With the recent publication of my 30th novel, The Corpse with the Steely Gaze, I’ve been thinking about the significance of that number. Do you remember your 30th birthday? (Or what do you hope it might look like if you haven’t reached it yet?) I hope it was/will be a good day for you. They say that your 30th birthday represents a significant milestone: the beginning of your mature years, when you begin to glimpse the fruits of your labours, but still have the chance to build the life you really want to live. I hope the same can be said for one’s 30th novel.
My 30th birthday? I dined at a restaurant in London called La Brasserie. It’s gone now, but I managed to give it a decent mention in The Corpse with the Granite Heart, when I sent my protagonist, Cait Morgan, there with her husband, Bud Anderson, and allowed them to enjoy a wonderful meal. And that’s just one example of how my own real life has found its way into my works of fiction, albeit in an altered version.
And that’s one of the things that’s really caused me to pause as I reflect on the thirty spines on my bookshelf: how much of me do they contain? How much of my life story will be passed along, without readers even knowing it? And the answer is...a surprising amount. Do I regret pouring my soul onto the page in my work? Not really, though I have been somewhat selective in terms of what I’ve left out, and of the people to whom I have “gifted” certain experiences, or emotions. If anyone knows me – the entire me – they’ll see a great deal of my life story playing out across the thousands of pages and millions of words. However, I hope that readers are, instead, able to relate to characters who are weak, but can be strong; who have flaws, but also the courage to stand up for their convictions; who grapple with moments of great turmoil, but manage to find a resolution within themselves.
The other thing I’ve been reflecting on is the nature of the hundreds of people I’ve now created who are real to me, and I hope they are to my readers, too. Some have appeared in just one book, others have recurring roles, and many have stuck around for more than a dozen titles. Given that I write murder mysteries I’ve had to create many of them in such a way that they appear to contain within themselves, somehow, the potential to be a killer, which has had me reaching into my training as a psychologist every single writing day, to make sure I’m creating a person on the page who could exist in real life, and become a potential suspect. And do you know what they all have in common? Nothing.
Agatha Christie got one of her characters to note the fact that all murderers have friends, family, or acquaintances, all of whom might never be able to believe that the person they knew had done such a thing (I’m paraphrasing wildly here). That’s something that echoes for me as I create those who might have dunnit as well as those who did: they are all “normal” people. But at least one of them did something so abnormal that a life that was once being lived has now been ended in an unnatural way, so I build the personalities of the characters I create to allow the genesis of that terrible deed to be “understandable”. Do I always want my readers to feel sympathy for the killer? No. But I want them to at least be able to empathize with them...to be satisfied they understand why what happened, happened. Of course, I temper that with the fact that almost all of the people I create who “might have dunnit”, didn’t – which just goes to prove that taking a life is not the solution to a problem that most would, or should, choose, which I believe is a critical point to make within my work.
What will happen in all the books I have yet to write? I have no idea. I don’t even know how many more there will be. I admit that I’ve always been a storyteller, long before my first mystery was published, so I dare say the desire to tell tales that, hopefully, engage won’t leave me any time soon, though the discipline it takes to actually get those 80,000 to 100,000 words in the right order to do just that becomes more of a challenge with each book.
So this is my “Thank You” to all those who’ve chosen to read some, or even all, of my “first thirty books”: I hope you were entertained and satisfied by them, were engaged by the people and places I created within them, and – even if you weren’t aware of it at the time – I really hope you had fun meeting a little bit of me along the way.
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Author of the traditional Cait Morgan Mysteries, and the cosy WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries set in Wales, Cathy Ace was born and raised in Wales, and migrated to Canada. She's a past Chair of Crime Writers of Canada, and is a Bony Blithe, IPPY, IBA and Editor’s Choice CrimeFictionLover Award winner.
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