If you could describe in three words each of the leading ladies from your novels, Annabel from Trace of Deceit, Nell in Dangerous Duet, and Elizabeth in The Lady in Smoke, what would they be?
Annabel: painter, observer, loyal
Nell: pianist, courageous, confiding
Elizabeth: resilient, honest, insightful
Your novels display an exceptional eye for detail. Is this a natural skill or one you have had to develop?
This is a tool I’ve honed through rather plodding work, I’m afraid. Worldbuilding requires research—but it also requires an attention to detail that can feel almost fussy and painstaking and even boring. I have a notebook with lists of “objects” in Victorian England—in a middle-class house, in a wealthy house, in a street in Mayfair, in a street in Whitechapel, in a music hall, in a railway station, in a butcher’s shop, on a dock on the Thames. What I came to realize is that the “stuff” that makes up the Victorian world needs to be at my fingertips, and over the years my lists have grown large. To some extent, they’re now inside my head, so I can feather the items in organically, the way we might mention a microwave or an iPad in conversation. But I still reread my lists periodically and continue to add to them as I learn about new aspects of the era.
If you could choose a character from one of your novels to be for a day, who would it be and why?
Hmm … I might be Jeremy, the boy who becomes my newspaperman Tom Flynn’s sidekick after picking his pocket. He’s a lot of fun to write, and I imagine he’d be a lot of fun to be. He’s a troublemaker, nosy, sassy, ill-mannered, with an excellent memory and a tendency to listen around corners and to fancy himself more important than he is!
Tom Flynn, is a recurring newspaper man, in all three of your novels. Can you tell us a little about him and why you chose him to be a recurring character?
Tom Flynn is based on my English teacher from senior year of high school, Bill Polito. He was the first to teach me how to read a novel with care and attention to characters’ motives and feelings; he was also the first person who told me I could write. Like Tom Flynn, Bill Polito has a tip of his finger missing—from a painting accident—and he’s frank even to bluntness. But Bill cared deeply about teaching and books and his students, and as a small token of my esteem, he will have at least a bit part in every book set in 1870s London that I write.
Who or what inspired you to become a writer?
I’ve always scribbled in notebooks and journals and written poetry (most of it bad) and stories. I’ve received encouragement from a few teachers along the way, but I’d say it is other authors who have inspired me most. I remember in fifth grade reading The Witch of Blackbird Pond, and as I finished, I thought, Someday I want to write a book that makes other people feel like that.
What book or author from your childhood has shaped you most as a writer today?
I’d have to say Mary Stewart’s novels The Moonspinners, This Rough Magic (won the Edgar in 1965) and Nine Coaches Waiting. I first discovered Mary Stewart in my grandmother’s library, amidst the bodice rippers and other books, when I was around twelve. Mary Stewart writes such elegant sentences, and she seemed so certain of how characters would feel in a given situation. Her protagonists were all young women who stumbled into mysteries in exotic locations—Greece, France, Austria—and ended up in a romance. So, I guess my three first novels all fall into that pattern that I fell in love with as a young adult. My next book, however, features a male protagonist, an Inspector at Scotland Yard (still in 1870s London), so I’m branching out!
Where do your ideas spring from for your Victorian historical mysteries?
Often I find some weird fact that strikes me. It almost feels physical, like a zing in my brain. With Lady, it was my years of research on railway disasters and the medical men who treated the victims; as I revisited the material, I culled the incidents that zinged and put them in the novel. With A Dangerous Duet, I learned about Fanny Dickens, Charles’s older sister who was a brilliant pianist in the 1820s but had to give up her spot at the Royal Academy because she couldn’t afford tuition. My heart ached for her having so little choice. But by the 1870s, there were dozens of music halls where women were performing. Hm, I wondered—what if a girl wanted to earn money that way? Then my husband was going to London for work, so I tagged along and found Wilton’s, the last standing Victorian music hall, from the 1850s, in Graces Lane in Whitechapel. I walked in, stumbled over a nail that was sticking up from the old wooden floor (that stumble appears in Duet, on the staircase); descended the bent stairs into the basement and saw the plaster and brick and smelled the rust; then went back upstairs and stood at the end of the music hall and looked toward the stage, where—zing—I could see Nell playing piano in the alcove to the right of it. That was a lucky find!
What is the most difficult part of the artistic process for you?
This may sound odd, but it is all difficult and all lovely at the same time. I love finding an idea, developing it, writing, rewriting, sticking the plot points on index cards and moving them around on my floor, revising, reading it out loud and revising again. It’s all a pleasure, really, because I’ve written enough books now that I know that if I get stuck, it’s only temporary.
The only time I’ve ever really had writer’s block was one day when I was revising A Lady in the Smoke, and I thought, “What will my agent think of this? What will the editor think? What will readers think?” But as I sat there panicking, eventually I realized that I needed to be asking other questions: “Elizabeth has just woken up in a strange bed, in a strange room that smells of lye, with people shouting and footsteps outside, and she remembers the railway crash. How does she feel? What does she need right now? What will she do next?” That was an important realization for me—that if I stick close to the character, if I climb in bed with her, I don’t get writer’s block.
What books are in your current reading pile? Any you recommend?
My reading pile, like that of most writers I know, is toppling. But next up are Megha Majumdar, A Burning and Rachel Howzell Hall, And Now She’s Gone; and for research, Peter Ackroyd, Thames: The Biography, Alan Mooreland, The White Nile, and Lara Mailem, Mudlark. Books I recommend because I love them and put them in my top 25 of all time include Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow, David Benioff, City of Thieves, Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves, Geraldine Brooks, A Year of Wonders, Nancy Turner, These is My Words, and Tana French, Faithful Place; Daring Greatly by Brene Brown (nonfiction); and Lit by Mary Carr and My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul (memoir). If you’d like to see more of my recommendations and reviews, you can visit my website (www.karenodden.com) and click on the tab “Books I recommend.”
If you were to write one book in another genre, what genre would you choose?
I’d like to write a YA novel. Lady actually started out as YA (“The Viscount’s Daughter” was the working title) but morphed to historical mystery when my agent pointed out that while my heroine was technically YA (Elizabeth was 17 originally), most teens aren’t going to be all that interested in parliamentary intrigue and railway scandals. My son wanted me to write a book about a baseball team in Arizona (he played for years), with a new kid coming to town, with one undocumented parent, and there’s part of me that would love to do that.
Are you able to share in a few words what you are currently working on?
I have two projects. My next book, coming in Fall 2021 and in final revisions, is the first in a new series, but still set in 1870s London and with some overlapping characters with my other books. In Down a Dark River, Scotland Yard inspector Michael Corravan, a former bare-knuckles boxer from Whitechapel, investigates the murder of a wealthy young woman who is found dead, in a boat, floating down the Thames. This is a departure from my heroine series; it’s darker and it’s really about the intolerable feeling of powerlessness in the face of injustice that can drive people to do savage things.
The other book, which I’ve just finished drafting, is about Gwendolyn Manning, sister to Celia Jesper from A Trace of Deceit. Gwendolyn is a lady novelist, and her friend Lewis, a political economist, has just returned to London from Africa, where he was on a year-long expedition with the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. In Africa, Lewis witnessed the horrors of the slave and ivory trades, and he plans to write a “tell-all” about it. But there are a lot of people in England who don’t want that book written, for both political and economic reasons, and he’s murdered before he can finish it. Gwendolyn and Lewis’s other good friend Nicholas Tait (a newspaperman) attempt to find out who murdered Lewis and to find his manuscript, which has gone missing, so it can be published as Lewis would have wanted. I love this book … the research has been fascinating.
What has been the highlight of your writing career thus far?
There have been so many—it’s truly hard to pick. One was receiving the email from my agent telling me he loved my train wreck novel and offering to represent me; that happened (of all places) in the elevator that descends at Disney’s haunted house. (True story!) I’d say another was my book launch for A Dangerous Duet, at the Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale. I had heard nightmare stories about book events where only 6 people show up. But I arrived at the Pen and found 75 people, standing room only—mostly friends but also people who were part of the Pen community. It was lovely! But I also feel I don’t need a crowd. We writers write to be read … and when we find even one reader who truly “gets” our books, it’s a thrill every single time. It doesn’t ever diminish, at least for me. That’s why I encourage everyone to write to authors (on their website, or through goodreads) to tell them when they love a book. It’s the nicest email to find in my inbox! The people who have found me, who have become friends and beta-readers and supporters, are the biggest gift I’ve received as a writer. Hands down.
If you could invite one author to your home for dinner (from the past or present) who would it be?
It’s probably trite, but Jane Austen. There’s such a mythos about her … and I truly love her novels. I have taught both Emma and Pride and Prejudice several times, and each time I find something new. I would love to speak with someone who has such an acute awareness of the motives and small gestures that shape our interactions, such an exquisite sensitivity to people’s feelings. It’s a quality I admire in anyone, and I think it’s crucial in a writer, so I continue to work to develop it in myself.
