Rosanne Limoncelli

Rosanne Limoncelli is an author, filmmaker, and storyteller living in Brooklyn. She has written, directed, and produced short narrative films, documentaries, and educational films. Limoncelli also writes plays, feature scripts, poetry, games, mysteries, and science fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Suspense Magazine, and Noir Nation, and her short films have been screened in festivals around the world.

Limoncelli's debut mystery novel is The Four Queens of Crime.

My Q&A with the author:

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

My book The Four Queens of Crime takes the reader straight into the premise of Golden Age Mysteries. Fans of that era know Agatha Christie was called the Queen of Crime, and if they haven’t yet read Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh or Margery Allingham, the novel is a good introduction to those authors. They were dubbed the Four Queens of Crime since they were to top selling authors of the 1930’s and all four authors are characters in the book. The year is 1938 and the Four Queens of Crime are called upon to host a fundraiser gala ball for the Women’s Voluntary Service, to help prepare for the event of war. They host the ball on a Friday evening and will stay the whole weekend at Sir Henry Heathcote’s country estate. The gala goes well, but the four writers witness quite a bit of dramatic family dynamics and political intrigue that pervade the event. The next morning Sir Henry is found murdered on the locked library.

What's in a name?

I love research. It’s the most fun and productive way to procrastinate. Many of the characters in this story are real people and I read everything I could that was written about them and written by them, so using their real names was important. My favorite character is DCI Lilian Wyles. The fact that she was the first woman detective in Scotland Yard, everything she had to go through, and had to fight for, was inspiring to me. For the fictional characters, choosing names is something I struggle with, it’s so hard to decide! I try and let my mind wander and come up with something from my subconscious in order for it to feel organic. More important to me is their background, their motivation, and their actions that connect them to the themes and clues and plot points.

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

My teenage self would love that I found the courage to write whole novels, especially of the mystery genre. At the time I was reading a lot of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and was about to discover Agatha Christie. My brain loved to solve puzzles and ponder on how other people’s brains thought about a variety of things, and the psychology of their actions, good, bad and the gray in between. I was not encouraged to write fiction, at that young age, in fact I was discouraged, and it took me years to find my path to writing, which is now what I love to do best.

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

Definitely beginnings! I always write the endings first. I must understand the crime, what it means to me as the key to the theme, then I work my way backwards. Meanwhile, in my mind, I'm writing the life stories of all the characters, but how much of that does the book really need? Where the story should start is my biggest conundrum. In this story I decided to have each author be introduced in their own scene as they are thinking conflicted thoughts about participating in the gala. Agatha is receiving the invitation, Dorothy is helping prepare for the event, Ngaio is choosing clothes and packing for the weekend, and Margery is driving to the country estate. Each scene introduces the character to the reader, allows the character to foreshadow issues, and also brings us closer in time to the event. I also wanted to introduce DCI Lilian Wyles, and her scene turned out to be a prologue.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

So many of these characters did feel like they were a world apart, mainly due to the 1938 era, but I focused on the parallels. Each writer character has their own unique writing style and background, but I related to all of them in my own way, as a writer. Overall, I think I relate most to DCI Wyles, as she is the professional puzzle solver, the real detective, and has to deal with the professional world she is in which is mostly made up of men. She has to find her way to deal with professional situations and hold strong to succeed in her job. I definitely brought a lot of my own experience to imagine Lilian’s.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I am also a filmmaker and I teach filmmaking and story writing so I love watching movies as much as I love reading, so I would say that is my biggest influence outside of books. But I also have a wide interest in genres and when researching this book I watched narrative and documentary films, as well as reading fiction and nonfiction books that were about the era or written in the era. I loved getting into the specific language and politics of the time and place, listening, watching, and reading materials on how people spoke in 1938 England and what topics were filling their minds. There are so many parallels with the politics of that time to ours, and studying those details was a big inspiration for this book.

Visit Rosanne Limoncelli's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Four Queens of Crime.

The Page 69 Test: The Four Queens of Crime.

--Marshal Zeringue