When I
started writing mysteries, I certainly had no intention of getting into the
realm of the paranormal. I saw myself as following in the footsteps of Agatha
Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, rather than H.P. Lovecraft, Oliver Onions, and
Jack Mann. But once you start writing, stuff happens.
The first
Quill Gordon mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, was entirely rational and grounded in the everyday. The
second, Wash Her Guilt Away, which will be out in a couple of weeks, started
out that way, but at the beginning I threw in, almost as an aside, one brief
supernatural reference — to a rumored witch placing a curse on the place where
the action occurs.
It turned
out to be like taking one piece of candy from a box of chocolates, and the next
thing you know, you’ve eaten the whole damn box. By the time the book was
written, it had an entire coven of witches, a headless boatman, and a
suspicious death with possibly supernatural overtones. How did it get out of
hand like that?
Was it Carr’s Influence?
The easy
way out would be to blame John Dickson Carr. He was one of the great
practitioners of the locked-room mystery (the murder is committed in a locked
room, which the killer shouldn’t have been able to enter or leave), and a
couple of his books, notably Below
Suspicion and The Burning Court
also had a strong witchcraft angle. Wash
Her Guilt Away is dedicated in his spirit — which, come to think of it, is
a loaded word.
My second
book is something of an English country-house mystery, in which a group of
people are brought together for a short time, tension develops, and a crime is
committed. But it also has a locked-room mystery in it, hence the dedication to
Carr. That mystery has a natural explanation, as they all do, but I started to
see how other supernatural elements might come into play.
Because the
setting of the book is a lodge in the remote forests of Northern California, it
lent itself to an air of the supernatural. After all, there’s a reason that
Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
were set in the woods. I stole from both of those, by the way. If you’re going
to steal from an author, do it to a dead one whose copyright has expired.
Two Feet Firmly on Ground
At the
moment I’m trying to figure out how much to make of the paranormal angle in
marketing Wash Her Guilt Away. A lot
of people eat that stuff up, but the fact is that I’m a pretty rational man
when it comes to such issues. My favorite ghost stories are the ones written by
authors such as J.S. LeFanu and M.R. James, in which the supernatural elements
are reflections of the emotional states and consciences of the characters. For
a really good example of this, see LeFanu’s story, “The Familiar,” about a man
driven mad by mysterious footsteps that follow him through the city at night.
I’ll
probably compromise by teasing to at least the witch element in the dust-jacket
blurb, but otherwise not making too much of a deal about it. Any future books I
write will appear in the mystery section of Amazon, not the paranormal, and
that’s the way I prefer it. The third mystery, which I am now outlining in
detail, should again be perfectly rational, and the general ideas I have for
books beyond that are also paranormal-free. After all, the real world is scary
enough.
