Before I was Cozy: Guest Post by Clea Simon

After three nonfiction books and 22 cozy/amateur sleuth mysteries, Clea Simon returns to her rock & roll past this fall with World Enough (Severn House), an edgy urban noir. She is also the author of four mystery series with cats in them, the most recent being the black cat-narrated As Dark As My Fur (Severn House) and the “pet noir,” When Bunnies Go Bad (Poisoned Pen Press). A recovering journalist, Clea lives in Massachusetts. She can be reached at www.cleasimon.com 

Clea Simon:
Before I was cozy… 

Back in the day, there was little that was cozy about my life. Sure, I had creature comforts, thanks to a part-time secretarial job that paid most of the bills., and even a long-haired grey cat whom I loved dearly. But what I needed for soul sustenance was loud, hard, and fast.

For the first few years, after I graduated from college, the local music scene was the center of my life. The clubs where bands played original music – the Rat, the Channel, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Storyville, among others – became my “third place,” not home, not work, where I could go. Through it, I found my tribe of friends and lovers. My first profession – as a music critic. More fundamentally, in the loud garage punk scene of ‘80s Boston, I found an outlet for the emotional turmoil I had grown up with in a family plagued by mental illness and dysfunction. The friends I made there understood this – many of them had similar stories – and the late nights were as often as not joyous celebrations of relief and release as expressions of pain or rage.

Perhaps it is the nature of things to change. At any rate, things did. The writing I was doing for music magazines led to more mainstream, more stable, jobs. The clubs I knew closed, the bands broke up, and between the need for more sleep and the pleasures of more secure relationships, I felt less of a need to learn the rhythms of new ones. The books that had been my salvation growing up ¬ – from C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Beatrix Potter to Lillian Jackson Braun and Rita Mae Brown – once again claimed center stage, and I rediscovered the joy of whimsy and mystery. I started writing cozies.

Granted, there was some overlap. My first cozy, Mew is for Murder, featured a freelance writer trying to establish herself as a music critic. Throughout the six books of that series, my heroine Theda Krakow’s sidekick was a purple-haired punk musician who calls herself Violet Haze. But in the 12 years and 16 other mysteries since, the music scene has receded. Granted, not all my books have been cozies – my editors usually prefer the term “amateur sleuth” and I’ve dubbed one series “pet noir” – but they’ve been gentle. No cursing, no overt sex. As the old saw goes, “the blood is dry before it hits the page.” And the music, when it plays, is secondary, no longer the life blood – the pulse – that it was.

Until now. For World Enough, I’ve created Tara Winton, a heroine who shares many characteristics with the woman I once was. Isolated, somewhat disconnected from her family and her past, back in the day Tara too found solace and a community of sorts in the clubs. Twenty years later, she’s not doing as well, though. She’s marking time with a boring corporate job and drifting emotionally, unable to move on from her divorce. Until, that is, she runs into an old friend – now the editor of a glossy city magazine – at the funeral of a former scenester, a bartender/bouncer who had settled down with a wife and kid before dying in what appears to be a freak accident.

Tara and her buddy start talking at the wake, and he throws her a lifeline – an assignment to write about the old scene. In particular, about a band – the Aught Nines – that should have been famous. That would have been – if only the singer hadn’t OD’d, twenty years before. That rising star had a tenuous connection to the man whose funeral they’ve just attended. In many ways, all the attendees are connected. And so it makes sense for Tara to start interviewing her old cohort. Her ex Peter and her best friend Min scoff at the assignment, but Tara is grateful for the chance to write again about something she cares about. To reconnect with a world that once meant so much.

That world is rife with drugs and sex. With petty rivalries and struggles for fame and attention. It is the world I once knew and still, in some part of me, love. It is not, in any sense, cozy. But it is a world that I was ready to revisit. A story that maybe, after 22 lighter mysteries, I finally had the discipline to explore, the skills to chronicle, and the will work into the larger plotline of a double-edged (and morally ambiguous) mystery.

Will there be others? At this point, I think so – though I am very much enjoying the playful feline-centric cozy that I’m working on now. Maybe it took this long for me to be able to go back and write about the club scene, to balance its attractions with its excesses and flaws. Maybe I needed the distance to be able to see what really happened. Or maybe I’ve simply reached the point where I can put on an old record – vinyl, even – and think, “Damn, that was something, wasn’t it?”

Authors and their Cats: Clea Simon: Putting the Kitty in the Crime Fiction

Today for Caturday, in addition to posting a photo of an Author with her Cat, I have a guest post from the wonderful and talented cat author, herself, Clea Simon. Clea wrote a post for Mystery Fanfare last summer -- On Writing: What Happens Next?  Simon is the author of several mystery series, including the Theda Krakow Mystery series, the Dulcie Schwartz feline series, and the Pru Marlowe pet noir series. She also publishes short stories and appears with regularity in several magazines. She has published three non-fiction books dealing with topics ranging from mentally ill siblings to the connection between women and cats. 

Clea Simon:

Putting the Kitty in the Crime Fiction

Why do I write books with cats in them? Honestly, it’s a mystery.

It’s not like I ever set out to write cat books – cat crime fiction, specifically. My first mystery (yes, Mew is for Murder) arose from a nonfiction book I’d written (ok, that was about cats too). I’d explored the phenomenon known as “animal hoarding” – aka, the “crazy cat lady” – and found myself considering how many suspects there would be if one of these hoarders were to be found dead. And now I can’t stop. Even though I’ve left cozy territory behind with my latest, The Ninth Life*, somehow every time I sit down to write, a feline appears. Twenty mysteries in, I’m almost resigned to it.

It’s not like I enjoy only cat-centered books. Even aside from my current required reading (books for a panel I’m moderating at Crimefest, a review assignment for my local paper), my taste runs to darker fiction, crime-related or not. (I just finished Ann Cleeve’s wonderful Silent Voices, which followed Alexander Chee’s intriguing, but not entirely successful, historical Queen of the Night).

Yes, I do have loads of cat books in the house (a current favorite, thanks to a generous friend, is the hilarious picture book, Fat Cat Art). And yes, I do have an actual cat – a little tuxedo kitty who goes by the name of Musetta – but as much as she likes to think she runs the household, I do not find that she narrates my books for me, although at times I wish she did. (As I pen this, I’m deep in revisions to the sequel to Ninth Life, and I really wish she would shoulder more of the load.)

Nor was it ever a conscious marketing ploy. I mean, if I had gone into this field for the big bucks, I’d be writing sexy, dangerous shoot-em-ups. Thrillers with car chases and explosions. Only when I hunker down by the computer, well, a little voice says, “mew.”

Maybe that’s it, after all. Maybe I write cats because they give voice to the other, less coherent impulses emanating from the back of my head. What does any sidekick do, after all, but reflect the protagonist’s musings back at her? Provide a little comic relief? And for someone who spends hours alone – well, alone except for a certain tuxedo cat – maybe it makes sense that when my characters need to air their innermost thoughts, they do so to (if not through) an animal character. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. I’ll let you know when the cats tell me.

*Really. The Richmond Times Dispatch said, specifically: “Unlike other catcentric mysteries — there’s nothing cozy here — it offers an unusual and satisfying take on contemporary noir.”

On Writing: What Happens Next? by Clea Simon

Today I welcome Clea Simon. This post is very timely, as I recented moderated a panel on Plotters vs Pantsers (a very odd term, indeed) at Kepler's Mystery and Thriller Saturday. If you're a writer--or a reader-- you'll love this article on What Happen's Next?

Clea Simon is the author of several mystery series, including the Theda Krakow Mystery series, the Dulcie Schwartz feline series, and the Pru Marlowe pet noir series. She also publishes short stories and appears with regularity in several magazines. She has published three non-fiction books dealing with topics ranging from mentally ill siblings to the connection between women and cats. The recipient of multiple honors, including the Cat Writers Associations Presidents Award, she lives in Massachusetts with her husband and their cat.

Clea Simon:
What Happen's Next? 

Readers often ask how we mystery writers plot. During panel discussions, this usually leads to a chat about “pantsers” vs. “plotters,” those who let the writing guide us as opposed to those who outline what will happen before the writing starts. But I don’t know if these readers are really asking about our process, per se. Whether they too are writers or are simply fans, reading for pleasure, I think they want to know something more basic. They want to know how we figure out what happens next. I wish I could give them an answer.

Sometimes, it’s easy. When a mystery is based on a real-life crime that case can provide at least a bit of path. My new mystery, Code Grey, is the ninth in my feline-filled academic series for Severn House. Because my protagonist is a graduate student writing her dissertation on 18th Century books, I try to keep up on what’s happening in rare books – and the case of the Girolamini library in Naples, Italy, did give me some ideas (though I won’t say which ones!).

More often, it’s not that simple. Even when there’s a solid spark to kick off the book, the questions begin early. Usually, I’ll start with an idea or a scene in mind. A troubled former scholar is found unconscious deep in an excavation, with a rare book tucked into his coat. He’s assumed to be homeless, only the book is in good condition – and it has been missing for thirty years. Where has it been? Who found him? Was anyone watching? Why does he have that book? Did he steal it or save it? And will he ever wake to tell us?

In short, what happens next?

To answer these questions, we ask ourselves the same questions readers do. And in the best cases, we – like our readers – let the story unfold for us. I know other writers have spoken about this, but I will say it again: Sometimes, the best times, the story tells us where it wants to go. I might write a scene in which Dulcie jumps down to help the scholar, but then I’ll stop. Dulcie will feel sympathy, for sure, but she’s not a jump-into-a-pit type. She’s an academic, a bookish girl who is not athletically inclined. And so I delete that passage and have her going for help … only on the way, she meets someone. Or hears something… or ….

Before I know it, the story has taken off on its own direction (and, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about that poor scholar. We’ll get him out of that hole somehow). By being true to my character, by letting Dulcie be Dulcie, the story takes on a life of its own. A life that, I hope, will be more realistic to my readers – will feel less manipulated, despite the odd ghost or benign feline spirit that haunts this particular series.

For the record, I’m a “pantser.” I rarely know exactly what will happen with my stories as I begin them. This means I have to do a lot more revision after the first draft is done. After all, the character who ends up being the murderer might seem like a nice guy in the first five chapters, but there ought to be some hint that he’s not, right? My books are somewhere along the cozy-traditional-amateur sleuth continuum, and part of my deal with my readers is that my books should function like a puzzle – a riddle they, too, can unravel if they read carefully. I’m not going to surprise anyone with an identical twin villain or a last-minute newcomer responsible for all the mayhem.

But I’ve spoken with enough of my colleagues to know that this kind of serendipity is not unique to pantsers. In fact, I’ve heard more than one plotter laughingly talk about crafting a detailed outline … and then throwing it out the window when a character refuses to go along with the program. Because ultimately we mystery authors are not concerned simply with producing the manuscript, despite the deadlines and waiting publishers. We don’t simply want to get the story written. We, too, want to know what happens next.