Kemper Donovan

Kemper Donovan is an acclaimed author and host of the “All About Agatha” podcast. A graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, he worked at the literary management company Circle of Confusion for a decade before transitioning to writing full-time. He is a member of the New York Bar Association, PEN America, and Mystery Writers of America. He lives with his husband and daughters in Los Angeles.

Donovan's new novel is Loose Lips.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Quite a lot, I hope! My title, Loose Lips, is the first part of a common phrase: “Loose lips sink ships.” To make certain that this word association occurs in the mind of a would-be reader, I made sure to include a picture of a sinking ship on the cover of the book. The idea is to convey: 1) the action of the story takes place entirely on a boat, and 2) matters on this boat go seriously awry. There is also a subtitle, A Ghostwriter Mystery, which clarifies that this book is a mystery, one in a series, and furthermore, that it does not matter where the book falls within that series, since any one of the Ghostwriter Mysteries can be read on its own. The Ghostwriter in question is the narrator of each book, and in this outing, she reluctantly joins a literary-themed cruise as a lecturer, along with a handful of writer colleagues and a few hundred paying passengers. Would you be surprised to learn that secrets and intrigue abound aboard this ship, and that someone ends up murdered?

What's in a name?

Ah, well, this opens up a can of worms, I’m afraid. Loose Lips is the second Ghostwriter Mystery. In the first book in the series, The Busy Body, my Ghostwriter character did not have a name. That’s right: she went nameless for the entire book. I was partly inspired here by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which famously features a nameless first-person female narrator, but I also felt that my enigmatic, withholding Ghostwriter character did not want to be named. (She is a ghostwriter, after all.) In my second book in the series, I decided that this character finally needed a name, if only for ease of reference. And so, she goes by “Belle Currer” in this book, which is the pseudonym she used when she “wrote” The Busy Body. (Just as Watson writes his chronicles of Sherlock Holmes, my first-person narrator writes the stories that she tells.) This name is a cheeky inversion of “Currer Bell,” the pseudonym Charlotte Brontë used when first publishing Jane Eyre—a novel both the Ghostwriter and I happen to love very much.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

I think it would make perfect sense to my teenaged self that I write mysteries. I was always a mystery fanatic—in particular, a devotee of Agatha Christie, both on the page and screen. (I particularly loved the David Suchet series, Agatha Christie’s Poirot.) For the past eight years, I’ve vented my love of Christie by way of a podcast that I host called All About Agatha. (For the first five years I co-hosted the show with a dear friend of mine, Catherine Brobeck, but she passed away. I’ve continued the project solo.) Sooner or later, I was going to have to start writing mysteries of my own. It was only a matter of time….

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I’ve found that when I’m writing a mystery, the beginning is much harder than the ending, due to the type of mystery that I write. My mysteries are “puzzle” or “fair play” mysteries, also known as “whodunits,” which feature clues that the reader can ferret out in the text at the same time the fictional investigators do. This means there is a pre-arranged solution at the end of the novel, which has to be carefully built into the text. (Agatha Christie was an expert at these sorts of mysteries, as were many of her contemporaries in the so-called “Golden Age of Detective Fiction.”) For this reason, by the time I’ve reached the ending of one of my mysteries, I’ve got everything worked out, and the going is much smoother than at the beginning, when I’m still experimenting and figuring out exactly what I want to do. There is no question that the beginnings undergo significantly more changes!

Visit Kemper Donovan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue