Brian Stoddart is Professor Emeritus at La Trobe University where he served as Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) and as Vice-Chancellor. He took his first two degrees at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand where he first became interested in India, then completed a PhD at the University of Western Australia that looked at the rise of nationalism in south India. Along with his work on India, Brian has been a pioneering writer in sports culture and has produced books on Australian sport, Caribbean cricket and other related subjects. In addition, Brian Stoddart writes the Superintendent Le Fanu crime fiction series set in British India. A Madras Miasma and The Pallampur Predicament attracted excellent reviews and recognition while the third, A Straits Settlement, was longlisted for the 2017 Ngaio Marsh Award for best New Zealand crime novel.

In A Straits Settlement, the third installment of the Chris Le Fanu Mystery series, the intrepid superintendent is promoted to Inspector-General of Police in 1920s Madras, which proves to be more boring than he had envisaged. Instead of pushing papers across his desk, Le Fanu focuses on the disappearance of a senior Indian Civil Service officer and an apparently unrelated murder. As the two incidents intertwine, the world-weary detective is drawn into the worlds of indentured labor recruitment and antiquities theft.

Brian Stoddart stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and research his novels: 

 

Looking For Le Fanu

When the first book in the Chris Le Fanu series appeared, many readers loved its atmospherics of 1920s Madras in colonial India, and the city itself being as much a character as the protagonist and his colleagues on both sides of the crime fence. Even the Madras/Chennai media critics thought I had it “right”, a source of great satisfaction.

All those readers marvelled at the research behind the book and its successors, wondering how I had done it all.

Well, I cheated, in a sense.

I began writing, badly, at school in New Zealand, then went to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch to become an historian. Two things that happened back then now mark the Le Fanu series. First, I began re-reading all my sports books as an historian, realising that since the later nineteenth century sport has had a deep and meaningful impact on life globally. That began my pioneering sports history and culture work, but also determined that Le Fanu be a golfer and one of his assistants a cricketer. They reference that intellectual journey.

The second impact was even bigger. In first year I took a course in Pacific and Asian History at its first time of offering. That began a lifelong fascination with Asia. Then I took a specialist intensive course on modern India with Ian Catanach, one of those teachers and mentors who change your life. That led to a Masters degree, a fixation with India, and a high school teaching job. A year later Ian engineered a PhD scholarship for me at the University of Western Australia where I began researching the growth of nationalist politics in south India.

That research put me physically into what was then still called Madras, now renamed Chennai, and indirectly began the Le Fanu story thread. By the time I got there, I “knew” the city, its suburbs, streets, highlights and lowlights because I had studied it so closely. When I got off the ship in the Port of Madras, I knew where to go despite never having been there before. Years later I had the same sensation in Venice, “knowing” the place simply from having read Donna Leon.

I spent months then, over time, years in the Madras archives opposite Egmore Railway Station, ransacking files that recounted clashes between nationalists and police, and the ruminations of British Raj officials  trying to handle it all. By definition I learned about police processes, methods, thinking and organisation in the British India context. That included the evolving, difficult relations between European officers and Indian other ranks.

Fortuitously, the archival work was supplemented by an important personal one. By complete chance the patriarch in the house where I stayed turned out to have been one of the first Indian Inspectors-General of Police in post-Independence Madras, and began his career during the period I was studying. So every night I returned to the house, sat outside and discussed the files I had been reading while he reminisced about being amidst the action.

My thesis was not about the police but I read everything possible on the Indian Police Service, an academic colleague wrote a book on the Madras Presidency police service that graced my shelves alongside a growing line of Indian police histories and autobiographies.

Then I went off and write about sport but retained the interest in India. A string of academically-oriented works followed, but that police interest remained while I read all the crime fiction I could for fun. Eventually I wrote the biography of an Indian Civil Service maverick, something I thought I would never do. Then came a memoir of living in Damascus just before the start of the present troubles, another literary form I had thought beyond me.

I never thought to write fiction, either, but with time to spare on foreign assignment in Cambodia, instead of reading crime fiction I decided to write some, so Le Fanu emerged.

At one level I followed that rubric of “write what you know”. I had always considered India a great potential crime fiction site for both historical and contemporary settings. All that research from all those archives and conversations was still sitting there, I “knew” Madras. My Indian Civil Service biography sprang the idea of having someone “odd” as protagonist to set up tensions and complexities. A Le Fanu had been in the Indian Civil Service in Madras during the nineteenth century and, of course, there was the twist provided by Sheridan Le Fanu who had rivalled Edgar Alan Poe as a mystery writer. Besides, a Le Fanu had also played rugby for England, so there was another strand.

While I returned physically to Madras, as I still call the place, to “see” it again as a crime setting, the Le Fanu cases, locations, combatants and all the rest were just there waiting to be disinterred. Some of the characters are even real historical ones, while the main “fictionalised” ones all have people and personalities discovered long ago lurking in behind.

Strictly speaking, then, years of research sits behind Chris Le Fanu. But the passage of time has allowed me to re-approach that research more dispassionately, allowing the story and stories to take precedence rather than that research. As people say, the biggest problem is that having done all that “research” you feel compelled to use it. That is less of a problem for me now because even though I am revisiting it, the research has settled in my mind.

The great bonus? A lot more people like Le Fanu than read the thesis on which he is based! 

 

You can learn more about the author and his books (both fiction and nonfiction) via his website or follow him on Facebook and Twitter. His crime novels are available from Crimewave Press and all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Elka Ray

Elka Ray is a Canadian/UK author and editor, whose first novel, Hanoi Jane, was published by Marshall Cavendish in English and DT Books in Vietnamese. That was followed by the suspense novel, Saigon Dark, which came out with Crimewave Press in November 2016, as well as a collection of short crime stories, What You Don’t Know: Tales of Obsession, Mystery & Murder in Southeast Asia. Elka is also the author and illustrator of a popular series of bilingual children’s books about Vietnam and lives with her family near Hoi An.

Elka stops by In Reference to Murder to today to take some Author R&R and talk a bit about her writing:

My childhood was nomadic. No stranger to homesickness, I looked forward to growing up - and being in control of where I lived. As a result, place is important to me, both in life and in fiction. 

Looking back on books I read long ago, the settings often remain clearer to me than the plots - that misty graveyard in Dickens' Great Expectations, the ominously dark Canadian lakes of Andrew Pyper's Lost Girls, the secret passages of Hogwarts in J.K Rowling's Harry Potter series... Little annoys me more than a book set in a place I know well and the author clearly doesn't. 

The three books I've published so far - Hanoi Jane, Saigon Dark and What You Don't Know: Tales of Obsession, Mystery & Murder in Southeast Asia - are all set in Southeast Asia, where I've lived for over 20 years. As a journalist and travel writer I used to cover a fair bit of ground. All these stories take place in spots I've lived, worked or holidayed. 

My crime/romance novel Newly Wed, Nearly Dead will be published by Seventh Street in early 2019. It's set in another place I know well, on Canada's beautiful Vancouver Island.

I once tried to set part of a story in a country I'd never been - Syria, I think it was. I read news reports and travel blogs. I watched Youtube videos. I googled everything from the weather  in July to the smell in the market to the most common boys' and girls' names. I quizzed friends who'd worked there.

The scene sounded authentic - at least to me, who'd never been near the place. But how would I know? I ended up scrapping it. 

I write fiction by instinct and fear too much research will bog me down. If I know the setting, I trust the story will fall into place - and the internet is there for the rest. Imagine having to go to the library and pore through dusty encyclopedias to confirm place names or the most popular bands in 1977. Imagine lugging home heavy medical textbooks to find appropriate causes of death. Google is both a writer's best friend and potential worst enemy, providing the ultimate excuse to procrastinate. Divorce law in Canada. Fast acting poisons. Fatal head wounds. How long until human hair rots away.

I hope I'm never connected to a real crime as the police would have a field day with my internet history. 

 

You can read more about Elka and her books on her website at www.elkaray.com, or follow her on Facebook, Twitter or at elka.ray on Instagram. Elka's book Saigon Dark is available from Crimewave Press and via all major booksellers.

Author R&R with David Malcolm

David Malcolm was born in Aberdeen and educated in Ab­erdeen, Zürich, and London. He's lived and worked in Japan, the USA, and currently calls Sopot, Poland home, where he is professor at the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Gdańsk. His collection of short fiction, Radio Moscow and Other Stories, was published by Blackwitch Press in 2015 and republished by Artizan in 2016.

His new novel, The German Messenger (Crime Wave Press) is set in late 1916 when Europe is tearing itself apart in the Great War. Harry Draffen, a part Greek and part Scottish British secret agent, becomes part of a daring attempt by British and German spies to stop the gratuitous bloodletting of WWI. Draffen journeys from the slums of East London to an Oxford college, from the trenches on the Western Front to an isolated house on the Scottish coast, and then on to a bloody showdown in the North of England, to chase a phantom and elusive German messenger.


David Malcolm stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and researching the novel:

 

Most of the fiction that I write is set in the past. I find the past – places, people, events – much more interesting than the present. The German Messenger is set in late 1916 and early 1917. I’ve also written other crime stories that take place during the Great War or in the early 1950s.

The problem for me is not so much the grand historical events. They can be tricky however. For example, like many even moderately well-read people, I had heard very little of the Salonika campaign in which the British Army was involved, alongside Allied forces, between 1915 and 1918. It was complicated, bloody, not very successful – and largely forgotten. I realized as I was writing The German Messenger that my hero Draffen – because he is part-Greek – has to have been involved somehow in it. I may have to juggle with time-lines in sequels to the Messenger.

However, the grand events are not so much a problem. It’s the smaller details that a writer setting stories in the past  also needs to get right. Exactly how short were women’s skirts in 1917? Did British officers wear uniforms to civilian dinner parties in 1916? What did a Habsburg infantry unit look like in 1915? (The answer to that is: in field-grey, very tough, and very scary.) How were train carriages laid out in southern England in the winter of 1916 (with a corridor running the length of the carriage, or with doors opening directly on to the platform)? The problem is not just with the distant past. How much had Hamburg been rebuilt by 1951? What did that part of Warsaw look like in 1953? What was it like to be in that kind of bar in Tokyo in 1984?

But of course there are loads of books and magazines in libraries, and many that you can get to read at home if you haven’t got the British Library twenty minutes down the road. (I am very jealous of those who do.) For example, I have collections of wonderful pictures of the third arrondissement in Paris that give you a sense of the streets there from 1900 through 1940. A book that I looked at by chance in the British Library contains a railway map of the Baltic area in 1908, so I now know how my hero gets from Warsaw to Reval/Tallinn. Books, too, give you ideas for stories. Alex Butterworth’s splendid The World That Never Was  tells you more about the anarchists and the policemen of Europe between 1870 and 1914 than you probably ever wanted to know. (In fact, it’s a very depressing book – folly on all sides.) Do you need to write a novel about the Habsburg secret services? Have a look at Albert Pethö’s Agenten für den Doppeladler (Agents for the Double-Eagle). It has the kernels of more plots than you can shake a stick at. Museums, too, can be of assistance, and can inspire. A visit to the marvelous Nissim de Camondo museum in Paris gave me the background to a whole subplot for the next German Messenger novel.

Zoppot 1910 Plan

Then there’s the internet. Pictures everywhere. Snippets of stories. Maps. Street plans of Zoppot in 1902. Fashion pictures. Film of Hamburg streets in 1955. It’s almost like being there sometimes. It’s not cheating at all. If only it had all been there twenty years ago.

But sometimes, of course, you just invent. When I wrote a thriller set in Japan in the 1980s, I decided I might as well invent the bar where the hero meets an important female character. I had lived in Tokyo for two years, so I had lots of surrounding details right. But I’d never been to that kind of bar. I couldn’t do the local research, and – to be honest – I didn’t want to. I don’t care for that kind of place, and it’s wise to know your limitations. So I imagined it. European and American readers who’ve looked at the typescript say it’s completely authentic and believable. I haven’t dared show it to any Japanese ones. I did the same in The German Messenger with The Cherry Tree nightclub (do all my stories take place in bars, you ask). I made it up. When I read it again, I think to myself even – how authentic! But I believe the author should do that kind of invention very sparingly. All fictions are precisely that – fictions. But you owe, I believe, a debt to reality, to the past, to the people of the past, and you should do your best to get it right. I try. For readers, too, there has to be a certain density of historical detail to make the story feel real (not too much, not too little). The most accurate is usually the best.

Fortunately, I love libraries. My work has taken me to some of the best in the world. I’m very happy in them, even in indifferent ones. But the streets of London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, and Warsaw give you ideas, give you settings, make you imagine. They’re kinds of libraries too. Dusty second-hand bookstores in provincial cities, too, are still sources of ideas, atmosphere, details.

Photograph copyright Jennifer Zielinska

Then there is serendipity. I was in Łódź (Lodz in German, Russian, and Yiddish) a couple of years ago in a second-hand bookstore (also one of my favorite places, as you can guess). I bought a book about Łódż in the Great War, and the bookseller said to me, “Oh, my grandmother was a girl during the First War.” She remembered one of the first battles of the War that was fought around the city. The local bourgeoisie stood out on the roof of the Grand Hotel on the main street and watched as the Russians and Germans lobbed shells at each other from either side of the city. Who could invent that?

 

Find out more about David Malcolm and his books via the Crime Wave Press site and Amazon. The German Messenger is now available from all major booksellers.

Author R&R with Rich Zahradnik

Rich Zahradnik was a journalist for 30-plus years working as a reporter and editor in all major news media, including online, newspaper, broadcast, magazine and wire services. He held editorial positions at CNN, Bloomberg News, Fox Business Network, AOL and The Hollywood Reporter. He's also the author of the Coleridge Taylor Mystery series (A Black Sail, Drop Dead Punk, Last Words). The first three books in the series were shortlisted or won awards in the three major competitions for books from independent publishers. A Black Sail was named best mystery in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards and a finalist in the 2016 Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Awards. Drop Dead Punk collected the gold medal for mystery ebook in the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards, while Last Words won the bronze medal for mystery/thriller ebook in the 2015 IPPYs and honorable mention for a mystery in the Foreword Reviews competition.

The latest series installment, Lights Out Summer (Camel Press), is set in March 1977, when ballistics link murders going back six months to the same Charter Arms Bulldog .44, and a serial killer, Son of Sam, is on the loose. But Coleridge Taylor can’t compete with the armies of reporters fighting New York’s tabloid war—only rewrite what they get. Constantly on the lookout for victims who need their stories told, he uncovers other killings being ignored because of the media circus. He goes after one, the story of a young Black woman gunned down in her apartment building the same night Son of Sam struck elsewhere in Queens. The story entangles Taylor with a wealthy Park Avenue family at war with itself. Just as he’s closing in on the killer and his scoop, the July 13-14 blackout sends New York into a 24-hour orgy of looting and destruction.

Rich stops by In Reference to Murder today to talk about writing and research Lights Out Summer:

 

Researching the Coleridge Taylor Mysteries changed in a big way in 2014—in both interesting and embarrassing fashion. Sometime before then, I’d put on my gift list the massive “The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages 1851-2009.” The tome included three DVDs—remember those?—containing 54,693 front pages linking to complete articles.

Taylor is a reporter who always has an acute awareness of the other stories going on around him. He reacts to news and how it’s covered even when it’s not his story. The novels are set in the seventies. From a storytelling standpoint, a headline from a certain day can give readers a feel for the period—or remind them of a crime or political event or cultural incident they’d forgotten and perhaps echoes what’s happening today.

Right, so that’s why I needed the book. My wife gave it to me for Hanukkah. The cost of the giant thing was somewhere between $125 and $165. Within months, the New York Times announced online subscribers would have access to TimesMachine, an online archive of complete issues of the paper as they originally appeared going back to 1865. I never did put one of those DVDs into my computer. You can now buy the DVD/book package on Amazon for $8.27.

I am well past my embarrassment. (The Times could have given me some warning, though.) TimesMachine is indispensible. I can go deeper to see the stories beyond the front page. The ads, too. This helps for all the reasons I mentioned above. And others. My new mystery, Lights Out Summer, is set in 1977 and an important set piece in the plot is the New York blackout of July 13-14. No book was written about those terrible 25 hours when thousands of businesses were looted and destroyed. But I could read all of the articles the Times published during and in the aftermath of the stealing, fires and vandalism. (The Times itself pulled off a miracle by sending editors over to Jersey and getting the paper out.) I’ll admit, the TimesMachine is particularly helpful to me because my books are set in New York, so I can track local politics, cultural and crime. Tidbits are sprinkled throughout the novels.

Each of my books involves a major New York historical event in the plot: the city’s near bankruptcy, the Bicentennial celebrations, Son of Sam’s murder spree. And for each, I’ve found at least a couple of books to go deep on the subject even if the event—like the Bicentennial—serves as a backdrop to the crime story. For “Lights Out Summer,” I was greatly aided by “Son of Sam: Based on the Authorized Transcription of the Tapes, Official Documents and Diaries of David Berkowitz” by Lawrence D. Klausner and “Son of Sam: The .44 Caliber Killer” by George Carpozi Jr. I learned of an earlier New York serial killer, 3X, from the wonderful “Police Reporter: Forty Years One of New York’s Finest Reporters” by Ted Prager. That book also gave me insights into what Taylor’s job was like for one or two generations of reporters before him.

A collection of general histories, timelines and atlases of New York rounds out my library.

Oh, and one last reference is indispensible: “Billboard Top 10 Singles Charts, 1955 to 2000.” Music triggers memories in readers. The seventies were a period of massive change as disco, punk, hairband rock and the sixties survivors fought for listeners’ attention. I could easily pick out a song I remember from 1977 and drop it in. But the charts show me what tunes were hot in a particular week—adding a nice level of detail. They also remind me of songs and bands I’d forgotten.

Disco-Tex and the x-O-Lettes anyone?

You can learn more about Rich and his books via his website and follow him on Twitter, Facebook, and Goodreads. Lights Out Summer is available via all major book retailers.

Author R&R with Rebecca Marks

An attorney, musician, and owner of dog-show champion Belgian Tervurens, Rebecca Marks is also the author of the Dana Cohen Mystery Series, which deal with a woman who has retired at age 42 from her post as detective with the NYPD and relocated to the North Fork of Long Island. She plans on helping her elderly father manage his winery but soon finds she can't stop solving mysteries. Following the first two installments, On the Rocks and Four Shots Neat, she's just released the third book in the series, Stone Cold Sober, from Black Opal Books.

In the novel, Dana's best friend, Marilyn, is directing a local musical theater production. Dana's estranged lover, Alex Frasier, the father of the child she's carrying, is a Morris dancer in the show, but Dana has no theatrical talent at all. So Marilyn cooks up a way to get the two former lovebirds together, hiring Dana to work security for the production. When Dana discovers a gruesome murder during one of the show's rehearsals, her "detective gene" overtakes her, and she can't resist the urge to throw herself into this case. But as she investigates, she uncovers some dark secrets and realizes, too late, how far someone will go to keep them hidden...

Rebecca stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing her books:

 

In our current culture, sophisticated readers have access to the most updated information about most everything, and they are not shy about finding the information and complaining about errors. So I’ve always felt that it’s very important to make sure that as an author, I do my homework and research all of the parts of the story that entail factual legal procedures. In a mystery, it’s common to talk about police work, legal process, and much of what happens between the crime and the solution.

Although I am a Massachusetts lawyer, I have never been licensed to practice in New York, and the rules and procedures can vary greatly from state to state. The Dana Cohen mystery series takes place entirely in New York. So I followed several different routes to ensure that I got the facts right.

First of all, Google has been a tremendously important tool for me. There is a great deal of information posted online by the state of New York, detailing police procedure, court process, medical examiner rules, and grand jury proceedings, to name a few. I read extensively about all of the following: 

• Police conduct legal searches, but to do so, they need the proper warrants and implements to conduct their searches. The Consolidated Laws of New York’s CPL code provide all of the information about what property police can seize during a search, who and what are subject to such search, when the warrants are executable, and how they are obtained, to name a few of the procedures.
• Because Dana operates mostly in Suffolk County, I consulted the Suffolk County Government Medical Examiner website. It provides extensive information about how the ME operates in Suffolk County, including timing, autopsy policy, and when the ME is called in.
• Grand juries are convened by the county prosecutor to ascertain whether the perpetrator of a crime should be indicted. Although these procedures are similar from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, I researched how it works in Suffolk County, to make sure I didn’t write something that wasn’t true. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office provides complete information about criminal justice procedures, which were invaluable to me in writing Dana’s stories.
• Finally, court cases also follow the procedure of the jurisdiction where the crime occurred, and New York publishes extensive articles about how criminal procedure works in that state. Luckily, my law background enabled me to understand the gist of the NYS CPL Law Code.

In addition to the rich availability of information on the Internet, there are other extremely useful tools out there for authors to use in the quest to do accurate research. There are several Yahoo groups that provide useful information volunteered by other authors who have already done the research. I have found that the Yahoo group “Crimescene Writer” is extremely useful. On that site, writers can ask questions about absolutely everything they might be planning to write about in their crime novels. Recently, someone asked about a gunshot wound, and how it would affect a victim. Many people answered this question and provided information about where to learn more. There are reports about how the FBI operates, what police do, what is legal and illegal for the police, warrants, and any other questions an author might have about their book.

I have asked several questions of this group in the course of my writing the Dana Cohen mystery series, and I always receive excellent information. Then I am able to refine that information even more carefully by digging into its accuracy.

Finally, there are several organizations that support mystery writers, and I am a member of two of those: Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and International Thriller Writers (ITW). These organizations provide not only a venue for writers to meet other writers, but also give members a place to seek relevant information. 

Research is not only interesting and fun, but doing it thoroughly gives me the confidence that although I am writing fiction, the procedures and actions of agencies involved in my mysteries are correct and believable. 

 

You can learn more about Rebecca and her books via her website, or follow her on Twitter or on Facebook.