Some Thoughts on In-Person Research: Guest Post by Mark Pryor

Mark Pryor is the author of the Hugo Marston novels The Bookseller, The Crypt Thief, The Blood Promise, The Button Man, The Reluctant Matador, and The Paris Librarian, as well as the novels Hollow Man and Dominic. He has also published the true-crime book As She Lay Sleeping. A native of Hertfordshire, England, he is an assistant district attorney in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and three children. 

Mark Pryor:
Some Thoughts on In-Person Research 

I initially titled this article, “The Importance of In-Person Research,” but I am always wary of writers who lay out their practices and procedures and suggest every author needs to adopt them. In fact, when asked the only good piece of writing advice I give is: do what works best for you. Also, the original title doesn’t really work if you’re writing about Mars or Atlantis, or 17th century Belgium, since you’re not doing much in-person research. I assume…

So, maybe this should really be called: Why in-person research is important to me, and why it might be good for you to do it, but please don’t feel obliged. Hmm, accurate enough if not all that snappy…

Anyway.

I go to the places that I write about for several reasons. The first is that I like to travel, and so do my wife and kids. Setting a book in a new place, then, is the equivalent of packing a bag—once I’ve done it, we’re going! (I have friends who set their books in east Texas and rural New York. Truly wonderful books, but hardly the most exotic research jaunts!)

Another reason is that for my series, I try to make the place another character: it throws up obstacles to my detectives, and provides flavor and atmosphere for the reader to enjoy. Now it’s true, I can find locations and street names online, I can be geographically accurate that way but, if I did all my research that way, I’d miss this (true story):

I was walking in Paris to meet my mum at the train station. A fairly drab part of Paris, nothing for the tourists to enjoy really. But then I turned the corner into a short but wide pedestrian street that sloped gently uphill. The tarmac gave way to cobbles, and on either side the street was lined with small stores. A cheese shop to my right, and beside it a bakery. Across the way the proprietor stood in the doorway to his little restaurant smoking a cigarette, perhaps waiting for customers or maybe just someone to chat with. I looked ahead, past the flower stalls, as a pretty girl on a bicycle free-wheeled towards me, her hair, scarf and coat fluttering in the wind behind her, a smile plastered across her face as she and the rolling suitcase she was pulling bounced across the cobbles and past me.

It was a perfect moment, and one that went straight into a book, a moment I’d never get from Google maps.

Another one: in the old town of Barcelona the small, winding streets are lined with shops, cafes, and restaurants. Most of them are roughly the same size and fronted with large, square windows that are protected during closing hours by metal shutters that are pulled down to the ground. When they’re down, you have absolutely no idea what the business is behind them, it could be a toy shop, a perfumery, or a hat store. Those shutters are very often covered in graffiti, but more often than not quite beautifully, delightfully expressive artwork of all colors and styles.

And so one October morning, as I walked through Barcelona’s narrow and ancient streets, I had the sensation that I was strolling through an advent calendar, these colorful square shutters scrolling up and open to reveal some new delight I couldn’t have guessed at. Again, that’s something you can’t get from the kind of moment-in-time snapshot an internet map would give you.

To me, it’s not just Notre Dame or the Eiffel Tower that give Paris its unique ambience. It’s also these little moments, a glimpse into someone’s day or a passing mail van with a message stenciled on its side: Smile. There could be a love letter for you inside! I mean, could that be anywhere but Paris? And how would I know about it, how would I see it if I don’t go there in person?

Ah, yes. You’re right. I do have a trip to plan. Merci beaucoup!

Mark Pryor’s The Sorbonne Affair (Seventh Street Books) hit the shelves last week.

Camille Lerens: Guest post by Mark Pryor

Mark Pryor is the author of the Hugo Marston novels The Bookseller, The Crypt Thief, The Blood Promise, The Button Man, and The Reluctant Matador, and the stand-alone Hollow Man. He has also published the true-crime book As She Lay Sleeping. A native of Hertfordshire, England, he is an assistant district attorney in Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and three children. The Paris Librarian (Seventh Street Books) will be out August 9, 2016.

Mark Pryor:
Camille Lerens
 
The question has been posed to me in several ways, by numerous people, and with varying degrees of politeness: how and why did I create a transgender French police Lieutenant for my Hugo Marston series, and did doing so cause me any concerns?

Allow me to explain, using geraniums and pastries as props.

My first novel, The Bookseller, is set in Paris during the winter, and at one point my protagonist Hugo Marston is wandering the streets and enjoying the old buildings, appreciating the hotels with their window boxes that “spilled red geraniums.” Later in the story, Hugo takes a trip to the Pyrenees Mountains where he enjoys a nice meal followed by a crème patisserie layered with strawberries.

A year or two after the book came out, I received an email from a reader who said she’d enjoyed the story and characters very much, but she felt the need to point out two things: that geraniums don’t flower in the winter, and one can’t get strawberries in the Pyrenees in winter.

On that second point, I phoned my dear old mum who lives in the very village Hugo visited and asked whether that was true, whether she could get strawberries during winter.

“Can I buy strawberries here?” She was confused by the question. “Yes, but I’m sure it’d be easier for you to buy your own, rather than me send you some,” she said. “They’d be mushy by the time they got to Texas.”

“No, mum, I meant do they sell strawberries there in winter? If you want some, can you get them?”

“It’s not 1950 here, you know. Of course you can, they’re just a bit more expensive,” she said. “Why are you asking silly questions?”

I emailed my reader back and politely pointed out the availability of fresh fruit in the Pyrenees. Ever the gentleman, I declined to point out that many of the geraniums in Paris’s window boxes are fake. Pretty, but fake.

All of this is to say that I hesitated before I created the character of Camille Lerens because I knew that if I got her wrong, there would be consequences.

I hesitated a lot.

You see, there’s an old writers’ saw that says, “Write what you know.” It’s obviously a recommendation and not a rule but generally speaking it’s a good one. It doesn’t mean, by the way, that you should only write about things you already know. I take it to mean that if you can research a subject or visit a place to give your story authenticity, that’s just fine. Plastic flowers and strawberries in winter? Check.

But a transgender, black police woman ain’t no bowl of strawberries. Characters are people, not mere places or objects, and for a book to convince and charm its readers the characters have to be real. I didn’t want to create a character I couldn’t make real, I couldn’t do justice to. And on a topic like this, there was a lot of room to not just get it wrong but to get it insultingly wrong.

But I also wanted to create a book, or series of books, that reflect the changing world around us—I gave my first Paris detective a Spanish name, because Europe today is more of a melting pot than ever. I made Hugo’s first love interest a confident, professional woman because, as my mother pointed out, this isn’t the 1950s.

This wasn’t enough, though, because I realized that with just one exception, all of my major characters in that first book were middle-aged white guys. So sure, the characters themselves might seem real but they lived in a world that was pretty homogenous. Take a look around, I told myself, that world is long gone. And yet I stuffed my book with… middle-aged white men.

Including the bad guy.

I introduced Camille Lerens in the third novel, The Blood Promise, after the untimely demise of her colleague (no names, no spoilers, but I’ll admit I even surprised myself!). Right there and then it seemed like a good time to change things up a little. We hear about the need for diversity a lot in today’s world and I agree that it’s important. Important in books, too, and by bringing Camille into that novel I now have wonderful dose of diversity for the series. But why specifically her, the way she is?

There’s a reason, sure enough. You see, the older I get, the more keenly I become aware of how lucky I am. With my writing career, my legal career, with my family and friends. Sure, I worked hard to get here but I’ve had help along the way. And there’s one thing I’ve not had to deal with, ever: discrimination. (Apart from the time a criminal defense lawyer filed a motion to prevent me using my English accent in trial! (http://www.daconfidential.com/2009/10/i-say-tom-ah-to-you-try-to-stop-me.html.))

The combination of good fortune and my realization that others aren’t as lucky have combined for the past fifteen years or so to make me strive to understand people who are different, either through choice or by dint of nature. I’m as straight as an arrow but I’ll fight for anyone in the LGBT community. I’m as white as snow, but heaven help you if you utter racist slurs in my presence.

Which is all to say that writing Camille Lerens is a way to understand a different world view. To explore it. For me, yes, but also a way to subject my other cis-gendered characters to someone different from them. And this isn’t a purely political exercise, not at all. In every book I strive to put my protagonist Hugo in situations that test him in one way or another. Maybe physically, maybe mentally, maybe emotionally. For a straight Texas male to come across, and have to work with, a black transgender cop was a reminder to him, as well as to me and my readers, that the world is changing in wonderful ways and welcoming that change moves us all forward.

In talks and at book signings I often describe Hugo as a “fish out of water,” a cowboy-boot wearing Texas lawman on the streets of Paris. And any story is enhanced, I think, by that concept of a character not just fighting the bad guys but fighting a part of himself, striving to find himself in his new location. Camille Lerens was a fish out of water for much of her life, right up until she was able to live as herself, realize her true self. I like that she can do that on the pages of my books, with good people like Hugo, Tom, and Claudia to support her.

Not that she should get comfortable.

Camille’s predecessor learned that in crime fiction anything can happen at any time, which means that no one is ever completely safe from the knife or the bullet. Oh no, because as much fun as I have with my gaggle of good guys, I really love dreaming up the wicked characters and when it comes to carrying out their evils deeds, Hugo, Tom, and Camille need to understand that they don’t discriminate either.