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Featured Author -
November 2005
Robert Lopresti |
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Featured Author -
November 2005
Robert Lopresti |
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LIKE A GLUTTON AT A FREE BUFFET
I wrote my first mystery story when I was in library school. You might say I was trying to start two careers at once.
I quickly found it was easier to make a living as a librarian than as an author, and the biblio biz has paid for the writing hobby ever since. Usually the two sides of my life co-exist peacefully, but sometimes they can interfere with each other. Because sometimes even an author of fiction has to do research.
So what’s the problem, you may ask. Don’t librarians enjoy research?
Well, yes. That’s the point. Because as someone said, you never finish research; at some point you just give up.
And reference librarians hate to give up. We know better than most people that there’s always another book, another database, another website to try. It’s like giving a kid the key to a candy shop or taking a glutton to a free buffet and saying “stop when you’ve had enough.”
The problem, in other words, is that eventually you have to stop looking and start writing.
Consider my mystery novel, SUCH A KILLING CRIME, just out this fall and available at finer bookstores everywhere. It is set in Greenwich Village, 1963, the high water mark of the folk music revival.
Well, you see the problem. I knew where to start, but where do you stop? I read all the issues of Sing Out! and Broadside, the folk music magazines of the time. I went to the New York newspapers and discovered that all the dailies were on strike that year. The weekly alternative Village Voice was the newspaper of record, so to speak.
I interviewed several people who were there and lived through the times, including the great songwriter Tom Paxton, who permitted me to include him as a character. (He gallantly offered to be the murderer, but I had to regretfully inform him of his innocence.)
That was enough to give me the structure of the book but I kept finding wonderful details I had to wedge in. For example:
One trick about being a writer and a librarian is that your employer may frown on you doing your own research on company time. I try to keep them separate, but sometimes things just leap out at you.
For example, when I was working in New Jersey I learned in a government document about a small community in the southern part of the state called Mauricetown. The interesting point is that the name is pronounced just like Morristown, the much better known city in the north.
“Hmm,” I thought. “An outsider wouldn’t know that, but a local, like my Atlantic City private eye Marty Crow, would.”
The resulting tale, “The Federal Case,” was Marty’s first appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. And the only research I had to do there was figure out the road Marty would take to Mauricetown.
Another story that made it to Hitchcock’s was “Snake In The Sweetgrass,” which is told from the viewpoint of an elderly Kentucky fiddler. I used three sources to get his voice right. One was the Foxfire books, which are mostly transcriptions of interviews with older residents of Appalachia. From them I took the flat tone a lot of the speakers used for framing dialog.
I also borrowed a book from another library: Mountain Range by Robert Hendrickson. This dictionary of Appalachian vocabulary gave me wonderful expressions like “between hay and grass,” which means someone who is not quite grown.
Not long after writing the story I read Big Ugly, a novel by William F. Weld and discovered that that former governor of Massachusetts had apparently looked in the same reference book as I did, because his West Virginia character used some of the same terms as my fiddler.
Oh, I said I used three sources for my fiddler’s language, didn’t I? The third source was my imagination.
Because no matter how much you love research, if you’re a fiction writer, sooner or later you have to make things up.
ROBERT LOPRESTI works in a library in Washington state. His latest story is in the December issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. His novel, SUCH A KILLING CRIME, is available from Kearney Street Books. His website is tinyurl.com/6rcqo
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But the most frustrating thing about research is the knowledge that, no matter how much you do, you’ll probably still make mistakes, and someone will be there to point them out. On the first day my novel was on sale someone cheerfully told me of a geographical error on page 5. There was quite a crowd around, so I didn’t kill him.