First of
all, thank you for choosing my mystery novel Wash Her Guilt Away as your book to be discussed this month. I
hope, most of all, that it entertained you and would like to say a few words,
before the discussion begins, about how it came to be written.
When I
wrote the first Quill Gordon mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, in the late 1990s, I drew up a list of stories for
additional novels in the series in the event an agent or publisher asked.
Unable to publish conventionally, I put the book aside for more than a decade
until Amazon and Kindle came along to make self-publishing a viable
alternative.
Gratified
by the response to the first book, I decided to proceed with the second on the
list, which had already been titled Wash
Her Guilt Away, after the Oliver Goldsmith poem at the front of the book. I
began writing it in early 2013, and it was published April 30, 2014.
Borrowed Elements
Wash Her Guilt Away is an attempt to put
a modern spin on two tropes of the classic murder mystery — classic referring
to those mysteries generally written between the two world wars. It’s a
variation on the British country-house mystery, in which a group of diverse
guests are thrown together and tensions arise; and of the locked-room mystery,
in which someone is found murdered in a hermetically sealed chamber, or locked
room, from which the killer should not have been able to depart yet somehow
did.
The book
also borrows elements from certain American authors. Edgar Allan Poe, for
instance, who wrote “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” widely considered to be
the first locked-room mystery.
Because the
novel is set in the wilds of the Northern California mountains, I also drew on
the work of early American writers and their depictions of a vast, untamed
landscape. The discovery of the witches in the forest and their role in the
community owes something to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown,” and
the headless boatman at Indian Hollow is direct idea-theft from Washington
Irving’s headless horseman in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”
Trying to Be Better
With each
book I write, I try to improve as a writer and try to work specifically on a
couple of issues. I felt that The McHenry
Inheritance was a respectable debut novel that introduced a character, a
premise, a style, and that demonstrated a level of fundamental storytelling
competence.
That said,
I felt that parts of it were underdeveloped and decided to work harder at
developing character and creating crisp dialogue. The story line of Wash Her Guilt Away lent itself very
well to this consideration, dealing, as it does, with a group of people forced
together by circumstance and bad weather. More so than my other two novels, Wash Her Guilt Away attempts to build
tension through atmosphere and the development of characters and situations.
Each of you must, of course, judge for yourselves whether or not that effort
succeeded.
Finally, in
an attempt to cut to the chase, let me answer the most-frequently asked
question: Where do you get your ideas? I never have any shortage of ideas; the
problem is pulling several of them together to create a coherent and satisfying
story that allows me to develop character and atmosphere. It takes time for the
right ideas to align into a workable story, which is why I probably spend as
much time outlining my books as writing them.
Any
questions?
(I will be appearing at a book club
discussing Wash Her Guilt Away in January, and a follow-up post will likely
ensue.)
