A
A Cold-Blooded Scoundrel
Why a Victorian murder mystery?
I'd grown up reading the original Sherlock Holmes and became addicted to the Granada Holmes series, starring the late Jeremy Brett. The Victorian era has captivated me ever since: the details of daily life, the mindset of the time, it's all fascinating. I think that era was the beginning of the 'modern age'.
In what way?
Flush toilets! Toilet paper! Soap that wouldn't take your skin off. Beauty products. Mass transit, the subway system. The invention of the telephone, the electric light. It's all there.
Your main characters - Inspector Devlin and Cst. Collins - are both gay. You often portray alternate sexualities in your books. Why is this?
There's never a decision of "Oh, I think I'll make this person gay" or whatever. Characters show up with their stories in hand, as it were. Julia Cameron once said that writing's not about making it up, it's about getting it down. I don't try and control characters. I just listen to their stories and let them be who they are. Devlin and Collins just happen to be gay.
Constable Freddie Collins isn't that bright. Aren't you worried you're writing a cliché?
Freddie isn't conventionally bright. He has a lot of what we might call 'emotional intelligence,' whereas Devlin is very shut down. Freddie isn't the genius that Devlin is, he hasn't got that intelligence for observing detail, but he is intelligent in his own way.
Didn't you once say that the Inspector Devlin series started as a joke?
Yes! Originally I started writing for an Internet group I belonged to. There were several of us on there, all members of a Holmesian fan writing group. We made up our own original stories out of the Holmes canon, and I was always interested in Inspector Lestrade, so I started writing him. Then I realised that he wasn't Lestrade anymore, but someone else, an individual. He started giving me orders: 'I'm not like that. I'd do this instead of that,' and so on. I wrote quite a bit of this for the Internet, never thinking anything would come of it, but people liked it and asked for more, and it just went from there. It wasn't planned. It's what you'd call a happy accident.
I've heard whispers that you do your own forensic experiments. Is this true?
Absolutely. I have quite a number of forensic texts, everything from anatomy to toxicology and beyond. For A Cold-Blooded Scoundrel, it was necessary to determine the burn time of human skin and hair. You can't get people to volunteer for these things, you know! "Can I burn your hair?" "Get away from me!" So I often have to improvise. I used chicken skin, stretched onto a board, and I doused it with cologne and set it on fire in various environments to see how it burned. It was pretty gruesome. My husband thinks it's gross.
Are you doing any forensic experiments for the next book?
Right now I am making heads out of Plaster of Paris - you stretch it over a balloon and let it dry, then puncture the balloon and take it out - and I have been filling them with ketchup and beating them up in my garden shed. I've covered the walls with big sheets of newsprint, to get a good spatter contrast. I've been photographing the process. It's up on my LiveJournal:
http://www.livejournal.com/streel I also plan a series of experiments with jimsonweed (datura stramonium) and garden snails.Garden snails?
Yes. They've been eating my roses.
Where do you do your best writing?
On my bike, believe it or not! There's something about the motion, I suppose. Also when I'm walking, I get good ideas then, too, and during meditation.
What's in store for Devlin and Freddie?
Some good things, some not so good things. There will be a character death in the second book, and a seemingly 'minor' character will rise to a place of great prominence. What I love about the Devlin series is that you can continue it almost indefinitely. It's 1889 when the series opens and Devlin is only 35, so he can go for awhile. Maybe I'll sink him on the Titanic.
The Titanic? Are you serious?
I might be. J
