selection and winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Dead Stop; Ambush; and Gone to Darkness. Blood on the Tracks and Dead Stop won the Colorado Book Award, and Dead Stop was nominated for the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence.
Nickless's latest book is At First Light, the first novel in a new series starring Professor Evan Wilding.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Barbara Nickless's website.
The short answer is … not much.
While pondering options for At First Light, I looked first at my protagonist, Dr. Evan Wilding, a forensic semiotician with a career as a police consultant interpreting the signs and symbols left behind by murderers. And since the first book in the series deals with a killer who leaves riddles for the investigators in his runic poems, I considered The Riddle Master or possibly The Runologist. Something to suggest what type of mystery—and what kind of hero—lay between the covers.
But because I’m writing a series, I need titles that can riff on each other, cluing readers in that each book is linked to the others. I also look for titles that offer a sense of menace.
As a backup for my publisher, I chose a theme related to time of day, with the intention of having the central murder in each book occur at the time of day reflected in the title. And that option is what my publisher decided to run with. Thus, in At First Light, the victim dies at the break of dawn, with other victims also chosen to die at first light. In the second book of the series (coming out later this year), the victims die at night, and so we have Dark of Night. It’s clear that my titles don’t do much heavy lifting in terms of telling the reader what to expect. Instead, my publisher relies on other techniques to let potential readers know these books are mystery-thrillers. And a sidebar: For my own fun, I always include the title somewhere in the body of the book.
What's in a name?
I wish I could explain how Dr. Evan Wilding’s name crawled out of the primordial soup of my subconscious brain and presented itself to me. But, alas, that answer lies twenty years in the past (if, in fact, it lies anywhere at all). I created the character of Evan at a writer’s boot camp as part of a writing exercise. The character appeared as a man in full in the middle of the night—his dwarfism, his interest in language, his intelligence, his police work. And his name.
The name given by the media to the serial killer in At First Light also popped up without much thought. What else do you call a murderer who, after torturing and slaying his victims, leaves them with poems styled after the Old English poets and written in futhorc—the Viking runes used in England during the Viking Age?
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?
My teenage self would be astonished that I’d decided to write mystery/thriller novels. After a childhood love of Encyclopedia Brown followed by a youthful fascination with Sherlock Holmes, I went all in for medieval literature during my college days. And that is the part that would not astonish my teenage self—that At First Light is filled with references to Beowulf and the difficult meter of Norse poetry.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
I am much more comfortable with beginnings, for that is when the entire fictional world unrolls at my feet, casting open doors and windows and daring me to take any number of intriguing paths. Maybe Evan and Addiewill fall in love. Maybe the killer is driven by something other than revenge. But, as the story goes along, doors and windows must—out of narrative necessity—close. The ending becomes both a Holy Grail and a Dreaded Thing. It’s The Thing That Must Be Rewritten.
My former series starred a former Marine who knew her way around guns and hand-to-hand combat. Every book in that series ended with a literal or metaphorical bang. But with Evan, who tops out at four foot five and who spends much of his day behind a desk, I need endings that are very different. Endings that require brains over brawn. I’m learning a new skill set when it comes to writing The End.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
The Middle Ages and Viking Age history. The art of falconry (I worked for years rehabilitating injured birds of prey). Scholars who’ve deciphered the seemingly undecipherable—or spent years trying (think Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Rongorono writing of Rapa Nui, Mayan glyphs). There is also my time as a sword-fighting member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. And the fact that I’ve always wanted to learn how to throw an axe.
The Page 69 Test: At First Light.
--Marshal Zeringue