful career. Fortunately, we may have stumbled upon it. “Joyce, someone such as you who's written over a hundred books, how do you consistently generate these fresh ideas and maintain this creative energy you've got going?”

“Well, it would not interest me to write the same book again, so I wouldn't be interested in that at all.”

“I wonder if some of it also has to do with all the reading you do. It's generating new ideas coming in all the time.”

“I suppose so. That's just the way our minds are different. I guess there are some writers who tend to write the same book. Some people have fixations about things. I don't know how to assess my own self, but I'm mostly interested in how to present the story in terms of structure. Like Flint Kill Creek, the story is really based very much on the physical reality of a creek: how, in a time of heavy rainfall, it rises and becomes this rushing stream. Other times, it's sort of peaceful and beautiful, and you walk along it, yet it's possible to underestimate the power of some natural phenomenon like a creek. It's an analog with human passion. You think that things are placid and in control, but something triggers it, and suddenly there is this violent upheaval of emotion. The story is really about a young man who is so frightened of falling in love or losing control, he has to have a kind of adversarial relationship with young women. He's really afraid to fall in love because it's like losing control. So, through a series of incidents, something happens so that he doesn't have to fall in love, that the person he might love disappears from the story. But to me, the story had to be written by that creek. I like to walk myself along the towpath here in the Princeton area, the Delaware and Raritan Canal. When I was a little girl, I played a lot in Tonawanda Creek, I mean literally played along with my friends. We would go down into the creek area and wade in the water, and then it was a little faster out in the middle, so it was kind of playful, but actually a little dangerous. Then, after rainfall, the creek would get very high and sometimes really high. So it's rushing along, and it's almost unrecognizable. I like to write about the real world, and describe it, and then put people into that world.”

“You've been writing for some time. How do you keep your writing so relevant and engaging to people at all times?”

“I don't know how I would answer that. I guess I'm just living in my own time. My most recent novel is called Butcher, and I wrote it a couple of years ago, and yet now it's so timely because women's reproductive rights have been really under attack and have been pushed back in many states, and it seems that women don't have the rights that we had only a decade ago, and things are kind of going backwards. So, my novel Butcher is set in the 19th century, and a lot of the ideas about women and women's bodies almost seem to be making like a nightmare comeback today. I was just in Milan. I was interviewed a lot about Butcher, and earlier in the year I was in Paris, and I was interviewed about Butcher, because the translations are coming out, and the interviewers were making that connection. They said, ‘Well, your novel is very timely. Was this deliberate?’ And I'm not sure if it was exactly deliberate, because I couldn't foretell the future, but it has this kind of painful timeliness now.”

“How do you balance your writing with all this marketing? Public appearances? Zoom meetings with me? How do you get all of it done? How does Joyce Carol Oates get all of it done?”

“Oh, I have a lot of quiet time. It's nice to talk to you, but as I said, I was reading like at 7 o'clock in the morning, I was completely immersed in a novel, then I was working on my own things, and then talking with you from three to four, that's a pleasure. It's like a little interlude. I don't travel that much. I just mentioned Milan and Paris because I was there. But most of the time I'm really home. I don't any longer have a husband. My husband passed away, so the house is very quiet. I have two kitties, and my life is kind of easy. Really, it's a lonely life, but in some ways it's easy.”

“Do you ever think at all—at the level you're at—about any kind of expanded readership or anything? Or do you just write and throw it out there?”

“I wouldn't really be thinking about that. That's a little late in my career. I mean, I try to write a bestseller.”

“And you have.”

“My next novel, which is coming out in June, is a whodunnit.”

“What's the title?”

“Fox, a person is named Fox. That's the first novel I've ever written that has that kind of plot. A body's found, there’s an investigation, we have back flash and backstory, people are interviewed. You follow about six or seven people, and one of them is actually the murderer, and you find out at the end who the murderer is. The last chapter reveals it. It's sort of like a classic structure of a whodunnit, and I've never done that before. I didn't do it for any particular reason. I think it was because I hadn't done it before, so I could experiment, and it was so much fun.”

“That's one of the things readers love about your work, is you experiment a lot.”

“That was a lot of fun, because I do read mysteries, and yet I never wrote an actual mystery before.”

“Authors sometimes get the advice—which you're totally the exception to—of pick one thing, stay with it, don’t veer from that because you can't build a brand if you don't stick with that one thing. Yet you write plays, nonfiction, poetry, short stories, novels, and you write in all sorts of genres. What advice or response do you give to that? Because I get that ‘stick with one thing’ all the time from media experts at Killer Nashville. You're the exception. You don't do that.”

“No, but I'm just my own person. I think if you want to have a serious career, like as a mystery detective writer, you probably should establish one character and develop that character. One detective, let's say, set in a certain region of America so that there's a good deal of local color. I think that's a good pattern to choose one person as a detective, investigator, or coroner and sort of stay with that person. I think most people, as it turns out, just don't have that much energy. They're not going to write in fifteen different modes. They're going to write in one. So that's sort of tried and true. I mean, you know Ellery Queen and Earl Stanley Gardner and Michael Connolly. Michael Connolly, with Hieronymus Bosch novels, is very successful, and they're excellent novels. He's a very good writer. He's made a wonderful career out of staying pretty close to home.”

“Is there any parting advice you would give to writers who are reading here?”

“I think the most practical advice, maybe, is to take a writing course with somebody whom you respect. That way you get some instant feedback on your writing, and I see it all the time. The students are so grateful for ideas. I have a young woman at Rutgers, she got criticism from the class, and she came back with a revision that was stunning to me. I just read it yesterday. Her revision is so good, I think my jaw dropped. She got ideas from five or six different people, including me. I gave her a lot of ideas. She just completely revised something and added pages and pages, and I was really amazed. I mean, what can I say? That wouldn't have happened without that workshop. She knows that. You have to be able to revise. You have to be able to sit there and listen to what people are saying, and take some notes, and then go home and actually work. She is a journalism major as well as something else. So I think she's got a real career sense. She’s gonna work. Other people may be waiting for inspiration or something special, but she's got the work ethic. And that's important.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference and the online streaming creative learning platform The Balanced Writer. Subscribe to his weekly writing tips at https://claystafford.com/

Joyce Carol Oates has published nearly 100 books, including 58 novels, many plays, novellas, volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, and Blonde were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; she won the National Book Award for her novel them. https://celestialtimepiece.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Author Tom Mead on “Writing Locked Room Mysteries”

Tom Mead interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I stumbled upon Tom Mead’s latest locked-room mystery from my friend Otto Penzler and immediately loved it. I knew I had to talk to Tom about it, as it was probably one of the best I’ve read in a long while. Tom and I got together electronically, me from Tennessee, U.S., and him from Derbyshire, U.K. The modern age of technology is not just fantastic for meetings such as this, but it also fosters a sense of global community, allowing us to get to know others face-to-face across continents. I was curious to know how, in the modern age, technology has affected what is known as the locked room mystery simply because these types of mysteries are fascinating intellectual puzzles, and modern forensics are straightforward (and often more quickly derived) facts. This interview ran long. Part of it has previously appeared in my monthly Writer’s Digest column, but the full interview, about four times the length of the Writer’s Digest version, constitutes our entire conversation. I learned so much from Tom that I felt other mystery writers might gain the same things I did by hearing Tom’s conversation in full. “Tom, for those unfamiliar with a locked room mystery, can you explain that to us?”

“Yes, absolutely. The term refers to a sub-genre of the classic puzzle mystery, or the whodunnit, emphasizing a seemingly impossible crime. So, in other words, a crime that physically could not have taken place. Hence, the imagery of the locked room. Locked room mysteries are a rarefied sub-genre because, by their nature, they are complex and convoluted creations. They’re structured like a puzzle, but there’s also an emphasis on the atmosphere and a kind of eeriness about them because there’s the appearance of something supernatural having taken place. But, of course, the solution is always rational and earthly. The locked room mystery became popular during the Golden Age of detective fiction between the World Wars. Many great authors tackled the genre, but my favorite is John Dickson Carr, the acknowledged master of the locked room mystery. I started writing locked rooms as a kind of tribute to him, and I look at them as a kind of literary magic trick, if you like. It’s all about misdirection and creating the appearance of the impossible.”

“Well, you had me trying to beat you at this mystery, and I have to say I did not.”

“Well, that’s good. That’s part of the fun, of course. A great thing about Golden Age detective fiction—something that appeals to me as a reader—is this idea of the intellectual game and the challenge to the reader. Ellery Queen was particularly good at that sort of thing and would often include a literal challenge to the reader, wherein the author would sort of step in, address the reader directly, and say, “All the clues are there. They’ve been hidden throughout the text for you to spot. Can you solve the mystery before the detective?” And so, I thought it would be fun to incorporate a literal challenge to the reader into my Spector mysteries. So again, it’s all part of the tribute to the Golden Age, but also having a bit of fun with the reader, and just playing up that puzzle aspect of the mystery.”

“Well, my wife said, ‘How is it?’ because I read a lot of books, and I said, ‘This is very good, but I am not sure how he’s going to pull this off,’ and I’m not giving anything away, because we’ve got a picture on the cover here, how did this person get in this boat? And that was the one that kept throwing me. And you don’t reveal until the very end, almost, how that happened. And so, I’m going, ‘Is he going to play fair? Is he going to answer how this boat shows up in here?’ So anyway, you did well in wrapping everything up.”

“Thank you very much. And yes, thank you for saying that about the boat puzzle. That was the one that I had the most fun with. It’s the most elaborate. In that respect, it’s a tribute to the Japanese locked room mystery or traditional Japanese mystery because there’s been a recent glut of translations of classic Japanese mysteries. I’ve had great fun delving into them. They are remarkably complex, even by the standards of Golden Age detective fiction, and some of the clever devices, techniques, tricks, and gimmicks that writers like Seishi Yokomizo have come up with are great and help to stimulate my imagination as a writer as well as a reader. I think that’s also partially a tribute to the Japanese mystery tradition.”

“You’ve been citing different cultures and countries. Locked room is global in every type of culture.”

“Yeah, I mean, the appeal of mystery fiction generally is universal, I think, and there have been numerous anthologies and collections of stories from all over the world that deal with this idea of the impossible crime. But there’s a concentration within Japan. The Japanese traditional mystery is known as Honkaku, which is a term that means Orthodox Mystery. So, in other words, a mystery with a fair puzzle that plays by the rules. And these days, there’s been a kind of resurgence in Honkaku mysteries, known as Shin Honkaku, or the New Orthodox. The popularity in Japan is massive, and several of these books are being translated into English. As someone who loves puzzle mysteries, I’ve enjoyed delving into the past and reading the classic Golden Age authors. My favorites are Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Frederic Brown, Helen McCloy, names like that, and people from the ‘30s to about the ‘50s. Also, alongside those authors, I’ve been reading classic Japanese and contemporary Japanese mysteries, which play by the same rule book where the focus is on a puzzle. It’s on identifying whodunnit, but also howdunnit. How could this impossible thing have occurred? As a writer, I think it’s all grist to the mill. I like to seek out these more diverse, perhaps unorthodox, or obscure, titles, and it’s a real joy to me as a reader and a writer.”

“You’re going to roll your eyes at this, but how in the world does one write a locked-room mystery? I don’t think I have the intelligence for it. Where do you start? Is it the ending, and you go backward? How does it work?”

“Now, that is a great question. To me, there’s no specific technique that I’ve hit upon. I’ve tried various approaches. But the idea is that you want every problem and every solution to be different. I should go about it differently each time. But I am a big fan of stage magic that I will come across in reading the book, hopefully, because my detective character—who’s very much a Golden Age pastiche of an amateur sleuth—is an old vaudevillian. I suppose he’s a retired conjurer from the London stage who has now turned his knack for unraveling impossible puzzles into the world of crime and detection. I grew up fascinated by stage magic, and I read a lot about magicians, how tricks are done, and the principles behind stage magic. So how, for instance, does a certain type of magic trick work on the brain, the part of the brain that is misdirected by a certain sleight of hand, and how does that sleight of hand work? I’ve read a few nonfiction works on that subject, and to be honest, the principles are very similar to mystery writing. I often liken writing mysteries to performing a magic show because, in both instances, you’ve got a performer guiding an audience's attention in a certain direction. In both instances, the trick's workings are in plain sight the whole time. But it’s about how you conceal them and ensure the audience doesn’t perceive them. In terms of plotting and writing, I suppose my general approach is the same as a magician’s. I will usually look at the effect that I want to achieve. It may be the case of coming up with an impossibility or a scenario that I think would be effective for the plot structure that I’ve got. Then, in some cases, it’s a question of working backward: how that trick can be pulled off via earthly practical means. This is an old stage illusionist’s principle of creating a gimmick that will achieve this effect. Then, at the other end of the scale, sometimes I will stumble across something, whether it be a trick or an illusion, an optical illusion, a misheard quotation, or a line of dialogue from something. It will stimulate something that I will then decide to try and develop into an impossibility. I’ve approached it from different angles, I suppose. Sometimes, I start with the trick itself, and I think about how I can incorporate that into my plot, and other times, I will have an unanswered question that I’ll need to devise my answer to.”

“Is there a specific type of sleuth that works well with locked room mysteries?”

“I suppose locked room mysteries are heightened by their nature. They’re non-naturalistic. They’re surreal. And there’s an emphasis on atmosphere. And I’ve already mentioned a sense of the eerie, the uncanny. I think the detective needs to be suitably larger than life, flamboyant, you might say, and theatrical, and these are the elements that I’ve distilled into my detective character, Joseph Spector. I think the amateur sleuth is a classic trope of the Golden Age. And a decidedly unrealistic, non-naturalistic one. I think the detective needs to reflect on the puzzle that you’ve set. With an elaborate and ornately contrived locked room mystery, you need a detective capable of these great flights of fancy and an air of performance about them. John Dickson Carr’s great detective was Gideon Fell, a boisterous kind of Falstaffian figure based on the author G.K. Chesterton. Then his other great detective was Sir Henry Merrivale, who was, if anything, even more flamboyant than Fell with a distinctive white suit and a penchant for practical jokes and the like. So, it is an almost cartoonish figure, but a figure that suited the puzzle framework that Carr created. A match made in heaven, I suppose.”

“Do certain types of plots lend themselves to locked room mysteries?”

“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I generally talk about the Golden Age mystery. The Golden Age usually refers to the decades between the World Wars, such as the ‘20s and ‘30s, when writers like Agatha Christie rose to prominence, and I’ve also talked about Ellery Queen. So, novels featuring a closed circle of suspects are often set in high society. So again, it’s quite a lofty scenario, not necessarily one that would be relatable to the average reader. Often with a country house setting like the one in Cabaret Macabre. The most important components would be the cast of suspects, the so-called closed circle of suspects. In other words, a set cast of characters whose identities are known from the outset so that you know that the murderer is lurking somewhere among that cast of characters. The setting is typically isolated. In Cabaret Macabre, it’s the House March Banks, which is a highly conventional English country seat. But if you think of Agatha Christie, for instance, you have the Orient Express, you have that kind of idea of a cast of characters in that single location, or Death on the Nile, of course, you have them on that river cruise. I think those kinds of scenarios are particularly appealing for creating locked room mysteries. My second book, The Murder Wheel, was set mainly in the backstage corridors of a fictional London theatre. For a locked room mystery, it’s fun to have it set within the constraints of a specific location for an impossibility. I think these are the kinds of ingredients that I like to employ.”

“When you’re talking about your study of conjuring, you tend to be the type who likes to look behind the scenes. How do you explain the popularity of locked-room mysteries? Is it the puzzle? Is it like the people who love crossword puzzles or someone trying to figure that out? You’ve got that specific demographic.”

“I think it is. Exactly as you say. The appeal lies within the puzzle first and foremost, but the Golden Age has an irresistible charm. I started trying to write Golden Age style, pastiche whodunnits as an exercise in escapism at the height of the Covid lockdowns here in the U.K. in 2020 and into 2021. So that was when I wrote Death in the Conjurer in draft, again, purely to keep myself entertained and amused by playing with the tropes and the conventions of the Golden Age mystery. However, regarding the puzzle and the locked room, I think the great writers of locked room mysteries had a great insight into human nature and human psychology, allowing them to play with the readers’ perceptions and expectations. As a reader, I appreciate an author who doesn’t dumb down the plot and who doesn’t simplify the plot. I like a very labyrinthine plot, which encourages you to play along and sets you an intellectual challenge. These are the things that I enjoy as a reader. I think, generally speaking, when I’m talking to people who are reading my books, and when I’m generally talking about locked rooms, it’s that sense of the writer having fun with you, the reader, and addressing ‘you, the reader’ directly and engaging you in this kind of elaborate performance.”

“Okay, let me ask you this. And no modesty here, okay? Why do more writers not write these? I have my suspicion, and I think I disclosed it at the beginning of this interview.”

“Locked room mysteries are, by their nature, complex undertakings. It would be best if you had a passion for the genre as a reader as well as a writer because it would be easy to set out and try and create a locked room mystery by numbers, but it wouldn’t have the same impact as a locked room that was constructed by somebody who knows the genre in and out. I think I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve had access to so many of the great titles from the past, and like I say, this influx of Japanese titles, translations of the French novels of Paul Halter—who’s another living legend of the locked room mystery. He’s a terrific writer and incredibly prolific. Speaking for myself, I’ve been able to read and distill all of that, generate my ideas from that, and combine it with the world of magic, which also fascinates me. But as to why more people don’t write the legitimate, locked room mystery style, I think other genres are perhaps less sophisticated in their construction and more commercially appealing—things like the conventional cozy mystery. Not to disparage the cozy mystery genre, but many titles are out there. There is a sheer glut of cozy mystery titles out there, and there are many recycled ideas out there. From a commercial perspective, selling a cozy mystery is easier because people know what to expect. They know how it will play out, whereas you are deliberately defying the genre's conventions with a mystery of the locked room. You are taking the established principles of the mystery, and you’re deliberately subverting them. And you’re making the work as unpredictable as possible because that’s the nature of it. I suppose that it’s more of a risk. It’s more of a balancing act because it can be a real disaster when it goes wrong. In a badly written locked room mystery, there’s much more to lose, whereas with cozy mysteries, there are many familiar elements for readers to latch onto. And there are so many long-running series out there that it’s perhaps easier to sell commercially. But again, not to disparage the cozy mystery because there are many cozy mysteries that incorporate locked room mystery elements. From a commercial point of view, I think the word cozy is a much easier sell than the locked room.”

“You’ve got to admit that writing and reading a locked room mystery take much more work because it’s not like you’re going to sit back in your leather chair and read this pleasurably. It’s like, okay, game on. Let’s go.”

“Exactly. I suppose it is perhaps more demanding, and therefore, the readers it will attract are those who love puzzles and trying to stay one step ahead of the detective or the author. The kinds of people who, like me, are fascinated by how tricks are done, who are, I suppose, as fascinated by that as they are by the tricks themselves. I mentioned a balancing act with locked room mysteries. It would be best if you had the reveal of the howdunnit to have a sense of satisfaction. You don’t want it to feel anti-climactic compared to the atmosphere and mystery you’ve constructed throughout the work. I suppose that’s what I mean when I say there’s more of a risk involved because you are essentially relying on this one gimmick to hold together the whole structure of the piece. You have to have faith that it will pay off, which is why I like to try different approaches within the same framework. I like to incorporate multiple puzzles, try to come up with puzzles that will complement each other and fit together rather like a kind of jigsaw, and try different types of illusions as well. You mentioned the boat illusion in Cabaret Macabre. There are conventional locked room mystery tricks, but then there are also identity tricks and things like that. There are tricks to do with alibis and what have you. I like to try to combine different types of things to maximize the satisfaction for the reader when all these tricks are unraveled. That’s the idea behind it.”

“As Spector would say, you’re building a house of cards.”

“Exactly.”

“For better or worse, it may turn out very well, or it may just completely collapse upon itself. You talked about the Golden Age quite a bit. Are locked-room mysteries era-dependent? Is it possible to write a locked-room mystery in today’s time with today’s forensic technology and law enforcement prowess?”

“Yeah, that’s a great question. I don’t think they’re dependent at all. There are many great examples of the locked room mystery throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, such as the post-Golden Age. But again, you must be more innovative and inventive to pull it off because information is so much easier today. With the Golden Age—which is what I love—you can rely on eyewitness accounts of events and things like that. These days, you’ve got CCTV. You’ve got an individual’s digital footprint to consider, and there are so many ways that the truth can be traced. In contrast, in the era that I write about, you were relying, I suppose, more on individual perception of an event or of an individual’s appearance—that kind of thing. To me, it’s closer to the principles of stage magic in that respect because when you’re in the audience at a magic show, you must rely on your own eyes and your perception of what’s happening around you. So that’s why I focus on that era. I’ve read many great works set far in the future, also some set in ancient Egypt or medieval times. Adam Roberts is an author who’s written some fascinating science fiction locked-room mysteries. They are fair playroom mysteries but set within this futuristic world he created. They’re quite a remarkable achievement, I would say. Likewise, I recently finished reading a Paul Doherty title. Paul Doherty writes historical mysteries, and he’s got a fantastic series set in the reign of King Richard II here in England. I think the principles are the same across the board, but I think if I’ve learned anything, it’s that the most fun and entertaining titles are the ones that are not afraid to break the rules or reinvent the rules of the genre.”

“As a wonderful writer of locked-room mysteries, what advice do you have for readers who wish to follow in your footsteps?”

“From my own experience, it was something that I did purely for my entertainment, and at the time I started writing, I was my audience, so I wasn’t writing for anybody else. If people want to write locked room mysteries, the same advice goes across the board. It’s to write the type of novel you enjoy reading, write the genre you like, write the period that most appeals to you, and create characters you enjoy reading and writing about. Those are the guiding principles that I’ve learned to live by. I think if people are looking to write murder mysteries, the best thing is to read a lot of murder mysteries, to focus on the type of mystery they love, to look at what makes it work, and to try and adapt those principles themselves.”

“Do what you love.”

“Precisely. It’s as simple as that.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference.
https://claystafford.com/

Tom Mead is a UK-based crime fiction author, including the Joseph Spector mystery series and numerous short stories. His debut novel, Death and the Conjuror, was selected as one of the top ten best mysteries of the year by Publishers Weekly. He lives in Derbyshire.
https://tommeadauthor.com/

Paying it Forward

An Interview with Writer, Editor and Publisher Judy Penz Sheluk By Charlie Kondek

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If the name Judy Penz Sheluk keeps popping up in your reading, that shouldn’t be a surprise. She’s published two series of mystery novels, the Glass Dolphin and the Marketville books, in addition to numerous short stories and articles. Her books on publishing—Finding Your Path to Publication: A Step-by-Step Guide and Self-publishing: The Ins & Outs of Going Indie— are valuable resources for the emerging or experienced writer navigating the ups and downs, about which Penz Sheluk knows a great deal. Based on those experiences, she runs her own label, Superior Shores Press, which has released its fourth anthology of crime and mystery stories, Larceny & Last Chances. The anthology features 22 stories from some of today’s most engaging writers (including me, the author of this interview, who is bursting with gratitude at being in their company). 

Penz Sheluk is a member of Sisters in Crime International, Sisters in Crime – Guppies, Sisters in Crime – Toronto, International Thriller Writers, Inc., the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and Crime Writers of Canada, where she served on the Board of Directors, most recently as Chair (whew!). While putting the finishing touches on Larceny & Last Chances and working to promote it, she took some time to let me pepper her with questions about the new book and her wide range of experiences across her various roles. As always, the advice she can give a writer was ample, as is the excitement over the work. Here’s what she had to say.   

CK: You had a long career in journalism before you started publishing fiction. What got you started on fiction? What keeps you writing it?

JPS: I’ve been writing stories “in my head” since I started walking to and from school as a young kid. Sometimes those stories would be short and take up one leg of the journey (about 20 minutes). Other times I’d keep them going for a few days. I honestly thought everyone did that until I mentioned it to my husband one day after a frustrating traffic-jammed commute. Something like, “Thank heavens I had that story going in my head.” I can still remember the stunned look on his face when he said, “You write stories in your head?” To his credit, he registered me in a 10-week creative writing course as a birthday present. My first publication (in THEMA Literary Journal) was a result of that course. I’ve never looked back. 

CK: You’re a novelist as well as a story writer. Which came first? What’s it like for you, working in both formats? 

JPS: I started with short fiction, but if I have a preference, it’s writing novels. I’m a complete pantser and, while that works well when you have 70,000 words to play with, it becomes problematic when you’re trying to tell a tale in 5,000 words or less. ‘The Last Chance Coalition,’ my story in Larceny & Last Chances (2,500 words) took me about two weeks to write! That’s the equivalent of two or three chapters, and when I’m working on a novel, my goal is a chapter a day. I have tremendous respect for short story writers.

CK: Then there are the anthologies. I don’t need to tell you how excited I am about Larceny & Last Chances. All the stories are so good. What got you into assembling anthologies, and how do you generate the theme for each? 

JPS: I got my start in short stories. I mentioned THEMA earlier, a theme-based literary journal, and that inspired the theme-based anthology idea. But it wasn’t until I had two published mystery stories in 2014 that I really thought, “Hey, I can do this.” When I decided to start Superior Shores Press in 2018 (following the closure of both small presses I’d been published with), I knew I had to give the press some legitimacy. It seemed like a win-win. Pay forward my own success, and establish SSP as the real deal.

As for themes, the first was called The Best Laid Plans (because it really was a risk and I had no idea what I was doing). After that I got into alliteration! Heartbreaks & Half-truths, Moonlight & Misadventure, and now, Larceny & Last Chances. I try not to make the theme too restrictive—e.g. no mention of murder—so that writers can explore their inner muse. 

CK: What are the top two things you look for in an anthology submission? 

JPS: 1) It must meet the theme, but not in an obvious way. Surprise me and you’ll surprise the reader. 2) A great ending. When I’m reading a story, sometimes I’ll be on the fence, and then the end will just blow me away. And so, I’ll reread the story, thinking, “How can I make this better, so I’m not on the fence?” And if the ideas pop at me, rapid fire, I know it’s a yes. Usually it’s stuff like too much backstory, or too many characters. Both are easily corrected if the author is amenable. In my experience, most authors only want to improve their work, and so they are largely receptive to any suggested edits. 

CK: What are reasons you might reject a submission? 

JPS: 1) Sloppy writing, and by that I mean not just missing commas or spelling/grammatical errors, but a lack of attention to detail. 2) For Larceny, I received a few submissions that had clearly been rejected for a recent location-themed anthology. I understand that good stories get rejected for any number of reasons, but as an author, you should make the effort to improve (and change the locale, if need be) before submitting to the next market. 3) The premise is unimaginative. I want you to be on theme, but it can’t be obvious and the ending should surprise or satisfy (and hopefully, both). 4) Werewolves. I really do not get werewolves.

CK:  I’m sure a lot of people ask you about publishing, based on your experiences, your articles, and your books on the topic. What are the most important pieces of advice you find yourself giving people?

JPS: Publishing is a business like any other. Rejection isn’t personal. And while there are exceptions, it’s the big names that will get the big bucks. I remember a writing instructor telling me: “If you want a six-figure publishing deal, become a celebrity. If you want to learn to write well, start with this class.”

CK: Thanks so much for taking the time for this, Judy!

JPS: My pleasure, Charlie. I’ve registered for Killer Nashville (my first time!) and can’t wait to meet Clay Stafford and the many writers and readers who will be attending this year’s conference. 

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Larceny & Last Chances: 22 Stories of Mystery & Suspense

Edited by Judy Penz Sheluk

Publication Date: June 18, 2024

Sometimes it’s about doing the right thing. Sometimes it’s about getting even. Sometimes it’s about taking what you think you deserve. And sometimes, it’s your last, best, hope. Edited by Judy Penz Sheluk and featuring stories by Christina Boufis, John Bukowski, Brenda Chapman, Susan Daly, Wil A. Emerson, Tracy Falenwolfe, Kate Fellowes, Molly Wills Fraser, Gina X. Grant, Karen Grose, Wendy Harrison, Julie Hastrup, Larry M. Keeton, Charlie Kondek, Edward Lodi, Bethany Maines, Gregory Meece, Cate Moyle, Judy Penz Sheluk, KM Rockwood, Kevin R. Tipple, and Robert Weibezahl.

Buy Link: www.books2read.com/larceny

“A Casual Conversation with Susan Isaacs”

Susan Isaacs interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I had a wonderful opportunity to just chat with bestselling author and mystery legend, Susan Isaacs, as a follow-up to my interview with her for my monthly Writer’s Digest column. It was a wonderful conversation. I needed a break from writing. She needed a break from writing. Like a fly on the wall (and with Susan’s permission), I thought I’d share the highlights of our conversation here with you.

“Susan, I just finished Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown. I loved it. And I now have singer Jim Croce’s earworm in my head.”

“Me, too.” She laughed.

“I love your descriptions in your prose. Right on the mark. Not too much, not too little.”

“Description can be hard.”

“But you do it so well. Any tips?”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I do. Two things. First, I see it in my head. I’m looking at the draft, and I say, ‘Hey, you know, there’s nothing here.’”

I laugh. “So, what do you do?”

“Well in Bad, Bad, Seymore Brown, the character with the problem is a college professor, a really nice woman, who teaches film, and her area of specialization is big Hollywood Studio films. When she was five, her parents were murdered. It was an arson murder, and she was lucky enough to jump out of the window of the house and save herself. So, Corie, who’s my detective, a former FBI agent, is called on, but not through herself, but through her dad, who’s a retired NYPD detective. He was a detective twenty years earlier, interviewing this little girl, April is her name, and they kept up a kind of birthday-card-Christmas-card relationship.”

“And the plot is great.”

“Thanks, but in terms of description, there was nothing there. But there were so many things to work with. So, after I get that structure, I see it in my head, and I begin to type it in.”

“The description?”

“Plot, then description.”

“And you mentioned another thing you do?”

“Research. And you don’t always have to physically go somewhere to do it. I had a great time with this novel. For example, it was during COVID, and nobody was holding a gun to my head and saying ‘Write’ so I had the leisure time to look at real estate in New Brunswick online, and I found the house with pictures that I knew April should live in, and that’s simply it. And I used that house because now April is being threatened, someone is trying to kill her twenty years after her parent’s death. Though the local cops are convinced it had nothing to do with her parents’ murder, but that’s why Corie’s dad and Corie get pulled into it.”

“So basically, when you do description, you get the structure, the bones of your plot, and then you go back and both imagine and research, at your leisure, the details that really set your writing off. What’s the hardest thing for you as a writer?”

“You know, I think there are all sorts of things that are hard for writers. For me, it’s plot. I’ll spend much more time on plot, you know, working it out, both from the detective’s point-of-view and the killer’s point-of-view, just so it seems whole, and it seems that what I write could have happened. For me, I don’t want somebody clapping their palm to their forehead and saying, ‘Oh, please!’ So that’s the hard thing for me.”

“You’ve talked with me about how focused you get when you’re writing.”

“Oh, yes. When you’re writing, you’re really concentrating. We were having work done on the house once and they were trying to do something in the basement, I forget what it was. But there was this jackhammer going, and I was upstairs working. It was when my kids were really young and, you know, I had only a limited amount of time to write every day, and so I was writing and I didn’t even hear the jackhammer until, I don’t know, the dog put her nose or snout on my knee and I stopped writing for a moment and said, ‘What is that?’ and then I heard it.”

“But it took your dog to bring you out of your zone. Not the jackhammer.”

“You get really involved.”

“Sort of transcending into another universe.”

“The story pulls you in. The weird thing is that I have ADD, ADHD, whatever they call it. I know that now, but I didn’t know that then, back when the jackhammer was in the basement. In fact, I didn’t know there was a name for it. I just thought, ‘This is how I am.’ You know, I go from one thing to the next. But people with ADHD can’t use that as an excuse not to write because you hyper-focus.”

“That’s interesting.”

“You don’t hear the jackhammers.”

“So things just flow.”

“Well, it’s always better in your head than on the page,” she says, “as far as writing goes.”

“I’d love to see your stories in your head, then, because your writing is great. As far as plotting, the book moves along at a fast clip. I noticed, distinctly, that your writing style is high with active verbs. Is that intentional or is that something that just comes naturally from you?”

“I think for me it just happens. It’s part of the plotting.”

“Well, it certainly moves the story forward.”

“Yes, I can see it would. But, no, I don’t think ‘let me think of an active verb’. You know,” she laughs, “I don’t think it ever occurred to me to even think of an active verb.”

“That’s funny. We’re all made so differently. I find it fascinating that, after all you’ve published, your Corie Geller novel is going to be part of the first series you’ve ever written. Everything else has been standalones.”

“Yes. I’m already writing the next book. Look, for forty-five years, I did mysteries. I did sagas. I did espionage novels. I did, you know, just regular books about people’s lives. But I never wrote a series because I was afraid I after writing one successful mystery, that I would be stuck, and I’d be writing, you know, my character and compromising positions with, Judith Singer goes Hawaiian in the 25th sequel. I didn’t want that. I wanted to try things out. So now that I’ve long been in my career this long, I thought I would really like to do a series because I want a family, another family.”

“Another family?”

“I mean, I have a great family. I have a husband who’s still practicing law. I have children, I have grandchildren, but I’m ready for another family.”

“And this series is going to be it?”

“It’s not just a one-book deal. I wanted more. So, I made Corie as rich and as complicated and as believable as she could be. It’s one thing to have a housewife detective. It’s another to have someone who lives in the suburbs, but who’s a pro. And she’s helped by her father, who was in the NYPD, who has a different kind of experience.”

“And that gives you a lot to work with. And, in an interesting way, at this stage of your life, another family to explore and live with.” I look at the clock. “Well, I guess we both need to get back to work.”

“This has been great. When you work alone all day, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone.”

We both laughed and we hung up. It was a break in the day. But a good break. I think Susan fed her ADHD a bit with the distraction, but for me, I learned a few things in just the passing conversation. Writers are wonderful. If you haven’t done it today, don’t text, don’t email, but pick up the phone and call a writer friend you know. I hung up the phone with Susan, invigorated, ready to get back to work. As she said, it’s nice to be able to just mouth off to someone. As I would say, it’s nice to talk to someone and remember that, as writers, we are not alone, and we all have so much to learn.

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer and filmmaker and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Susan Isaacs is the author of fourteen novels, including Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, Takes One to Know One, As Husbands Go, Long Time No See, Any Place I Hang My Hat, and Compromising Positions. A recipient of the Writers for Writers Award and the John Steinbeck Award, Isaacs is a former chairman of the board of Poets & Writers, and a past president of Mystery Writers of America. Her fiction has been translated into thirty languages. She lives on Long Island with her husband. https://www.susanisaacs.com/

Author Amulya Malladi on “Research: Doing It, Loving It, Using It, and Leaving It Out”

Amulya Malladi interviewed by Clay Stafford

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“I’m talking today with international bestselling author Amulya Malladi about her latest book A Death in Denmark. What I think is fascinating is your sense of endurance. This book—research and writing—took you ten years to write.”

She laughs. “You know, it was COVID. We all didn’t have anything better to do. I was working for a Life Sciences Company, a diagnostic company, so I was very busy. But you know, outside of reading papers about COVID, this was the outlet. And so that’s sort of how long it took to get the book done. I had the idea for a long time. I needed a pandemic to convince me that I could write a mystery.”

“Which is interesting because you’d never written a mystery before. Having never worked in that genre, I’m sure there was a learning curve there for you.”

“A lot of research.”

“You love reading mysteries, so you already had a background in the structure of that, but what you’ve written in A Death in Denmark is a highly focused historical work. It’s the attention and knowledge of detail that really made the book jump for me. Unless you’re a history major with emphasis on the Holocaust and carrying all of that information around in your head, you’re going to have to find factual information somewhere. How did you do that?”

“Studies.”

“Studies?”

“You’ll need a lot of the studies that are available. Luckily, my husband’s doing a Ph.D. He has a student I.D., so I could download a lot of studies with it. Otherwise, I’d be paying for it. Also, I work in diagnostic companies. I read a lot of clinical studies. So these are all peer-reviewed papers that are based on historic research, and they are published, so that is a great source, a reference.”

“But what if you don’t have that access?”

“You can go to your library and get access to it as well. If you’re looking for that kind of historic research, this is the place to go.”

“Not the Internet? Or books, maybe?”

“Clinical studies and peer-reviewed papers, peer-reviewed clinical studies, they’re laborious.”

“And we’re talking, for this book, information directly related to the historical accuracy of the Holocaust and Denmark’s involvement in that history?”

“You have to read through a lot to get to it. And it’s not fiction. They’re just throwing the data out there. But it’s a good source, especially for writers because we need to know about two-hundred-percent to write five-percent.”

“The old Hemingway iceberg reference.”

“To feel comfortable writing that five, you need to know so much more. I could write actually a whole other book about everything that I learned at that time. And that is a good place to go. So I recommend going and doing, not just looking at, you know, Wikipedia, and all that good stuff, but actually going and looking at those papers.”

“Documents from that time period and documents covering that time period and the involvement of the various individuals and groups.”

“When you read a paper, you see like fifteen other sources for those papers, and then you can go into those sources and learn more.”

I laugh this time. “For me, research is like a series of rabbit holes that I find myself falling into. How do you know when to stop?”

“The way I was doing it is I research as I write, and I do it constantly. You know, simple things I’m writing, and I’m like, ‘Oh, he has to turn on this street. What street was that again? I can’t remember.’ I have Maps open constantly, and I know Copenhagen, the city, very well. But, you know, I’ll forget the street names. That sometimes takes work. I’m just writing the second book and I wanted Gabriel Præst, my main character and an ex-Copenhagen cop, to go into this café and it turned into a three-hour research session.”

“Okay. Sounds like a rabbit hole to me.”

“You’ve got to pull yourself out of that hole, because, literally, that was one paragraph, and I just spent three hours going into it. And now I know way too much about this café that I didn’t need to know about. Again, to write that five-percent, I needed to know two-hundred percent. I am curious. I like to know this. So suddenly, now I have that café on my list because we’re going to Copenhagen in a few weeks, and I’m like, ‘Oh, we need to go check that out.’”

“So you’re actually doing onsite research, as well?”

“Yes. I use it all. I think as you write you will see, ‘Okay, now I got all the information that I need.’

“And then you write. Research done?”

“No. I was editing and again I was like, ‘Is this really correct? Did I get this information correct? Let me go check again.’”

“Which is why, I guess, your writing rings so true.”

“I think it is healthy for writers to do that, especially if you’re going to write historical fiction or any kind of fiction that requires research. Here’s the important thing. I think with research, you have to kind of find the source always. You know? It’s tempting to just end up in Wikipedia because it’s easy. You get there. But you know, Wikipedia has done a pretty decent job of asking for sources, and I always go into the source. You know you can keep going in and find the truth. I read Exodus while I lived in India. One million years ago, I was a teenager, and I don’t know if you’ve read Leon Uris’s Exodus, but there’s this famous story in that book about the Danish King. When the Germans came, they said, ‘Oh, they’re going to ask the Jews to wear the Star of David,’ and the story goes, based on Exodus, that the king rode the streets with the Star of David. I thought that was an amazing story. That was my first introduction to Denmark, like hundreds of years before I met my husband, and that story stayed with me. And then I find out it’s not a true story. You know? You know, Marie Antoinette never said ‘Let them eat cake.’ And so it was like, ‘Oh.’”

“Washington did not chop down the cherry tree.”

“No, and the apple didn’t fall. I mean, it’s simple things we do that with, right? With Casablanca, it’s like you said, you know, ‘Play it again, Sam.’ And she never said that. She said, ‘Play it.’ And you realize these become part of the story.”

“Secondary sources then, if I get what you’re saying, are suspect.”

“Research helps you figure out, ‘Okay, that never happened.’”

“When you say that you’re writing, and you’re incorporating the research into your writing sometimes you can’t, you’re not in a spot where the research goes into it. So, how do you organize your research that you’re not immediately using?”

“I don’t do that. I’m sure there are people who do that well. I’m sure there are people who are more disciplined than I am. I’m barely able to block my life. I mean, it’s hard enough, so you know if I do some research, I know there are people who take notes. I have notes, but those are the basics. ‘Oh, this guy’s name is this, his wife is this, he’s this old, please don’t say he’s from this street, he’s living on this street…’ Some basics I’ll have, so I can go back and look. But a lot of the times I’m like, ‘What was this guy’s husband doing again?’ I have to go find it. I won’t read the notes in all honesty, even if I make them. So for me, it’s important to go in and look at that point.”

“And this is why you write and research at the same time.”

“And this is why maybe it’s not the best way to do the research. It takes longer, like I said, you spend three hours doing something that is not important, but hey, that was kind of fun for me. I was curious to remember about Dan Turéll’s books, because I hadn’t read them for a while.”

“Some writers don’t like research. You like research. And for historicals, there’s really no way around it, is there?”

“I take my time and I think I really like the research. I have fun doing it.”

“Does it hurt to leave some of the research out?”

“Oh, my God, yes. My editor said, ‘You know, Amulya, we need the World War II stuff more.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, really? Watch me.’ So I spend all this time and I basically wrote the book that my character, the dead politician, writes.”

“This is an integral part of the story, for those who haven’t read the book.”

“I wrote a large part of that book that she is supposed to have written and put it in this book. I put in footnotes.”

“Footnotes?”

“My editor calls me and she’s like, ‘I don’t think we can have footnotes and fiction.’ I’m like, ‘Really?’ And she goes, ‘You know, you can make a list of all of this and put it in the back of the book. We’ll be happy to do that. But you can’t have footnotes.’ I felt so bad taking it out because this was really good stuff. You know, these were important stories.”

“So it does hurt to leave these things out.”

“I did all kinds of research. I read the secret reports, the daily reports that the Germans wrote, because you can find pictures of that. I kind of went in and did all of that to kind of make this as authentic as possible, and then she said, ‘Could you please, like make it part of the book, and not as…’ She’s like ‘People are going to lose interest.’ So yeah, it does hurt. It really didn’t make me happy to do that.”

“You reference real companies, use real restaurants, use real clothing, use real drinks. You use real foods. Do you have some sort of legal counsel that has looked over this to make sure nobody is going to sue you for anything you write? Or how do you protect yourself in your research?”

“When I’m being not-so-nice about something, I am careful. I have not heard anything from legal. Maybe I should ask tomorrow. I think Robert B. Parker said this in an interview once: ‘If I’m going to say something bad about a restaurant, I make the name up.’”

“Circling back, you do onsite research, as well.”

“Oh, yeah. I’ve been to Berlin several times, so I know the streets of Berlin. I know this process. I know what they feel like. It’s easier to write about places you’ve been to, but the details you will forget. Even though I know Copenhagen very well, I still forget the details. ‘What is that place called again? What was that restaurant I used to go to?’ And then I have to go look in Maps, and find, ‘Ah, that’s what it’s called here. How do they spell this again?’ But I think, yes, from a research perspective, if you are wanting to set a whole set of books somewhere, and if you have a chance to go there, go. Unless you’re setting a book in Afghanistan, or you know, Iraq, then don’t go. Because I did set a book partly in Afghanistan and I remember I talked to a friend of mine. She’s a journalist for AP and she said, ‘Oh, you should come to Kabul.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t think so, just tell me what you know so I can learn from that and write it.’ She’s like, ‘You’ll have a great time on it.’ And I said, ‘I will not have a great time. No, not doing that.’ But I think, yes…”

“When it comes to perceived safety, you’re like me, an armchair researcher. Right?”

“Give me a book. Give me a clinical study. Give me a peer-reviewed paper, I’ll be good.”

“What advice do you have for new writers?”

“Edit. Edit all the time. I’ve met writers, especially when they are new, they say things like, ‘Oh, my God! If I edit too much, it takes the essence away. I always say, ‘No, it just takes the garbage away.’ Edit. Edit, until you are so sick of that book. Because, trust me, when the book is finished and you read it, you’ll want to edit it again because you missed a few things. I tell everybody, ‘Edit, edit, edit. And don’t fall in love with anything you write while you’re writing it because you may have to delete it.’ You know, you may write one-hundred pages and realize, I went on the wrong track and now I have to go delete it.”

“And take out the footnotes.”

“Yeah, and take out the footnotes.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, literary theorist, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. https://claystafford.com/

Clay’s book links: https://linktr.ee/claystafford

Amulya Malladi is the bestselling author of eight novels. Her books have been translated into several languages. She won a screenwriting award for her work on Ø (Island), a Danish series that aired on Amazon Prime Global and Studio Canal+. https://www.amulyamalladi.com/

Amulya’s book link: https://linktr.ee/amulyamalladi