Laura Lippman

Duane Swierczynski recently interviewed Laura Lippman for Philadelphia City Paper.

Here's the introduction to the interview and their first exchange:

Two years ago, novelist Laura Lippman was laughing and joking around with friends on the way to the Washington Nationals' Opening Day game. Then they drove past Wheaton Plaza, a shopping mall in a D.C. suburb, and everybody suddenly stopped talking.

Over 30 years ago, two young girls, Sheila and Katherine Lyon, walked to the Wheaton Plaza and never returned home.

"We were in our early teens when the Lyon sisters disappeared," says Lippman. "I think it was the first crime that felt real to us."

Lippman, formerly a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, has spent a career making crime feel real to readers, both in her award-winning Tess Monaghan series, and lately, in a run of scorching stand-alone novels. Lippman's latest, the time-hopping What the Dead Know, draws inspiration from the true-life mystery of the Lyon sisters, but takes us to the places few journalists dare to venture: inside the heads of the victims, their families, and ultimately, the perpetrators.

(Full disclosure: Lippman has graciously lent blurbs to my books, and even interviewed me once for her Web site. I figured turnabout was fair play.)

City Paper: You claim to have a notoriously bad memory, yet you really seem to nail 1975 as well as 1983 and 1989, from music to style ...

Laura Lippman: I'm not sure if my memory is poor, or if I'm just a lot more honest about its limitations. I've noticed that when you argue with someone over memory, the other person becomes very vehement, because you're basically challenging the whole narrative of his or her life. At any rate, I spent about a month at the Enoch Pratt, our central library, reading newspapers and magazines from 1975. Seventeen was particularly helpful. I was better on 1983 and 1989 because I used to keep pretty decent journals.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard Hawke

Bookreporter.com interviewed Richard Hawke about his debut suspense novel, Speak of the Devil.

The interview opens:

Bookreporter.com: The opening scene of Speak of the Devil is one of the best openers we've read. We never will watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade the same way again. Did you have this plot in mind from the start, or did it evolve as you started writing?

Richard Hawke: I'll tell you how this whole thing got rolling. I was frustrated with the half-dozen false starts I'd made. I was feeling very constricted in the way I was writing, way too controlling. So just to let off steam, I scribbled down a sentence about a gunman taking aim at Mother Goose. I can't explain where the image came from, and for the next several days the sentence sat there in my notebook as a joke sentence. Finally I came to my senses and realized that the joke sentence qualified as "an inspiration." Then began the real work. Who was doing the shooting? Why was he aiming at Mother Goose? And who was the witness to the shooting who was reporting it to the reader? Omniscient or a first-person narrator? Initially, I envisioned a father with his children or an uncle with his nieces....

But when I realized that I'd want my protagonist to chase after the gunman and surely a father or uncle wouldn't leave the kids crying on a crazed sidewalk like that, I ditched the kids. And once I put the scene into a first-person narrator's voice, the guy was so clearly a New York City detective that I quite honestly had no more choice in the matter. And so, with those kernels in place (the shooting, the detective), I settled in to do the grunt work: devising the plot.

Read the entire interview.

Check out -- The Page 99 Test: Richard Hawke's Cold Day in Hell.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Crais

Ali Karim recently interviewed Robert Crais for The Rap Sheet. Crais' most recent novel The Watchman puts Joe Pike, formerly the sidekick in Crais's novels featuring Elvis Cole, at the center of the story.

Part of the Karim-Crais exchange:

AK: Crime-fiction sidekicks such as Pike, Hawk, Dennis Lehane’s Bubba Rogowski, Harlan Coben’s Win [Windsor Horne Lockwood III], et al. have a certain appeal to readers, and morally, they often allow the hero not to be tarnished when there’s a bad guy to kill. So, what’s your take on sidekicks and their morality in crime fiction?

RC: I had a publisher back in the old days, who dubbed Joe Pike as a sociopath. I guess they did that for commercial reasons, but I resented it then and I still don’t believe it today. I think Joe Pike is a very moral guy (from his point of view), ethical, with his own code. He just sees the world differently from you and I. He’s not a slave to what we call the law, so I don’t really think of Joe doing Elvis Cole’s dirty work, I think he functions within his own code and his own universe, and there is a very rigid standard to Joe Pike’s universe, which others have to respect.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Morgan

Linda Stankard interviewed Robert Morgan about his novel, Brave Enemies.

The interview opens:

Rape, murder, disguise, deception — the opening pages of Robert Morgan's new novel, Brave Enemies, have all the elements of a modern-day thriller. But this gripping story actually takes place during the American Revolution, an era when neighbor suspected neighbor and the "wrong" sympathies, whether actual or perceived, could deliver your neck to a noose in short order.

Running for her life from dire circumstances at home, 16-year-old Josie Summers cuts her hair, dresses in men's clothing and leaves behind the small world of her family farm in the Carolinas. Rushing headlong into a wider world with grave dangers, Josie eventually finds herself in the midst of the crucial Battle of Cowpens.

"I first heard about the Battle of Cowpens from my father," Morgan says, explaining how the initial seed for the novel was planted years before it grew to fruition. "He was a great storyteller, and I was, of course, intensely interested in the Revolutionary battles fought in the South, being a North Carolina native. And this battle, one in which a smaller, less equipped force defeats a larger one, was fascinating in technical terms."

Read the entire article-interview.

Read the Page 99 Test: Brave Enemies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kevin Brockmeier

Alyson Rudd recently interviewed Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Brief History of The Dead, for the Times (London).

The opening exchanges:

RUDD: You were brave to bind the plot of The Brief History of the Dead so closely around Coca-Cola’s marketing ambitions. Why did you opt for a real company?

BROCKMEIER: I considered inventing a company, but nothing sounded anything other than needlessly artificial and, frankly, silly. I needed a device such as Coca-Cola to set the plot in motion, but my worry was aesthetic: I had to find a product name that wouldn’t ruin the atmosphere of the prose. Coke is so widely known that the word almost reads as a generic noun. Simply enough, it seemed to cause fewer aesthetic problems than anything else.

Has there been feedback from Coca-Cola?

As far as I know, there has been none at all from Coca-Cola. The feedback from readers, has been pretty consistent. Everywhere I go, people ask me this, and I tell them that there have been some pretty elaborate disclaimers on the copyright page, and I can only presume that my publishers know what they are doing.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Dara Horn

The Elegant Variation interviewed Dara Horn, author of The World to Come, last year.

The first question and answer:

1) Time Magazine called your novel - which has drawn favorable comparisons to Nicole Krauss' The History of Love - "a "deeply satisfying literary mystery."Given that one of the interminable debates out there has to do with the eternal conflict between the "genre" and the "literary," what experiences can you share about having successfully melded the two? How much - if at all - did you weigh the question of "literary" versus "mystery"? Or do you think everyone is fussing over nothing?

DH: I think the divide between "literary" and "genre" fiction is rather arbitrary. Crime and Punishment is a thriller, and there are plenty of books that are called "literary" simply because they don't have a conventional plot. But the genres are useful in describing a book, which is how you get people to read it. When I published my first novel, I was living in an apartment on the 31st floor, and I had trouble describing what my book was about in the elevator, even though it was a long ride. At some point I said to myself, "I wish I had just written a book about an art heist." So I wrote my second book about an art heist, and I certainly owe that external structure of the book to "genre" fiction. But I really saw the art heist or mystery plot as a way of bringing the reader along into a particular story, into a world of art and literature that might not be familiar, and into an exploration of other ideas - about who owns a work of art, for instance, or what's authentic and what's fake or forged, or whether art or literature can offer people some kind of redemption, or why we trust people at all.

Read the entire interview.

Visit Dara Horn's website and read the first chapter of The World to Come.

Read -- The Page 99 Test: Dara Horn's "The World to Come"

--Marshal Zeringue

Mohsin Hamid

From the Harcourt interview with Mohsin Hamid on The Reluctant Fundamentalist (March 2007):

Q: The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a monologue about a Pakistani’s experiences in America at the time of the 9/11 attacks. What made you choose this format, which has the Pakistani narrating the tale to an American whose voice is never actually heard?

A: The form the novel, with the narrator and his audience both acting as characters, allowed me to mirror the mutual suspicion with which America and Pakistan (or the Muslim world) look at one another. The Pakistani narrator wonders: is this just a normal guy or is he a killer out to get me? The American man who is his audience wonders the same. And this allows the novel to inhabit an interior emotional world much like the exterior political world in which it will be read. The form of the novel is an invitation, which if the reader accepts, will in turn implicate the reader, because the reader will be called upon to judge the novel’s outcome and shape its ending.

Read the entire interview.

Read an excerpt from The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and visit Mohsin Hamid's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kate Bernheimer

Kate Bernheimer is the author of The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold and The Complete Tales of Merry Gold.

Here is part of an interview with her at Fiction Collective Two:

What led you to explore the rich world of folk and fairy tales in your writing? Do you have a personal connection to German, Russian, and Yiddish folklore?

I'm glad you find the world of fairy tales to be a rich world. Thank you for saying that. So often, I find that this immense, strange body of literature is subtly, or not-so-subtly, misunderstood and maligned. This is not to say I think everyone must love fairy tales, but at least ought to consider them, and as works of art. A few years ago a writer in a widely read and prestigious magazine asked "Is it possible that we have actually come to the end of fairy tales as an available, rather than an archival, entertainment?" The rest of the article, though praising of traditional fairytales, seemed, to me, to come to the conclusion that indeed we had. I believe that we haven't. I suppose that for my work to be considered "archival" rather than "available" could be considered a compliment. To think of myself as an Archivist, instead of as a Novelist or Editor, would be great fun, actually.

A number of events conspired to bring me here, to fairy tales. As a young child, I loved my fairy tale dolls-particularly the Madame Alexander Cinderella "before transformation" doll that I shared with my older sister. We had a pair of dolls, one Cinderella in a pink sparkling gown and one a Cinderella in a drab green dress. We messed up the fancy Cinderella's hair-cut it ragged, ripped the tulle of the gown-and fought over the two dolls, both of us wanting both of these dirty creatures to call our own. I recently read, in a New York Times article entitled "Love the Riches, Lose the Rags," about how girl-children now only identify with Cinderella as the ballroom-dress version; that's a strange twist, and sadly unsurprising in our wealth-obsessed culture. It couldn't be further from some of the beautiful early Cinderella variants, which celebrated the strength of the disenfranchised, the poor. Anyway, I grew up watching Disney movies in my grandfather's theatre basement; he had a movie projector and we four kids would sit on his old leather couch with popcorn, terrified and elated. In the books, the printed versions, I have been drawn as long as I can remember to fairy tales because of the abstract and elegant earthiness of them, their saturation with the natural world and their constant excursions toward rapture. Existentially, I am fascinated by their obsession with isolation, and how this isolation is reflected in them artistically. When I began work on my first novel, I began-at first on a whim and then with an imperative-to read fairy tale scholarship, by writers such as Max Luthi, Maria Tatar, Jack Zipes, Donald Haase, Cristina Bacchilega, and many others. What I discovered was an exciting intellectual dialogue, a conversation about literature, politics, art, philosophy, books, and it began to enter my work: somehow, it gave me form. In the cultural heritage of my biological family (which includes Latvian and German people), there is a close connection to Russian, German, and Yiddish fairy tales. Their syntax provides me with rapture, and makes me think.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sandra Parshall

Sandra Parshall is the author of The Heat of the Moon and the just-released Disturbing the Dead.

Read the Page 69 Test results for Disturbing the Dead.

Julia Buckley interviewed Parsahll last August. Part of their conversation:

You got your start in journalism writing obituaries. Did you ever wonder, as a future mystery writer, whether any of those deaths were really accidental? Or, as P.D. James has famously said, “Did Humpty Dumpty fall or was he pushed?”

Oh, sure. I’ve always suspected the worst of people. But the boring truth is that the great majority of deaths are either natural or purely accidental. Murder fascinates people not only because it’s the worst thing anyone can do to another person but because it’s out of the ordinary – even now, when our society seems so violent.

Read the entire interview.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Furst

Alan Furst put his latest novel, The Foreign Correspondent, to the Page 99 Test. The results will be posted in a week or so.

Meanwhile, Furst fans may look in on his BookPage interview with Jay MacDonald from last summer. It opens:

Alan Furst admits he's "not entirely clear" on how he came to be the pre-eminent American writer of World War II spy novels. Beginning with Night Soldiers in 1988, the former journalist has written nine critically acclaimed espionage novels, including his latest, The Foreign Correspondent.

As the grandson of Jewish immigrants growing up in Manhattan, the only spy novels Furst read were by Eric Ambler and Ian Fleming, escapist fare with little grounding in reality. Then, on a 1983 travel story assignment for Esquire, he visited the Soviet Union, his ancestral home, for the first time.

"It was an enormous epiphany for me," Furst says by phone from his apartment in Paris. "I was back where I'd come from and there wasn't any question about that." Furst was frustrated that the Russians dictated when and where he could travel, all with the goal of converting his American dollars into rubles. "I had no desire to go to Moscow; the Russians made you go. If you wanted to go to the Danube, they wouldn't let you go there. My whole life turned on them being such jerks about it."

Read on.

--Marshal Zeringue