The LadyKillers

Interview with Author Judith Rock

NOTE: LadyKiller Priscilla Royal's post on the topic "Justice" will appear on Thursday, September 8.

 

Please join us today as we interview historical mystery author Judith Rock, who writes the Charles du Luc series set in 17th-century Paris. Today, September 6, is the release day for her newest book: THE ELOQUENCE OF BLOOD!

Judith is a former New York City police officer, professional dancer and choreographer. She has written on dance, art, and theology for many journals, and has been artist-in-residence and taught and lectured at colleges, seminaries, and conferences across the United States and abroad.

She lives with her husband in Sarasota, Florida. You can find out more about her and her books on her website: http://www.judithrock.com/.

Why 17^th century Paris?

My Charles du Luc books are set in 17^th century Paris because they're based on my doctoral work on the Jesuits' production of dance as part of teaching rhetoric at their college of Louis le Grand in Paris. Dance in Jesuit college theatres lasted from about 1660 to 1760, but I chose the 17^th century--instead of the 18^th--for several reasons. The French 17^th century is less well known to English speaking readers than the 18^th century is. It also interests me more. It's a neither-here-nor-there period in some ways, a time when the medieval world was still visible, though fading, and what we call the modern world was emerging, but still shadowy. I chose the later years of the 17^th century because I know a lot about the college ballets in the 1680's--I have programmes, some music and and other information about the ballet productions then, and also about the college itself.  Also, I wanted the great dancing master Pierre Beauchamps, Louis le Grand's secular dancing master in those years, to be part of the books. And I performed the dance of that period briefly, until a knee injury forced me to stop. (Baroque dance technique is very precise and challenging, and is usually done wearing heels.)

 I also set my books in France because I love France and love being there! I lived in Paris and also at the Jesuit Cultural Center in Chantilly, just outside Paris, while I did the initial research, and I fell permanently in love with France, Paris, and the French.

Why Charles?

I made Charles a rhetoric teacher because I wanted the ballets to figure in the books and  producing and rehearsing the ballets was part of teaching rhetoric in Jesuit schools.  I made him a young "half-fledged" Jesuit to give him a wide margin of action and decision. Charles is still going through the very long Jesuit training and formation and is not yet a priest--and therefore has not taken final vows. This lets him be still somewhat unsure about his future and not yet bound in certain ways.  Like the Jesuits I've known and so deeply appreciated, he takes his religious commitment very seriously. He, like them, is also very intelligent.  He thinks widely and deeply and questions things. Though I try very hard to make him a 17^th century man and Jesuit--he can't be a crusader for religious tolerance, or pacifism, or feminism, or any other 21^st century cause.

He's a minor noble because I discovered after I had named him that there was indeed a family of minor nobles named du Luc in the south of France, where he comes from. Bishop du Luc in the first book is a real person and a member of that family, and for my purposes, Charles's cousin.

I made him Charles an ex-soldier for several reasons. There was nearly constant war in his time, and France and most other countries were full of ex-soldiers. And I needed him to have certain skills to investigate crimes, and soldiers know about fighting, scouting, weapons, wounds, and dead bodies.  Also, as I created his background, he "told" me he'd been a soldier.  I imagine every writer has this experience--an imaginary character starts telling you who he is and what he will and won't do. Well, it turned out that Charles had been in love with a young cousin, but not allowed to marry her. So, in noble and half-baked adolescent fashion, he went off and become a soldier, intending to "show everyone" by dying gloriously in battle. He was wounded, but recovered, only to get very inglorious dysentery. During his long recovery from that, he grew up, read a biography of St. Ignatius of Loyola--also an ex-soldier--and realized that he wanted to be a Jesuit.  (Many women where he lived were very disappointed. )  So he has not only his deep interior life and religious commitment, he is also an intensely physical person who has learned the hard way that war is about as glorious as dysentery. 

By now, some people may be seeing obvious parallels with Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael.  I see those, too, and Cadfael is one of my favorite fictional characters. I think of him as one of Charles's literary ancestors, and I hope that Charles has inherited some of Cadfael's humor and warm, generous caring for people.

Who is your favorite secondary character?

Overall, my favorite secondary character is Nicolas de la Reynie, a historical figure who's sometimes called the first modern police chief. He was the first official to be charged with policing Paris and did the job from 1667 to 1697.  Policing at that time meant overseeing the majority of what went on in the city:  not just crime fighting, but street cleaning, street lighting, regulating the Paris craft guilds, and even, at one point, converting Paris's Protestants, called Huguenots--a job he didn't want to do and ignored as much as he could.  He was an educated man and--like the police inspector in Dorothy Sayers' novels, Charles Parker--liked to read theology in his spare time. In my first book, La Reynie and Charles begin as enemies and then move into a wary truce. In the second book, their relationship develops.

My other favorite secondary characters include Madame Leclerc, the baker's wife in the shop next to the college chapel door, her daughter Marie-Ange, and Père Thomas Damiot, another Louis le Grand professor and Charles's friend, who appears in the second book.  And then there's the beggar woman called Reine, also in the second book.  I didn't consciously create Reine.  When I got to the place in The Eloquence of Blood where Charles and La Reynie go into the kitchen of Procope's café, looking for a beggar called Reine,  La Reynie lifted a candle to see who was sitting in the corner. Reine was sitting in the corner, an utterly different beggar than I had imagined. She started talking, took center stage there in the kitchen, and plays a major and unforeseen role in The Eloquence of Blood.

Do you use real people in your books?

The cast of both books is a mix of real and fictional people.  Besides Nicolas de la Reynie and Pierre Beauchamps, the real people include Père Jouvancy and Père Pallu, Jesuits who taught rhetoric and wrote Latin tragedies at the college of Louis le Grand. The college rector of those years was Père Jacques Le Picart, though I know nothing about him but his name and have imagined his character. Michel de Louvois, Louis XIV's War Minister and Charles's adversary, was as feared and hated as I show him in the first book. The Guise family was real and were much as I paint them in the first book, but my Père Sebastian Guise is imaginary. Some of the courtiers mentioned in both books are real, including the German princess Liselotte, wife of the king's brother,  The Prince of Conti, the Prince of Condé and his wife Claire Clemence, Anne-Marie de Bourbon, the Duchess of Tuscany, and the Duc du Maine are all real. The musician Marc Antoine Charpentier, who appears briefly in the second book, had worked for the Guise family and worked often for the Jesuits. And the trio of Siamese ambassadors really did come to Paris and attend the Louis le Grand ballet in August of 1686. 

I include real people, as both major and minor characters, because they were part of the Parisian world of the late 1680's, and therefore part of Charles's world. I want Charles to be as much a real man of his time as I can possibly make him, influenced by and responding to real people and events, and I want to take readers as far into his world as possible.

What is your writing space like?

When I learned that the first book was going to be published, I celebrated by redoing my writing space. It was a present to myself after ten tough years of trying to publish fiction. And I knew that I would be spending a lot of time there, if my hopes materialized and there were more books. It's a plain room, an ex-bedroom, with sliding doors opening onto a small garden with a large palm tree, cape jasmine, ferns, Yaupon holly,  a ground orchid, lizards, snails, and birds. I keep trying to grow geraniums in pots on the steps outside the sliding doors, but they hate the Florida rainy season. The room's large desk and three of the bookcases are white. One bookcase is painted with flowers, and there are also a blue-green wicker rocking chair, a green wicker table and a footstool. I keep a largish map of Paris c. 1700 and a magnifying glass on another table. There are more bookshelves, files and a printer in the two closets.  There is also a ceiling fan, various dance pictures from my performing past, a large book called The Ubiquitous Pig standing upright on top of a bookcase, a life mask I made at some conference in the distant past, a picture of an aunt riding a motorcycle in the 1930's, a large sticker from my sojourn at the Skip Barber Racing School at Lime Rock, and a soft clay sculpture of a dancer's bare foot I made surreptitiously at a boring meeting when I was a professor.  And there's a large blue ball to roll around on, and juggling balls to play with when I can't stand sitting down any more. The most important thing in the room is the solid door into the rest of the house, which mostly stays  closed. I don't like interruptions. I never answer the phone when I'm writing and I often work with the drapes closed and an earplug in my ear (only one ear works).

Advice for beginning writers?

I'm so new at this, I've hardly earned the right to give anyone advice!  But here's one thing I know that might be useful:  Find critics you trust and then trust--and wrestle with--what they tell you.  You are not always the best judge of your own work.

What sort of research do you do?

The initial research for the books was done in Paris--though I didn't know then that I'd be using it to write novels as well as a doctoral dissertation. Now, whenever I can get to France, I continue working with French sources, but when I'm in the U.S., which is most of the time, I read continually about the French 17^th century, Jesuits, dance history, the history of Paris, and French history in general. Right now I'm reading an American professor's 1950 account of living in a French village, and being amazed at how much of the village life he describes is like  17^th century life. Which tells me something important about France and being French, at least in the country. I read whatever I need to know, but don't, for each book.  For The Rhetoric of Death, I tracked down descriptions of the 1686 Siamese visit to France, which was a closely followed national event. For The Eloquence of Blood, I read about notaries, law, and adoption, which was illegal according to formal law, but still frequently done under customary law. For that book, I also read about the burial of royal hearts and guts, finance, the silver trade, lay Catholic societies formed for social and religious purposes, and the production of chocolate. (I discovered just in time that 17^th century chocolate was innocent of butterfat and therefore could not be used to coat things--as I was using it in the story.)  For the third book, which I'm currently working on, I've been poring over floorplans of Versailles and finding out the water machine at the palace of Marly worked. So my research reading stretches from popular books like Joan Dejean's The Essence of Style, How the French invented High Fashion and Fine Food, to annotated tomes like The Letters of St. Ignatius, to 17^th century documents like ballet programs, period memoirs, maps, period social comment, and costume drawings. The desire of my research crazed heart is to own the French dictionary published in 1690 by Antoine Furètiere.

Crafting the Historical Mystery: an interview with author Margaret Frazer

We have an honored guest today at The LadyKillers: historical mystery author Margaret Frazer. Margaret is the author of the nationally best-selling, Edgar Award-nominated Dame Frevisse series of medieval mysteries, the nationally best-selling Joliffe the Player series, and numerous short stories, including the award-winning "Neither Pity, Love, Nor Fear", all now becoming available on-line after appearing in various anthologies.  Published internationally, she is known for her meticulous research, well-crafted prose, and compelling characters.

LadyKillers own Priscilla Royal conducted the interview.

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1) When you began your first series, did you know how Dame Frevisse would evolve? Did you plan an open-ended series or was the original plan to write a limited number of books?

 When I began with Dame Frevisse, my then-co-author and I thought we were doing one book. All the basic elements were developed with that in mind – an ordinary nun who had gladly chosen to be a nun, living in the small, well-run, rural nunnery, with no dark back story complicating her life. So she would have some experience of the world, I gave her parents who traveled widely when she was a child, and when we wanted someone well-placed in society to bring news into the nunnery, I suggested Thomas Chaucer for an uncle-by-marriage because it would be fun to have someone in the book who was real but not a major historical figure.

Then we were offered a two book contract. Oh. Okay.  We had a nice nunnery and interesting characters and we could very happily write a second book with them. 

Of course when we were asked for more books after that, this small, rural nunnery began to be a problem. It wouldn’t take too many murders to seriously depopulate the neighborhood. Fortunately, medieval English records show that nuns were not as closely cloistered as they became in other countries after the Reformation.  (Of course after the Reformation there were no nuns at all in England.)  So long as their superior approved and they went accompanied, nuns could travel outside the nunnery for a number of reasons, and Frevisse has accordingly occasionally travelled.  Her relationship to, first, Thomas Chaucer and then to his daughter Alice, duchess of Suffolk, became useful in ways I never anticipated at the beginning, taking Frevisse to places and into situations she would otherwise never have gone.  At the same time, she was encountering murders and murderers and the sorrows those bring into people’s lives, and there was no way she could be unchanged by that.  So as the series went on (and my co-author tired of the Middle Ages and left to write other books), Frevisse grew, changed, deepened as a person as the years went by and her experiences accumulated. 

From planning to write one book, I had become enmeshed in an on-going series and loved it. But the time came when I began to feel the series was coming to an end.  The publisher was letting all the middle books in the series go out of print, and I supposed the day was coming when they would suddenly declare “No more” and the series would simply, arbitrarily stop at whatever point that was. Being a tiny bit on the cantankerous side, I decided I would end it where I wanted it to end, and so there is a rounding off in The Apostate’s Tale, the 17^th book of the series.

That has proved to be not an absolute end, of course. The e-book revolution has not only allowed me to put the out of print portions of the series back into print, it’s also giving me the freedom to write what I want, when I want. That’s how the novella Winter Heart came to be, letting us see what Frevisse is doing after The Apostate’s Tale. And I have to say that I found myself so happy to be back with Frevisse, writing about her and other “friends”, that I daresay more stories will follow. 

2) When you introduced Joliffe, how did he persuade you to give him his own series?

Joliffe persuaded me to give him his own series by absolutely, positively refusing to leave me alone.  When he appeared in The Servant’s Tale, the second book in Frevisse’s series, I thought our acquaintance would be brief – that one book and no more as he went on his way with his company of travelling players. But he wasn’t having it. When a plot needed complicating in The Prioress’ Tale, there he was, and it was clear that in the years since last encountering Frevisse he’d been up to more than being a player. But what? I knew, and wanted to pursue it, but my then-agent was unwilling to propose it to my editor. She said she didn’t want me to “shoot myself in the foot.” So, in the fullness of time, while still writing about Frevisse, I wrote the first of Joliffe’s books – A Play of Isaac – without telling my then-agent what I was doing until it was done.  Having shown I could work on two books at once, I was able to interest both agent and editor in giving Joliffe a chance.

Of course this has proved to be a challenge in a way I had not foreseen.  By the time I came to write A Play of Isaac, Joliffe had made a third appearance with Frevisse, in The Bastard’s Tale, a story set in 1447. But A Play of Isaac was set thirteen years earlier, just a few months after we first met him in The Servant’s Tale. So while in Frevisse’s series I had established certain events in his life, in his own series I was writing about a younger, less experienced Joliffe, living before those things had happened to him. And then I truly messed my mind over by writing A Play of Knaves at the same time I was writing The Traitor’s Tale, with Joliffe as the main character in both – but with about fifteen years between those two parts of his life. I was kept very much on my mental toes keeping the younger Joliffe from knowing things only the older Joliffe knew, and not letting the older Joliffe give away to readers too much about those fifteen years he had lived but the younger Joliffe had not.

And people wonder why authors go around muttering to themselves and looking distracted.

Helpfully – although the two series are written to be read quite separate from one another, and every book is designed to be read alone, with no need to read them in order – on my website at the bottom of the page labeled “Books”, there’s a link to a time-line that blends the two series together in sequence, in case you want to know what mischief Joliffe is getting into while Frevisse is dealing with her own problems.

3) In addition to other life adventures (your website biography amazed me!), you have experience in theater. Does this particular expertise influence how you write and how you approach character portrayal?

It does indeed.  For me, one of the great delights of acting has always been the becoming of someone other than myself.  I love to explore and find out a character I’m going to be.  It doesn’t matter how small the part.  An actor needs to inhabit his character thoroughly; and to inhabit a part, I’ve always needed to find something in me that, if cultivated, could have made me that character, no matter how different they may be from who I am.  Then I develop that part as far as it needs to go for me to be that character on stage.  This is invaluable as a way of creating characters with varied personalities and depths, and I love doing it, both on stage and in books.  People will say to me, “You identify with Frevisse, don’t you?”, but I have to honestly answer that I identify with all my characters as I’m writing them, that there’s something of me in all of them.  In all of them – a thought which tends to give pause to anyone who’s encountered Giles in The Murderer’s Tale or Blanche in The Squire’s Tale -- or Dame Alys anywhere.

That ability to inhabit a character comes from my theater work, but so does my “setting a scene” in my books.  When the story goes into a particular room, I see it in my mind like a stage set – where and what the furnishings are, the placing of the windows, the doors, the people -- and as I write the scene, I’m the director, always keeping before my mind’s eyes the physical relationships within that “acting” space.

All this undoubtedly comes from when I was sixteen years old and spent much of my summer reading all of Shakespeare’s plays aloud to myself, trying to change my voice and become each of the characters as I read them.  My personality and vocabulary were probably permanently warped by this (and before you ask – no, I had no social life when I was in high school), but it certainly gave me an eye and ear for how to portray different characters, along with a readiness to be anybody except myself.  Both on stage and in my books, it’s the chance to explore characters and their relationships that I enjoy.

Of course, because I write murder mysteries, I frequently have to kill someone, but that’s no problem.  It just gives me more aspects of (surviving) characters to explore!

4) I am thrilled to see a new Domina Frevisse tale, Winter Heart, available on e-reader, but you have written some short stories that are quite different from your series. One is Shakespeare's Mousetrap and another takes place in Alexandria Egypt, Strange Gods, Strange Men. What inspired you to write these particular tales?

For a long while I was convinced that I couldn’t write short stories. Never tried. Was never tempted. Then, several books into Dame Frevisse’s series, I heard from Mike Ashley, an English editor of numerous anthologies. He wanted a short story for a volume of historical mysteries he was putting together, and because he was offering money and I was supporting myself (with college for two sons looming ahead!), I decided to access my inner-Kipling.  I would learn how to write a short story! Imagine my delight to discover that, one, I could write a short story and, two, I enjoyed it!

The first story was The Witch’s Tale. Other offers to write for anthologies came, but not always on the theme of simply “historical mystery”. With my history in theater, I jumped at the chance to write a Shakespearean mystery, using my favorite play as the basis for Death of Kings.  But with the second chance to do a Shakespearean mystery, I was belated in getting to the emailed offer, and by the time I eagerly responded, other authors had already put in their claims for plays and I was left with . . . Titus Andronicus. Now there’s a play that doesn’t need a mystery written about it – it’s over-flowing with executions, rape, mutilations, murders, bastard birth, and a touch of cannibalism. What to do, what to do?  What I did became Shakespeare’s Mousetrap.

Then there’s Strange Gods, Strange Men. That was commissioned for an anthology of Egyptian mysteries because the plan was to have mysteries ranging across Egyptian history. But after I’d finished it, the decision was made to limit the anthology to ancient Egypt… which meant that my short story about medieval Egypt was left homeless. Not to fear, though– I sold it to Ellery Queen Magazine.

There have been other anthologies, ones centered on Shakespearean mysteries but others themed to medieval mysteries, religious mysteries, locked room mysteries, and royal mysteries. For the latter I wrote perhaps my favorite short story – Neither Pity, Love, Nor Fear – and along the way I’ve come to thoroughly enjoy the art of writing short fiction, and although anthologies seem to have tapered off, the e-market is giving all manner of new possibilities, not only to bring out older stories but to write new ones that won’t be constrained by editor-mandated word counts. 

That’s what happened with Winter Heart.  As my first venture in writing directly for e-sale, I meant it to be a short story, but it became a novella. 

I think I’m going to enjoy this odd new world of the internet.

We're so glad to be a stop on Margaret Frazer's blog tour for her novella Winter Heart! Be sure to visit her website at http://www.margaretfrazer.com for more information and to see her entire tour schedule.