Two Women Chat . . . Hilary Davidson and Robin Spano

Hilary’s debut novel, The Damage Done, won the 2011 Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and the Crimespree Award for Best First Novel. The book was also a finalist for the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel. The novel’s main character, Lily Moore, is, like Hilary, a travel writer. While their personal lives have little in common, they do share a few things, such as a love of vintage clothing, classic Hollywood movies, and Art Deco design. The sequel to The Damage Done is The Next One to Fall, a mystery set in Peru that Forge published on February 14, 2012. The third book in the series, Evil in All Its Disguises, will be published by Forge on March 5, 2013.

Hilary’s claim that she will do anything for a story is something that she’s had a few opportunities to regret. It sounds great until she finds herself diving for shipwrecks in the icy waters of the St. Lawrence River or swimming with sharks in the Bahamas.

She got her start in journalism in 1995, when she moved to New York for five months to intern at Harper’s Magazine. When Hilary returned to Toronto, she joined the staff of Canadian Living magazine as a copy editor. Her first freelance article, “Death Takes a Holiday” — about a New Orleans cemetery — was published by The Globe & Mail. She left her day job to write full-time in June 1998.
Her work as a travel writer has allowed her to visit places such as Peru, Easter Island, and Israel. Ironically, Hilary has spent much of her time writing books about her hometown, Toronto, and her adopted city, New York, where she’s lived since October 2001. She’s written 11 editions of Frommer’s Toronto and the first edition of Frommer’s New York City Day by Day, in addition to co-authoring five editions of Frommer’s Canada. In March 2008, she launched the Gluten-Free Guidebook, a website for people with celiac disease and gluten intolerance. (Hilary was diagnosed with celiac disease in 2004).

 

 

 

Robin Spano’s debut novel, Dead Politician Society, follows Clare Vengel on her first undercover assignment after the major is murdered in the middle of a speech. The sequel, Death Plays Poker follows Clare through her second assignment as she traces a string of poker players who are strangled in their hotel rooms.

Robin grew up in downtown Toronto and now lives in Lions Bay, BC. When she’s not lost in fiction, she loves to get outside snowboarding, hiking, boating, and riding the curves of the local highways in her big black pick-up truck.
Her historical role model is Winston Churchill, more for his independent thinking than his drinking. Her secret dream was to be one of Charlie’s Angels, but since real life danger terrifies her, she writes crime fiction instead.

She’s a founding member of Off The Page Toastmasters – a public speaking group for writers. She’s also active with Crime Writers of Canada and Sisters in Crime’s Toronto Chapter.

She is married to a man who hates reading and encourages her endlessly. Which is great, because it’s Keith who drags her away from her computer to do all those fun things outside.

 

Two Women Chat …
by Hilary Davidson and Robin Spano

 

Hilary: The highlight of my summer was the week I spent at your house in June. In a way, I still can't believe it happened. One minute, we were talking about doing an event with a couple of other writers, and then suddenly, I was at your house in B.C. with Ian Hamilton and Deryn Collier, and we had a week of events together. All of this after I met you for two minutes at Bouchercon in San Francisco! When I started writing crime fiction, I didn't expect that it would lead to making new friends and having slumber parties at their houses, but it has. Writing fiction has made my real life more surreal. Does it ever feel that way to you?

 

Robin: Surreal, um, definitely. Maybe because our job description is to go deep into our heads for several hours and write down the things we see in there. And then share those happenings with the world in the most public way possible.

 

At first I found that contrast hard – and I think I wrote more superficially about my characters, as a form of self-protection. But the more I write, the more natural it feels to pull the truth out from deeper inside, let my characters be more flawed and more real. In some ways, I think the most neurotic parts of ourselves are the most universally interesting to readers.

 

What really shocks me is how fun I'm finding the public part of the job. That tour with you and Ian and Deryn was a highlight of my summer too. I loved our late night gossip sessions with wine in the hot tub.

 

I also enjoyed our CBC interview. Kevin Sylvester asked some great questions, like how we handle genre snobbery – that phenomenon where highbrow literary readers dismiss genre fiction out of hand. I find it easy to dismiss any snob back – I feel like they're the one limiting their world by shutting a portion of it out. But I have crime writer friends who get really bothered by being slapped with a philistine label. What's your take?

 

Hilary: I think "literary fiction" is mostly a marketing term. If a book has an instantly recognizable theme — mystery/crime, sci-fi, romance, dystopian universe — it gets lumped into genre. Calling a book "literary fiction" is, to me, an acknowledgment that nobody can figure out what box it fits into. It's like a big bin of miscellaneous prose, some brilliant and some decidedly not.

 

Being snobby about it seems silly when you look at the issue from that perspective, but some people are. I got an email a week ago from someone my husband went to school with, saying — I'm paraphrasing here — that she wanted to write a mystery novel because that would be so much easier than a literary book. To my mind, that's even crazier than someone saying, "I only read literary fiction, not mysteries," which I've heard more than a few times. When I hear that, I know I'm talking to a person who wants to be seen as smart and tasteful, and has some insecurities about it.

 

Talking like this makes me feel like I'm back in your hot tub, wineglass in hand. What surprised me about staying at your house was that I got a lot of writing done that week. I never thought I'd be able to stick to my schedule with other people around. What's your writing schedule like when you aren't taking care of a house full of writers?

 

Robin: Ha ha. I hope your friend is reading this. I originally thought I'd start with a mystery because it would be easier to write too. (I'm a reformed genre snob, true confession.) But I quickly found that it was harder because not only do you have to make sure the characters have interesting growth arcs and the dialogue rings true and all the other facets of "literary" fiction, but you have to fit in clues and red herrings and suspects in a way that keeps the reader guessing and satisfies their curiosity at the end. I love the puzzle-making aspect of writing crime fiction – for me, the craft is the perfect blend of art and science – but there is no way anyone could convince me a mystery is easier to write.

 

I had a friend email me last week. He's a literary writer trying his hand at a chick lit novel. Which I totally love – I think it's great for writers to explore lots of genres and formats. But he asked me if he should dumb down (okay, he called it "simplify") his language to cater to genre fiction readers. He's a smart guy, and I understand where his question was coming from, but I told him no way. I give my reader full credit for having a brain. I explained that the only difference between literary and genre fiction is that genre has a specific plot designed to entertain, and literary, well, uh, needs no plot, really.

 

Normal writing schedule = first thing in the morning, always. Then the day could take on different shapes. This week I have a gardening project I'm passionate about, so after I've worked for a couple of hours I get my grubby clothes on and go out and play with my hoe and the bramble roots. Gardening, I'm learning, is great for mulling fiction. Sometimes I mix in some socializing – I'll meet a friend for coffee or lunch or a walk in the woods. Other days I'm intense and write all day. I think my favorite breaks involve driving – the Sea-to-Sky Highway has these wicked curves and gorgeous scenery; it relaxes me to spend time on it.

 

What's your schedule like? Living in Manhattan, it must be hard to stay at your desk all day.

 

Hilary: I remember the Sea-to-Sky Highway from my visit — that was so beautiful. In some ways, New York is full of distractions, but when I leave my apartment, I feel like I'm on a research mission. I walk a couple of miles each day, and things I see and overhear end up finding their way into my work. I also work out a lot of problems with plots while I'm walking. When I'm sitting at my desk, it can be hard to take a step back and get the perspective I need. Letting my mind wander while I walk frees me up to work out knots in the book.

 

My schedule is pretty steady. I like to write in the morning, partly because I can keep a leash on my social-media usage and web surfing. In the afternoon, I'm much more distractible. I'll have 50 news stories open in my browser, thanks to my Twitter friends. I sometimes write in the evening, too, usually when I'm in the closing stretch of a novel.

 

I tend to get consumed by what I'm writing. Dan jokes about me wandering into traffic when I'm working on a first draft, especially with a book. I see the story through the main character's eyes and that puts me inside Lily's head for extended periods of time. But it's an odd feeling, because I'm also on the outside of the story, peering in. I know all of these things about her that she would never tell anyone. It's a strange, complicated relationship, because we have some things in common (we're both travel writers) but there's a lot that's different (our family histories and personal lives). What's in like for you, writing about a character that has some of your traits (like your love of motorcycles!)?

 

Robin: I think you've said it really well – the relationship between Clare and me is strange and complicated.

 

I have enough in common with Clare that I feel perfectly comfortable crawling into her skin and seeing the world from behind her eyes. Because she's young and hot-blooded, I especially like taking out my real life rage through her fictional temper.

 

She's also different enough that I don't feel like I'm writing an autobiography. She's more fearless, more confident, she'd prefer watching TV to reading a book. And I really don't understand how Clare can prefer that watery piss they call Bud over the full-flavored IPAs I like to drink, but she is who she is, right? That's the thing about a character – they take on their own life, and you just have to let them be who they are, documenting what you can catch of them.

 

I think my favorite part of writing about Clare is the vicarious living. I choose her cases based on where I'd like to go undercover – a poker tournament, a ski resort town. I'm thinking maybe Hong Kong next. How do you choose Lily's next destination?

 

Hilary: It's mostly intuition. With THE NEXT ONE TO FALL, I never had a moment of doubt. I always knew the book would be set in Peru, and I never considered setting it anywhere else. With the third book, EVIL IN ALL ITS DISGUISES, the process was different because of legal concerns. Even though that book is pure fiction, it was inspired by the very real, and very tragic, story of a Frommer's editor who went missing at a resort in the Caribbean. My agent was worried about the legal implications of basing the novel in a similar setting. I ended up deciding to use Acapulco as the setting, largely because of its Hollywood history — Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra vacationed there, Elizabeth Taylor married Mike Todd there, John Wayne owed a resort there. Acapulco has a glittering past and a gritty present, which made it perfect, since it's the kind of spot Lily would gravitate toward. The irony: I've never been to Acapulco! I didn't want to pretend that I had, either, so all of the Acapulco scenes take place in a hotel where a journalist goes missing and Lily becomes a virtual prisoner. Being trapped at the hotel ends up giving the book a Gothic feel, which I wanted.

 

I feel that there are a lot of happy accidents that work their way into my writing, and discovering Acapulco's Hollywood history was one of them. Does that ever happen to you when you're writing?

 

Robin: Ha ha, I'm glad you didn't write a fake travelogue of Acapulco. I'm looking forward to reading this glass castle third book of yours!

 

Yeah, happy coincidences happen all the time. Most times when I run into a wall, the creative work-around ends up leading me to someplace much more rich and interesting than if I'd been able to go in a straight line like I'd originally planned. My third book, DEATH'S LAST RUN, was absolutely brutal to write. I'd get one plot line in place then realize I'd just pulled the rug out from under another plot line. I was six months late delivering it to my publisher because I just couldn't get all the threads working together. It was research help from my friend Christine that finally clicked everything into place. The find turned out to be a discussion of the war on drugs from the perspective of Latin American political leaders – a plot thread that's tiny compared with the full story, but a missing link can come from absolutely anywhere.

 

Okay, so I have to ask. This Stephen Leather guy who initiated the sock puppet scandal by bragging about writing fake reviews of his own work – he claims that all writers do it. He's wrong, right? I mean, am I naively in the dark, or did this guy do a line of blow before the panel where he said that? Have you ever written a review under a fake name? Is it really common practice, do you think?

 

Hilary: I refuse to believe this is a common practice. Of course, people who do it are going to want to hide behind the "everyone's doing it!" fig leaf, but it takes a particularly pathetic, shameless ego to go down that road. I've never written a review under a fake name. There are some things that would make you lose self-respect, and that's one of them. Though, I have to add, I can forgive authors who have written fake reviews to praise their own work. What I can't forgive are authors who used sock-puppet accounts to trash other writers' books. What R.J. Ellory did is so hateful, it defies description. Finding out that a writer anonymously trashed their competition guarantees that I will never pick up that writer's books.

 

It's disappointing, because the crime-fiction community overall is such a happy, supportive place. I remember the first conference I went to — that was Boucheron in San Francisco in 2010 — and how astonishingly kind people were. Have you felt that, too?

 

Robin: Yeah. I was petrified of that conference. My first book had been out for two weeks and I knew no one. But about five minutes in, I was already comfortable. People talk to you everywhere. Readers and bloggers love talking to writers, writers love dishing with other writers. There's no dead room, no loser table – just a bunch of awesome connections waiting to happen.

 

I attribute that awesome community to two things. First, crime writers can afford to be supportive. Because so many readers love mysteries and suspense novels, the sales pie is big enough that there's a slice for everyone who figures out the magic formula – i.e., how to connect with an audience. Second – and you may have heard me say this before – we take our rage out on the page. All our negative emotions have an outlet, since we're writing about dark things. In real life, that leaves us pretty chill.

 

I also have to credit social media for keeping writerly relationships alive. I met you for two minutes MAX, and I was totally intimidated by you because you just seemed so polished on and top of the scene (and as you left the room, some hot young guy was asking for your number). But then you Tweeted about seeing my book in a Barnes & Noble in Union Square, and I love Union Square and that made me feel like I was there with you. So I read your book and saw so much warmth inside you that I wanted to know you more. And I mean, from there, there was no stopping us – from wasting time online to being completely inappropriate at dinner parties, you're one of my very favorite friends in this crime writing community.

 

Hilary: That feeling is completely mutual, Robin. The great surprise about crime writing, for me, is that it’s brought so many wonderful people into my life.

 

Method Writing by Hilary Davidson

Hilary Davidson
The Damage Done (Forge, 2010) + The Next One to Fall (Forge, February 14, 2012)
http://www.hilarydavidson.com

Hilary Davidson’s debut novel, The Damage Done— won the 2011 Anthony Award for Best First Novel and the Crimespree Award for Best First Novel. It was also a finalist for an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada, and a Macavity Award. The sequel, The Next One to Fall—a mystery set in Peru, starting with a suspicious death at Machu Picchu—will be published by Forge on February 14, 2012.

 

She won the 2010 Spinetingler Award for Best Short Story for “Insatiable.” Hilary’s stories appear in anthologies including A Prisoner of Memory and 24 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories (Pegasus, 2008), Thuglit Presents: Blood, Guts, & Whiskey (Kensington, 2010), and Crime Factory: The First Shift (New Pulp Press, 2011). She’s also published work in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Beat to a Pulp, and Crimespree Magazine.

Like her main character in The Damage Done and The Next One to Fall, Hilary’s day job for more than a decade was travel journalist. She is also the author of 18 nonfiction books, including Frommer’s New York City Day by Day. Originally from Toronto, she has lived in New York since October 2001.

You can find Hilary online at www.hilarydavidson.com and on Twitter (@hilarydavidson).

Method Writing

By Hilary Davidson

I have a group of journalist friends I’ve been meeting with for years in New York, and they love to tease me about what I was like while writing my first novel. In particular, there was one evening we were meeting for our usual dinner and gabfest. We take turns hosting these nights out, and I was heading to my friend Ellen’s apartment on Mercer Street, a place I’d been to dozens of times. I remember coming out of the subway on Bleecker Street, and wandering around the neighborhood, looking for my friend’s building and not being able to find it. I found Mercer Street eventually, but not her building; I had to call and ask for directions. When I got there, I told them what had happened, and I blamed the book. But I didn’t tell them the entire truth, which was that I’d been writing that day about a character who was lost in a familiar neighborhood.

           

When I started writing fiction, I found that characters and stories took up more space in my brain than I ever imagined they would. I was used to writing articles and books of the nonfiction variety, so I thought I understood what it took to be a writer. But fiction made demands I hadn’t expected. Stories lurked in my brain no matter what I was doing or where I was. They weren’t even stories, in a real sense; I would be trying to work out why a character behaved a certain way, prodding at bits of scar tissue in his or her heart until I felt that I understood them. Then, when I wrote about them, they came to life in my mind so vividly that they were more like people I knew instead of people I’d invented.

At the same time, I started to realize that what went down on the page left emotional aftershocks. I can’t claim to have figured this out for myself; it was my husband who picked up on it.

“Did something bad happen in your book today?” he asked me one day.

“Yes! How did you know?”

“Because you’re acting like it happened to you,” he said.

It was an embarrassing thing to admit to, but he was right. There was very little emotional space between my main character and me. Years ago, when I was interning at a magazine in New York, I lived in a Salvation Army residence in Gramercy Park. It was an old-fashioned hotel for ladies, much like the residence in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. The residence was filled with actresses who were studying at the Lee Strasberg School, which was nearby. I often came back in the evening to find them trying to stimulate memories and re-create emotions so they could bring these feelings to a part they were playing. I found the practice baffling but intriguing, and I borrowed books from them to try to understand the theory. This was how Strasberg described the Method approach to acting:

“The human being who acts is the human being who lives. That is a terrifying circumstance. Essentially the actor acts a fiction, a dream; in life the stimuli to which we respond are always real. The actor must constantly respond to stimuli that are imaginary. And yet this must happen not only just as it happens in life, but actually more fully and more expressively. Although the actor can do things in life quite easily, when he has to do the same thing on the stage under fictitious conditions he has difficulty because he is not equipped as a human being merely to playact at imitating life. He must somehow believe. He must somehow be able to convince himself of the rightness of what he is doing in order to do things fully on the stage.”

It made a lot of sense, intuitively, but it felt like an impossible task. Being a writer seemed simple by comparison: you just made things up. Only it didn’t quite turn out that way for me.

I wasn’t conscious of deliberately calling up memories to create realistic reactions until I’d written most of The Damage Done. I knew that Lily, the main character, was claustrophobic, but I hadn’t confronted that head-on. When I tried to write about her reaction to being locked in a room, none of it felt very convincing to me. I couldn’t relate to her until I was able to call up a memory of feeling powerless and trapped. For me, that happened while I was scuba diving in the St. Lawrence River, and I lost my dive buddy underwater. The visibility was low, and I had no idea whether she’d been swept away by a current, or if she’d sunk further down. I searched for her, getting more panicked as each minute passed. Rapid breathing uses up oxygen fast, and even though I could move in the water, I couldn’t see more than ten feet around me. I felt the weight of the water pressing on me, and I felt horribly, hopelessly trapped.

That was how I finally figured out how to write about claustrophobia.

I’m writing my third novel now, and I’d love to say that I’ve found a better way to work emotions into the book. But just the other day, I went outside and put up an umbrella, only realizing after that it was bright and sunny out. Of course, I’d just been writing about a place where it was raining.

Linda Fairstein

LINDA FAIRSTEIN, America's foremost legal expert on crimes of sexual assault and domestic violence, led the Sex Crimes Unit of the District Attorney's Office in Manhattan for twenty-five years. A Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, she is a graduate of Vassar College and the University of Virginia School of Law. Her first novel, Final Jeopardy, introduced the critically acclaimed character of Alexandra Cooper and was made into an ABC Movie of the Week starring Dana Delaney. The celebrated series has gone on to include several New York Times bestsellers. The 13th in the series, Silent Mercy, will be released in March. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her nonfiction book, Sexual Violence, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She lives with her husband in Manhattan and on Martha's Vineyard.

There is a wonderful grace period between the moment I finish the very last copy edit of my latest novel and the day it appears on shelves in libraries and bookstores.  I can’t do another thing to change the story or to correct words, down to the last typo, and no one has yet had a chance to post a snarky review or unpleasant comment.  I’m in that wonderful time warp right now, until SILENT MERCY bursts out of its boxes on March 8^th, so I am delighted to be back with Kaye and friends to reflect on one of my favorite aspects of the series I write.

There was never any doubt when I started to create characters that my protagonist would mirror the work that I did in New York City, where I was a sex crimes prosecutor for thirty years.  And I knew that I had a phalanx of great partners from the office and the NYPD with whom to surround her.  The other thing of which I was certain, as a lifelong devotee of crime novels and mysteries, is that I never liked stories that were simply shoot-outs or car chases.  I love closing a book after time well spent with interesting people having learned something as well – from Agatha Christie’s intense research into poisons or places to Michael Connelly’s dead-on depictions of police procedure.

I was well aware that one of the gifts of my long prosecutorial experience was the opportunity it provided to me to get beyond the façade of some of the most interesting places in the city.  The job often took me behind the scenes, helping me understand that even the most glittering and glamorous venues had some dark doings behind the fancy fronts, if one only scratched the surface.

My eyes were opened wide when a young woman doctor was murdered while working late one night in her office in a large city hospital, and I realized that the population of patients, staff, visitors, and vendors (food, laundry, supplies, florists and so) passing through Bellevue on a single day was larger than the populations of most towns in America.  That became the impetus for LIKELY TO DIE.   When one of the most upscale art gallery owners in the world was implicated in two gruesome murders – and his gallery was on the same floor of a building as my hair salon (!) – the grittier side of the art world became my learning curve for COLD HIT.  The most beautiful landmarked ruins in the city stand at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, and I drove past them on the way home from my office every night, where they were so elegantly back-lit against the dark sky.  Designed by the same architect who created the soaring St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue – James Renwick – most of us assumed they had been the palatial home of a wealthy baron a century ago.  A bit of research under my belt, I learned the stunning building had been a smallpox hospital, to which many New Yorkers were shipped across the river, never to return.  Instead, they wound up in THE DEADHOUSE, as the small morgue behind the grand structure was known.  And when I learned that there were 50 million human bones collecting dust on shelves in the fabulous Museum of Natural History – the first place almost every child in the city is taken to see dinosaurs and animal dioramas – I couldn’t understand why those people hadn’t been buried in their homelands, with their families.  The terrible history of our 19^th century obsession to collect and study the remains of ‘other’ cultures is what gave birth to such museums, originally called cabinets of curiosity.  And getting to tour four stories below the street, where there are endless shelves of jars full of insects and reptiles I wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley, the idea for THE BONE VAULT came to life.  When a violinist was killed between acts during a performance of the Berlin Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House, it seemed hard to believe that she could disappear with four thousand people sitting in their seats in front of the curtain.  Beverly Sills allowed me to come backstage to learn the ins and outs of Lincoln Center, which became the centerpiece of Coop’s sixth adventure in DEATH DANCE.

One of the questions I’m always asked in bookstores on tours is whether I worry about running out of material.  I’m quick to say that I can’t imagine that’s the case, in this city that is so rich with history, even in the few short centuries of its existence as a metropolis.  The more I write, the more someone points me in the direction of some other treasure with roots to the past, and a bit of evil I can probably uncover.

I have always been fascinated with – and respectful of – the great religious institutions of New York.  There are hundreds of them here, of every denomination, and it’s hard to walk a block or two without passing something – whether a very grand structure or a tiny neighborhood church.  I decided to explore some of those in SILENT MERCY.  The book opens on the steps of Mount Neboh Baptist Church, which is a well-established congregation in the heart of Harlem.  Once, when I was investigating a crime on a nearby street, I paused to walk inside the church.  I was startled to see a Star of David in the stained glass windows high above me, and inscriptions in Hebrew.  It didn’t take much to find out that like many other churches in Harlem, Mount Neboh was originally constructed as a synagogue, at a period in time when Harlem –before the 1920’s was a Jewish neighborhood.

As soon as I told friends the direction of my research, everyone had ideas of places for me to visit – some well-known, others more obscure.  I had often been to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, but never new that was an ‘original’ St. Patrick’s, built 200 years ago, when the center of the population of New York was way downtown, not far from the courthouse.  The old cathedral has been gloriously restored and was just dedicated as a ‘basilica.’  One night while speaking at an event for Sisters in Crime, when I mentioned the theme of the novel, a young woman raised her hand and asked me whether I knew the story of the stained glass windows at the old Cathedral.  (By the way, her name is Hilary Davidson – and she writes a wonderful crime novel herself – the first one just out last year is THE DAMAGE DONE).  Of course, you’ll have to read SILENT MERCY to find out exactly what Hilary told me.

So I’m back to scratching beneath the surface to find out more about New York’s buried treasures.  Wherever I go, I can’t stop plotting ways for Coop and Chapman to get the real story, above or below ground, and weave some interesting history into a lively tale.  I hope Kaye invites me back to tell you what I find.  Happy reading to all in 2011.