Thank you, January Magazine!

"We engage with the work of the authors we love on many levels." So begins today's January Magazine Author Snapshot. It then goes on to say incredibly nice things – concluding: "Mystery, music, nightclubs, animals in danger: on a certain level, it’s an unlikely combination, yet, somehow, it works very well. And why? That special blend, I think: passion, heart, understanding and voice, voice, voice. Simon’s is as strong and clear as the passion she brings to the stories she tells."

January Magazine is a must-read, a 12-year-old online journal of the arts, with news, reviews, and interviews updated daily. I check in whenever I can, for information and just plain fun. But still, somehow, when editor (and fab author) Linda L. Richards asked me a few months ago if I wanted to be "snapshot," I said, sure and filled out an email interview. I never expected something as nice as this. Thank you, Linda! Thank you, January Magazine!

Forgotten Books

Have you heard about Patti Abbott's Friday Forgotten Books project? Death Was the Other Woman author Linda L. Richards has tagged me to write up this week's "Forgotten Book," and I'm thrilled to participate. In brief, Patti started this project stating: I'm worried great books of the recent past are sliding out of print and out of our consciousness. Not the first-tier classics we all can name, but the books that come next. And authors and bloggers have been diligent about digging up some wonderful reads. (For some of them, check out Patti's blog.)

For my turn, I'm picking Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, a book I find myself re-reading regularly. It's historical fiction, but like all Mantel's work, defiantly unsentimental. Instead, as it follows the fathers of the French Revolution Camille Desmoulins, Jacques Danton, and Maximilien Robbespierre and their colleagues from their bourgeois upbringing through to their end, in the Terror of their own creating, it celebrates the blood lust in all of us, as enthusiasm begets cruelty and passion consumes itself. Along the way, it also gives very plausible reasons for things turning out as they do, in the great dance with Mme Guillotine, shifting in view point between the characters and a cool historical ominpotence, noting in little historical asides: Under the bridges, by dim and precarious fires, the destitute wait for death. A loaf of bread is fourteen sous, for the New Year. I love it.

As you can probably tell, Mantel is a writer of extremes. She tends toward either short, dark novels, like Fludd and The Giant O'Brien, or oversize ones like this and the recent, and also very lovely, Beyond Black. The emotions and themes in all her books, even the tiny ones, are intense, set off by writing so dry it verges on cryptic, a quality I noticed recently in a very short essay she'd authored for Granta on finding an icon in a Jiddah souk. I now look for her everywhere. In between novels, she shows up regularly in the pages of the New York Review of Books and other journals. But A Place of Greater Safety is the one I come back to. I was given this book by my husband, who received a review copy and brought it home to me because of its size (748 pp.) He knows I'm a fast reader and figured this would last me a while. It has.

(I've chosen to show this 1998 edition, which is the one I have, rather than the 2006 paperback because of its cover. Same book, but this cool paperback features a detail of a portrait of Desmoulins by Bole.)

And for next week, I tag Caroline Leavitt.

Guest Blogger: Linda L. Richards

What’s in a name, anyway? This question came up for me again a few days ago, when Clea and I were making preparations for my visit here. At one point she said something like, “it’s a good thing the protagonist of your book is named Kitty, ‘cause she’ll feel right at home on my blog.”

And I laughed, of course, because it was funny and because Clea has the sort of witty energy that’s difficult to resist when she wants you to smile. But at the same time, I thought about what she’d said. Kitty. At this point, I’m having a tough time remembering where that even came from. And her last name: Pangborn? That I remember: I pulled it right out of the air. But I envisioned this young socialite thrust onto hard times. And she’s born a Katherine: Katherine right down to her matched luggage and her hand-stitched towels. And then the world changes -- the stock market crashes, her father kills himself, The Depression sweeps the country -- and she reluctantly emerges as “Kitty:” someone who puts up with a diminutive because she must. (Sorry, Clea: nothing at all to do with cats!)

Now here’s a secret, something I haven’t told anyone else. A secret about Dexter Theroux, the main male character in Death Was the Other Woman. No one has asked me why I settled him with “Dexter.” And it’s a pretty good question: one especially apt for this venue.

So why Dexter? Why not David or Michael or John -- one of those good old saint names that pull so much use. Was something more off-beat called for? Then Percival might have had the same effect. Or Archibald could have served. But the truth is this: at the very moment that the book that would become Death Was the Other Woman was pouring itself into my brain, I was dogsitting my friend Pam’s canine companion. And this dog was a rakish old gentleman: an Australian Shepherd-cross-something-wirey. He had seen his share of summers, this old guy, his coat was thin in spots and his joints could be a bit sore in the morning, but there was something ineffably cool about him. You really got that, if he was a music lover, he’d listen to jazz. And not just any jazz, either. But the kind of cool jazz popularized by Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck. Something that calls for wearing a beret and a slouchy, stripey shirt.

We’d go for walks and he’d be very self-possessed. My own dog, Jett, would be bouncing around, trying to get him to play, and he would play with her, a little indulgently. But there was never any question but that he was thinking his own thoughts and preparing to do his own business. He was courteous to Jett, you understand -- even if that courtesy was sometimes tinged with an aloof superiority that he came by very honestly -- but it was clear that he was focusing on larger issues. And this dog -- of course, and you’ve guessed it by now -- this dog was named Dex.

So, I don’t know, I’m sitting in my studio writing away and Dex has taken up residence somewhere near my feet. (His mom is a writer, so I guess it made sense to him to station himself near the woman making all the sharp clacking sounds on the keyed plastic thing.)

While he’s there, snoring softly, this character waltzes into my manuscript. I recognized him as soon as he walked in. He is tall and good-looking in a 1930s movie star kind of way. But he’s damaged and if you look closely, you can see it in his eyes. And though he’s damaged and even self-medicating, there is a core of moral strength that is sometimes difficult to see. What’s not difficult to see: he’s done some living in those shoes.

The character I was creating is not now a Southerner, but when I first saw him, I thought he was. And because I was writing him, he needed a name right now. When I’m working, my characters must have names in the first instant. The names don’t always stick, and sometimes they go through quite a few changes before I’m done, but this one has stuck just as it came out of my brain that day, with the borrowed dog snoring gently near my feet: Dexter J. Theroux, which seemed to me to be a good name for a damaged Bourbon-sucking Southerner.

After a while, though, I realized that for Dexter to have sustained the kind of damage I required, he probably could not have been an American. The United States got into WW I quite late in the game and I wanted this character to have suffered in the trenches for years. In the end I made him Canadian, which was not a big stretch. In the first place -- and arguably -- Canadian soldiers saw the very worst of that war. The powers that be used the Canadian boys as disposable fighting commodities: you could put them into difficult positions (along with Australians and maybe the Scots) because it didn’t matter as much whether you got them out.

And there were a lot of Canadians living in California in those years. Like, an almost unthinkable number. It was not at all outside of the realm of possibility for Dex to be a Canuck. I did not give him a Quebecois heritage, but I’ve left it open enough that it’s a possibility, especially given the name.

Now Dex -- the original Dex, he of the snores and the scratchy, wirey coat -- passed onto the rainbow bridge in the summer of 2006, just as I was riding the book that would become Death Was the Other Woman to the finish line.

The loss of him left a hole in the world in the place where he used to be and it left a void at the side of the writer whose clacking he heard most often. He does not live on in my novel. That would be silly. A man shouldn’t be a dog. But a bit of him? Maybe a bit of him. The spirit of a too-cool-for-school Dexter, who’s seen enough of life, you can’t impress him anymore, that Dexter lives on in my book, and in her heart.

A different kind of Kitty...

Tomorrow, we'll be turning this space over to Linda L. Richards. In addition to being the editor of January magazine, Linda's a crime fiction author. We'll be celebrating the release of her new Death Was the Other Woman, which takes us back to 1930s Los Angeles in the company of one Kitty Pangborn, the tough and loyal secretary who keeps private eye Dex Theroux off the ropes.

The book has already garnered a good deal of advance praise, but I particularly like this Booklist review. Or maybe I just like the name Kitty...


“Using a female narrator for a Depression-era noir tale seems a calculated strategy, but Richards makes it work naturally. Kitty, whose life of privilege disappeared when her father killed himself after the 1929 stock market crash, brings a peculiarly ironic point of view, filtering the tough guys, broads, gats, and gunsels through a patrician context that makes all the hard-boiled posturing seem as silly as high-society tomfoolery. Honoring the noir tradition while turning it on its head, Richards’ richly detailed period portrays a world in which lifestyles, whether high or low, become an elaborate defense against a harsh environment in which there is only one final act and the trick is to determine the time the curtain falls. Expect to hear more from Kitty Pangborn.”