It’s a conversation grabber—and sometimes stopper.
“I write murder mysteries.”—the answer to the polite, “What do you do?” What
follows has ranged from a perceptible move away to comments like, “You don’t
look like you write about murder”—(and that would be what kind of face?)—and an
enormous number of suggestions for killing without a trace, which continues to
give me pause. Notify the individual’s
family members?
There was never any question that when I was given a
gift of time—leaving my job during my husband’s sabbatical in another country—I
would write the novel in my head as a mystery. Since childhood, I had read
anything and everything, but it was mysteries that posed the wondrous challenge
of trying to guess whodunit before the final page. And here I am so many years
later trying to keep readers from doing just that.
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Agatha Christie set the bar. As I write, it’s one I
gaze upon from below with admiration, longing, and very occasionally a glimmer
of recognition. I think of Jane Marple as a kind of Great Aunt to my own series
character, Faith Fairchild. Jane Marple was—and remains—the quintessential
female sleuth, relying on her own intuition and keen powers of observation as
the basic tools for detection. She, and Dame Agatha, would scorn the current use
of the Internet to ferret out information, having no need for Google. Instead,
Miss Marple displays an uncanny ability to make connections between apparently
disparate individuals and events, past and present. Human beings are much of a
type, as are the situations in which they find themselves. The classic village
mystery, of which Christie’s Murder at
the Vicarage may be the best example, is the genre into which my series
falls. However, I do not limit the locale to a place like St. Mary Mead or in
my case, Aleford, Massachusetts, a fictitious Boston suburb. I’ve broadened the
definition to include New York City; Lyon, France; Cambridge, Massachusetts;
and locales in Maine, Vermont, and Norway. What motivates individuals to commit
murder, knows no borders. The kinds of communication that exist in a village
exist in a city, a country. Miss Marple with her bird watching binoculars or
sudden need to weed her garden becomes transformed into someone looking into
apartment windows across an airshaft or the individual who spies a moving van,
stuffs newspapers into a trash bag, and heads for the curb gleaning clues about
the new occupants from the furniture.
It all comes down to a passionate interest in
people. Miss Marple’s self-described “hobby” is “studying people, human nature
if you will.” I think of my sleuth as someone who metaphorically takes a stick
and pokes beneath the surface of a pond to find out what’s underneath, someone
who wants to know what’s behind an individual’s public face and explore any disparities.
It is in this space, the gap between what seems and what is, that true terror
lurks. The good neighbor who waters your plants and feeds your cat while you’re
away may, in fact, be a serial killer with fifty bodies buried in the backyard.
Bodies! Miss Marple’s friend Mrs. Bantry appeals for
help saying, “You’re so good at bodies!” All my titles start with, “The Body
in…” With the current one, number twenty-three, The Body in the Wardrobe I hope I’ve become “good at bodies” too.
The
Body in the Wardrobe is the 23rd
in Katherine Hall Page’s Faith Fairchild series and her 30th book
overall. She has published for middle grade and YA readers as well as a
collection of short stories, Small Plates (2014), and a series cookbook, Have Faith in your Kitchen (Orchises Press). She has been awarded Agathas for Best First, Best Novel, and Best SS
and also was nominated for additional Agathas, an Edgar, Macavity, Mary Higgins
Clark and the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Literary Award for Crime
Fiction. She is the recipient of Malice Domestic 28th’s Lifetime
Achievement Award. She lives in Maine and Massachusetts.
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1 Comments
Such a great post! TY
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