Memories tried and not so true...

Here's the full essay that ran last month in the wonderful Crimespree blog.

How reliable is memory?
According to neuroscientists, not very. While we may view any particular memory as a continuous film of a past scene, those who study how the brain processes describe it as something more like a collage. As a 2012 Psychology Today article summarized, every time we conjure a memory, we are not so much reviewing a complete set of stored data as re-configuring a complex scene from disparate parts. In other words, every memory is newly re-assembled, and even if the pieces are accurate they may be prone to reinterpretation. Our current situation may sublimate the pain of a heartbreak – or accentuate the regret over a path not chosen – to shift our focus. In the process of recall, therefore, we may be reacting more to our present lives than to anything that happened way back when.
This unreliability is why eyewitnesses cannot always be trusted, particularly when contradicted by physical evidence. In fact, one-third of cases overturned through the work of the Innocence Project through DNA testing were originally based on eye-witness testimony, according to a 2010 Scientific American article.
Such questions about memory are at the heart of my new mystery, WORLD ENOUGH. The answers won’t necessarily explain the deaths – one twenty years ago and one in the present time of the book – that we hear about at the start of the book. But they are key to how the narrative unfolds, and what will happen to our protagonist, a woman named Tara Winton who finds herself at personal and professional crossroads.
WORLD ENOUGH opens in Boston, 2007, right before the financial crisis, when the city – much like my protagonist – seems poised on the edge of the unknown. Bored at her corporate job, divorced but still seeing her ex, Tara lives for her nights out with the old crew – other forty-somethings who still play and enjoy the music they created twenty years before. When she is solicited to write an article revisiting those days, she leaps at the chance. Who wouldn’t want to relive the best period of one’s life?
As Tara recalls it, the ‘80s was a decade of community and creativity. On her own for the first time, she found herself drawn to the music then being generated by dozens of young bands in Boston. When a chance acquaintance had suggested she help him start a “zine,” a fan magazine, she seized the opportunity to jump-start her life. Not only could she recast herself as a writer – a dream so deeply buried she had barely articulated it to herself – but by doing so she could install herself in the nocturnal world. She was no longer a “tourist,” or fan; she had a role to play. A reason to come out each night to the clubs.

For a while, everything was wonderful. She built a reputation and traded the ‘zine for a paying job. She made fast friends and met the man she would marry. She felt herself an integral part of an artistic movement. And then, suddenly, everything fell apart. While she knew there had been problems – drugs, alcohol, a fickle music industry, and the general unsustainability of the frenzy – she still wonders what happened. Even as she interviews the survivors and revisits old haunts, Tara looks back on the decade as a golden period for herself and all those in the scene.
But was it? Were there clues she missed, in herself and among her friends? Was her little punk paradise really, as her favorite song went, world enough?
To write this book, I drew on my own life, including my past as a rock music critic. But this experience is not exclusive to any one subculture or time, except possibly to time of life – somewhere past forty and no longer up to going out every night. For those of us who have reached this point, it is, perhaps, natural to idealize our youth. We had more energy, and more potential. Everything seemed more exciting, because it was new to us. And the frustrations of those days – the insecurity of fledgling careers and relationships – are easy to dismiss in retrospect years later. These are factors Tara faces as her assignment takes on added meaning. As she must break down all she once accepted to find out what is real and what never existed at all.
Maybe such re-evaluations are also part of life, of looking forward. One early reader of WORLD EHOUGH called it a “coming-of-middle-age” book, and I believe there is some validity to that. The Tara who finds herself once more researching a story – revisiting those long-gone days – is a different person than the young zine writer we have also come to know. The older Tara has more information and, just maybe, more perspective. They say the truth will set you free, but in Tara’s case, it may simply raise more questions as the mystery unfolds.
Clea Simon

Before I was a writer...

Writers talk about finding their “voice” – their personal style – as if it’s a positive thing. But, sometimes, that means discovering that you are completely tone deaf.

I’ve always loved music, maybe as much as I love writing. And long before I became an author, I was a musician.

Drawn to the string bass in grade school – it was so big! The sound so rich and deep! – I was playing in community orchestras by my teens. Of course, by then, I was consumed by rock and roll, too. And since my friends all wanted to be guitarists or singers, up front and center, I was recruited. For the grand sum of $35, I purchased an electric bass, used, at the mall. Someone got a drum kit – a birthday? Christmas? – and we formed a band. It was heaven of the loudest sort, and I was sure I was besting John Entwhistle, playing and singing harmony too, nights and weekends in basements and garages all over town.

I still recall our first professional gig – playing a friend’s Sweet Sixteen. We ran out of tunes about 45 minutes in, and jammed on Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” for a good hour longer. Yeah, I learned how to solo early on – I did it all!

I didn’t intend to keep playing in college, but once again I was recruited. A bass player – one with actual musical training – will always be in demand, especially if she sings. Before long, we were gigging at campus parties and frat houses around New England, known for getting people dancing with our mix of originals and New Wave covers and a professional sound system that could fill a room. (We were less popular at our weekly Tuesday slot at the local pub. I can still hear the thwack of darts hitting the board, in the silence between numbers.)

With that sound system, we saw the opportunity to improve. We could tape ourselves, and we did, sitting down to listen track by track: Lead guitar, singer, rhythm guitar. Backing vocals… Good lord! How had I never known? I don’t recall if any of my bandmates said anything as we listened to my out-of-tune caterwauling. They didn’t have to. I stuck to bass from then on.

I continued to play in bands for a while after college, even as I began writing about music instead. Over the years, I turned from music journalism to the fiction that now occupies my time. I still sing in private, too. But I’ve found better uses for my voice.

(This essay originally ran in the Dear Reader email newsletter on Oct. 24.)

Mysterious Bookshop tonight!

As you read this, I'm on my way to NYC! I'll be reading and chatting at the renowned Mysterious Bookshop tonight at 6:30 (58 Warren St.) - the world's oldest and greatest mystery fiction specialty store. Hoping to see some old friends and family – and maybe some new friends as well! But if you can't make it, please feel free to call the store today at 212-587-1011 and order your copy of World Enough. I'll sign it for you tonight and the store can mail it out.

I wanted to go but...

I'm hoping to see you tomorrow (Nov. 8 at 6:30 p.m.) at Mysterious Bookshop in New York City (58 Warren St., in Tribeca). But if you can't make it and still want a signed, personalized book, you can get one. Please just call the store and tell them you want me to sign one for you – the number is (212) 587-1011. (You can always order a book on line, but please call to make sure they know to put it aside for me to sign.)

Going dark...

You should write romantic suspense.

That was how it started. A possibly offhand comment by my publisher over drinks at Crimefest that sent me off into a tizzy. After 22 mysteries ranging from cozy to paranormal, I was being directed to change things up. I’d written harder books, for sure (my Blackie and Care mysteries are positively dystopian), but all my mysteries had an essential sweetness to them. And cats – lots of cats – all based more or less on either my late, great Cyrus or my constant companion and muse, Musetta. Romantic suspense? I didn’t know where to start.

“Do you have any ideas?” My agent echoed the question my editor had voiced, when I’d next touched base. “Something you’ve always wanted to work on, perhaps?”

Well, yeah, I told them both. I did have a manuscript in the drawer – what writer didn’t – but I wasn’t sure if …

“Why not try it?” I don’t remember if my agent said that, or my husband, or some voice in the back of my head. All I know is I dug out that file – 100 pages I had worked and re-worked so many times I couldn’t remember – and I thought, “yeah, I could do this.” I read the opening scene, and I thought, “I want to do this.” A few pages later, and it hit me: “I’m ready to do this.” The book I had wanted to write for more than ten years was something I now could write. At some point, I broke it to my agent that the project I was diving into wasn’t anything at all like romantic suspense. By that point, I was already committed.

Those pages became the basis for my new World Enough, a rock and roll mystery that’s as close to a true noir as I’m ever likely to write. The setup is simple: A woman walks into a bar. It’s a bar filled with old friends, for sure, but also with history. The band that’s playing that night is one she’s followed for more than twenty years, as has the rest of the sparse crowd gathered there. The woman – Tara Winton – is a corporate PR drone, but back when the band was in its heyday, she’d been a rock critic, part of the garage-punk club scene. Back then, anything had seemed possible. Drugs and other dangers had taken their toll on the scene, but Tara is glad to be out. Glad to be among her surviving crew. Until, that is, she finds out that another of the old gang has died. Before long, she’s covering the scene again – asking questions that calls not only the present but her idyllic memories of the club days into doubt.

Yes, I was a rock critic, back in the day. I covered bands like the Aught Nines and the Whirled Shakers. But no, as I have now told several early readers from those days, I am not writing a thinly veiled exposé about any real bands. It’s funny, but none of htem ask if I’m writing about myself. If Tara, with her illusions and faulty memory, is me. That would be a harder one to answer, and it would touch on why it took me so long to be able to write this book. Why it took me so long to get the club world right.

How did it feel it leave cozies behind for sex and drugs and rock and roll? In this case, liberating. In this new voice, I could depict the world I remember, without inhibitions. I could work through more complex, conflicting emotions than I’d felt capable of tackling before. Bigger issues – and, yes, I already have ideas for the next book. A rocker, getting on in years, who must re-visit the trauma that both made her and kept her stuck in place as the world moved on.

It also made me appreciate my cozies more. World Enough is rough, at least emotionally, and I missed the warmth and whimsy of magical cats and benevolent spirits. I confess, I found myself longing for a career like Catriona McPherson’s, alternating cozies with harder-edged books. Maybe that’s why I dove into another Pru Marlowe while waiting for World Enough to come out. And why I’m absolutely thrilled that Polis Books has now picked up my “Witch Cats of Cambridge” series (look for the first book, A Spell of Murder, probably in early 2019). I got the news of the Polis offer during a particularly rough couple of weeks, which saw the decline and death of Musetta, so the idea of withdrawing into a magical world of friendly felines has been just the comfort I need. I like to think that this new series will offer readers that same kind of haven – playful and homely and sweet.

The first book is due in January, by which point I will have been talking about World Enough for several months, even pairing up with some of the rockers from those days here in Boston. Will I want to go dark again, after spending time with the warm and fuzzy? Maybe. We’ll see where the muse takes me – or the spirit of Musetta, perhaps, inspiring my next move.


This originally ran on the Wicked Cozies blog

Launch party tonight!

FINALLY! We're celebrating the release of World Enough at Harvard Book Store tonight with a reading, chat, and more (Harvard Book Store is right in Harvard Square, at 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge). Won't you join us? If you can't be there physically, you can still get a signed/personalized book. Please just call the store at 800-542-READ (or 617-661-1515) and order a copy. Tell them you want me to sign it for you, and they'll put it aside before arranging for delivery. (You can also order online at harvard.com)