Joy Castro's short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction has appeared in several anthologies and journals, and she was named one of 2009's Best New Latino Authors by LatinoStories.com. Her Truth Book: A Memoir was named a Book Sense Notable Book by the American Booksellers Association and excerpted in The New York Times Magazine. Joy's new debut novel, Hell or High Water, from Thomas Dunne Books, is celebrating its book launch today with the start of a blog tour.
Set in post-Katrina New Orleans, Hell or High Water features young, ambitious Cuban American reporter Nola Céspedes as she tracks registered sex offenders who went off the grid during the Hurricane Katrina evacuation. Nola tries to balance her investigation with taking care of her aging mother, mentoring a teenager, and meeting a mysterious stranger named Bento. But Nola is gradually drawn into an underworld of violent predators that she struggles to keep separate from her middle-class professional life. Raised in poverty by a single mother in New Orleans' notorious Desire Projects, Nola has her own secrets to hide.
Joy stopped by In Reference to Murder for a little "Author R&R (Reference and Research)" to offer up some of the research she undertook in writing this book:
Novelists sometimes feel comfortable drawing upon only their experience and imagination to write their books, but for my debut thriller Hell or High Water, in which a young tourist is abducted from the French Quarter in post-Katrina New Orleans, research was essential.
Although I’d been traveling regularly to New Orleans for many years before I set a mystery there, I found that I still needed to learn a great deal. Because my husband grew up on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain and later lived, worked, and graduated from college in New Orleans—and because we always stayed with his family when we visited—I’d had the good fortune of seeing a version of New Orleans that went well beyond the French Quarter’s particular charms. But I still had a lot to learn.
Though the novel is set in 2008, I wanted to integrate into the story some of the city’s rich, complicated history, including its colonial rulers, France and Spain, and some of the colorful characters from its past. Library research helped me with this aspect, as did visiting the historic Cabildo, part of the Louisiana State Museum complex in New Orleans. I’m particularly grateful to Ned Sublette’s excellent book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, which is thorough and beautifully written. I was able to include relevant, illuminating details about the French settlement of the city, early convent girls, the Baroness de Pontalba, and more.
Hell or High Water is set almost three years after Katrina, during the long aftermath of disaster, and Katrina still looms large in the memories of the characters. I was not in New Orleans during the hurricane; my in-laws came and stayed with us, and we obsessively watched, read, and listened to news reports about the storm. For heartbreaking accounts of the human impact, I read and reread Chris Rose’s Times-Picayune columns, which are collected in his wrenching book 1 Dead in Attic and which I highly recommend. Visiting New Orleans afterward, I interviewed a friend who’d returned to the city immediately after the evacuation, and details from his eyewitness account of that strange time—hot, silent, lawless—are integrated into the novel.
Other books helped me put the hurricane into a larger environmental and political context. Bento, a key character in Hell or High Water, is a coastal geomorphologist at the University of New Orleans, and my efforts to make his character believable, knowledgeable, and realistic were helped by books such as Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast and Mike Tidwell’s The Ravaging Tide: Strange Weather, Future Katrinas, and the Coming Death of America’s Coastal Cities. Bento’s urgency around restoring Louisiana’s coastal wetlands is based on the real concerns of scientists.
The main plot of Hell or High Water, though, concerns protagonist Nola Céspedes, a reporter at the Times-Picayune who is assigned a story about the hundreds of registered sex offenders who went off the grid during the hurricane evacuation and had not, by 2008, been relocated. At the same time, a female college student has been abducted from the French Quarter. Nola’s pursuit of both cases leads her into increasingly dangerous corners of the struggling city.
To give Nola’s interviews with sex criminals and psychiatric professionals the ring of accuracy, I did library research—with the help of some wonderful reference librarians—about sexual predators: the psychology of sex criminals, criminal sentencing, rehabilitation methods, and rates of recidivism. Library research also helped me describe the long-term effects of sexual assault, as well as the therapeutic methods used to help the victims. All of the information and statistics in the novel about these issues are based on recent published scholarship.
To be able to describe accurately Nola’s workplace in the Times-Picayune offices, my husband and I took a tour of the building—with a bunch of grade-school kids! That was fun. They asked all kinds of crazy questions as they were being herded through, and we just kind of tagged along. Seeing the actual presses on which the physical newspapers are manufactured was incredible. They’re gigantic. Getting a sense of the spatial relationships in the building helped me to visualize and describe Nola’s time at work more accurately. For help with the professional life of Nola’s friend Calinda, who works at the DA’s, I interviewed my sister-in-law, a Louisiana attorney and fantastic storyteller.
My own background is not Catholic, but Catholicism is tremendously important in New Orleans, and Nola, her mother, and her friends Soline and Fabi are Catholic. I did religious research about Catholicism, and since Nola’s mother immigrated from Cuba, the research included learning the various versions of the origin story of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s Virgin Mary, which I’d known about vaguely due to my own Cuban background but had never studied in any sort of thoroughgoing way. I also visited the two Catholic churches in New Orleans that are important settings in the novel, the St. Louis Cathedral in Jackson Square and Our Lady of the Rosary Church on Esplanade Avenue. In writing, though, I still made errors, and my Catholic friends were kind enough to point them out when they read the manuscript.
Because Nola and her mother are Cuban American, I also researched Santería, the syncretic Caribbean religion that mixes elements of Catholicism with Yoruba religion. If you’re familiar with Santería, you’ll notice that some of the key characters in the book are marked by colors and traits characteristic of Santería’s orishas, or deities. The bath that Nola takes on pages 315-317—for courage, strength, and protection—comes from a Santería recipe.
I was in the very early stages of drafting when I first heard about the French Canadian legend of the loup garou—half-man, half-wolf—during a director’s talk by filmmaker Jay Craven. I immediately intuited some relationship between that legendary curse and the plot of Hell or High Water. Excited, I researched the loup garou online and found that the legend had, indeed, traveled with the Acadians down to French Louisiana, where it morphed into the Cajun legend of the rougarou. As soon as I learned that, I had one of the key structuring metaphors of the novel.
All of this research was emotionally moving and intellectually fascinating. I learned so much.
But the really fun part was the on-the-ground research. Every location where Nola goes in the book—from bookstores to nightclubs, from restaurants to the zoo, from the Ninth Ward to the Garden District, from a plantation to Grand Isle—I went myself. The food Nola eats, I ate. I saw the bands she sees. And so on. I wanted to get the sensory details exactly right: the tastes, the scents, the humidity, the temperature of the water in the Gulf in April. (Oh, the sacrifice!) For the sake of literary accuracy, I threw myself on the grenades of K-Paul’s, Liuzza’s, Ignatius, and other fantastic New Orleans restaurants. That part of the research was genuinely delicious.
Once I’d learned so much in so many different realms, the challenge was weaving all the material together smoothly in support of the plot, so that the driving engines of the book would still be suspense and excitement. I hope Hell or High Water achieves that.
