Mary and Eric, your unusual writing duo has
been very successful indeed, with over 12 published mysteries. Although
ONE FOR SORROW is your first full-length novel, it might make it
your 13th co-authored mystery. I'm intrigued as much as our readers. How
and when did this writing relationship get started?
Eric
Mayer: Our writing relationship originated with a mystery story I
mentioned to Mary over the telephone, which I described as an "open tent"
mystery as opposed to the typical "closed room" mystery. For about two
years, she kept encouraging me to write it, but I never did. After we were
married and I couldn't avoid her, she forced me to sit down and hash it
out with her. It became our first co- authored piece and was sold to
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. That was "The Obo Mystery", the first of
the Inspector Dorj mysteries, set in modern day Mongolia. The latest Dorj
story entitled Death on the Trans Mongolian Railway will
appear in the March 2000 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine.
In this duo, who does what? How are tasks
divided?
Eric Mayer: We both do a little of
everything from the researching through the plotting and the writing. We
have a lot of discussions about plot and clues and characters. One of
Mary's ideas might set me off on a chain of thought I wouldn't have had
otherwise, and vice versa. So at the end of it all it is really impossible
to say who was responsible for what. In fact we have been known to get
into debates over the authorship of certain bits after a story appears,
with neither one of us being able to remember writing a particular
sentence or a paragraph.
During the actual writing process we
usually work separately on individual scenes, then weld them together and
rewrite as necessary. I have a tendency to take stuff out while Mary
usually adds. Apparently we manage in this way to blend our quite
different styles, because no one has mentioned noticing big stylistic
differences within the completed stories.
How has this
relationship grown and evolved over the years?
Eric
Mayer: In the beginning the idea was for Mary, who had had some
stories in Ellery Queen and elsewhere, to give me some pointers about
mysteries and to convince me to write that "open tent" mystery I'd been
talking about.
But when that resulted in a sale and subsequently
Mike Ashley asked us to contribute a historical mystery to an anthology he
was editing, it just seemed natural for us to collaborate again -
especially since I had some ideas about a Byzantine setting but no mystery
idea. That resulted in our first John story and so we just kept at it.
Over the years we've probably come to divide the work more equally, with
both of us working on all the elements, rather than one of us supplying
background and the other the mystery, although Mary is still the final
authority on clues!
Mary Reed: Eric's much better at evoking
atmosphere and background color.
Explain how a historical
mystery differs from a traditional mystery.
Eric
Mayer: A regular mystery already differs from non mystery fiction in
that the writer has to cope with an extra component - the mystery - which
necessitates putting in clues, making sure the clues are fair and
intelligible, etc. In a historical mystery you have to add historical
background besides. It can be difficult to fit in period details and
clues, and yet still keep the plot going and pay attention to the
characters.
In addition, the mystery should, I think, be rooted
somehow in the historical period, else why not have your private eye
roaming the alleys of modern day New York rather than Constantinople in
535 AD? But you have to be especially careful to play fair with the
reader. Even in modern day mysteries it can be a difficult question,
deciding how much the reader must be told and what you might expect a
reader to know. In a modern mystery, for example, a reader could be
expected to have a rough idea of how long it might take a suspect to get
from New York City to Los Angeles using various forms of transport. But
how long did it take to get from the Golden Horn to Antioch 1,500 years
ago?
You need to give the reader of an historical mystery all the
historical details required without, hopefully, red flagging the clues as
such!
Mary Reed: And, naturally, you have to make sure the
historical details are correct.
How much research does one
of your novels require?
Eric Mayer: Lots, though it would
be hard to quantify. Sometimes enormous amounts of time can be taken
verifying very small points. For example, at one point in our writing, a
question arose as to whether the Romans of Justinian's time ate swordfish.
We had just mentioned swordfish in passing, since you can find them in the
Mediterranean. Well, we never were able to find a source saying that
swordfish were or not on the menu back then. After much fruitless
research, we ended up taking out the passing reference. Which is why John
at one point has to eat plain old, probably tasteless, generic fish
instead of the swordfish he would've preferred, had it actually been
available at the time.
But the first person who can give us a
source proving that people in Constantinople ate swordfish in 535 AD will
receive an autographed copy of ONE FOR SORROW.
In my mind,
all the historical details have to be worked out before beginning, whereas
Mary prefers to dive into the story and worry about adding the details
later. I'm pretty sure Mary's way is the preferred method but mine makes
an excellent excuse for procrastination.
Is the Internet
helpful for your work?
Eric Mayer: It’s enormously
useful. There's a wealth of academic material out there. But Mary is the
real search wizard.
Mary Reed: As far as research goes, and
some of it goes far off into the cyber woods, I must admit that I really
enjoy the thrill of the chase, hunting down that elusive fact or an expert
who can provide the needed information.
You now have a
following of dedicated readers with high expectations. Is this difficult
to live up to?
Eric Mayer: Speaking for myself, I
wrote for more than twenty years with nothing to show for it but rejection
slips (aspiring and discouraged authors take note) - so I still find it
hard to believe that I'm finally doing something right. I once read that
"Ten years of rejection slips is nature's way of saying you can't write",
and I think I took it to heart. Strangely enough, getting published has
actually made the writing process somewhat more difficult for me. With
that background of rejection it is rather frightening to realize that I'm
expected to come up with something good. It’s much easier to write
something you expect no one but a slush pile editor to glance at
anyway.
On the other hand, though the process might be a little
more difficult, there is much, much more incentive to
persevere.
Mary Reed: Trying to provide interesting
mysteries to puzzle over is always a challenge, and we hope that folks
enjoy reading them as much as we enjoy writing them.
What
challenges do you face daily when working on a novel
together?
Eric Mayer: After a while it becomes
difficult to think of new places to hide dangerous kitchen
cutlery.
Mary Reed: It’s been somewhat easier to write
together since we agreed that whichever of us has a strong opinion with a
particular scene gets the final word on whether it should be included,
changed, moved to another part of the story or just thrown
out.
What advice would you give to an aspiring
writer?
Eric Mayer: Never give up. Don't take rejection to
heart. Editors like to give reasons for rejections in terms of
professional evaluation. Mostly it’s a matter of personal opinion. Often
the difference between being published and unpublished depends upon the
manuscript falling into the hands of the right individual. And finding a
talented co-author.
Mary Reed: Getting a manuscript into the
hands of the right individual sometimes happens in a strange way. One of
the first non-fiction pieces I sold concerned the British custom of swan
upping. Each summer, along a particular stretch of the River Thames, all
the wild swans are captured temporarily to have their beaks nicked with a
very slight mark. This is done to donate ownership - since all of the
swans belong either to the reigning monarch or one of two guilds in the
city of London. The second editor who saw that article happened to raise
swans as a hobby, and so he bought it.
Swans may not always fly to
one’s rescue. Breakthrough to publication takes time, so patience is
important. And, as Eric says, be persistent - it will keep you writing
when the first rejection slips arrive. Try to remember that the editor is
not rejecting you personally, but rather your work. Quite possibly the
next editor will love it - or the editor after that. If you've already
managed to beat my personal record of a dozen rejection slips in 48 hours,
you're also going to need a solid sense of humor! Refusing to take the
hint, I sent all the articles out again and all but one finally saw
publication.
Meanwhile, write, write, write, and then write some
more.
What next? What are your forthcoming
projects?
Mary Reed: Alas, there are but a certain
number of waking hours in a day and unfortunately we've got to devote a
few of them to other work. But we're currently hard at work on TWO FOR
JOY, the next novel about John, which Poisoned Pen Press will publish
this autumn. And we're still writing the odd - and some are very odd -
short story now and then. For example, John's fifth short adventure
appeared in Maxim Jakubowski's second Ellis Peters Memorial anthology,
Chronicles of Crime, published late last year in the UK.
We'd also
like to do a collection of stories about John sometime, and we've been
thinking about a novel featuring Inspector Dorj, but right now we're
devoting all our writing time to John.
We will be launching our own
bimonthly e-newsletter in February 2000. To receive it, simply send us a
note via email.
Any
closing thoughts or comments?
Mary Reed: Although
we'd write even if our only reader was our cat, we are very grateful to
Poisoned Pen Press for the opportunity to tell our stories to a wider
audience. The press made its debut in l996 because of concern about major
publishers' shrinking mid-lists, a trend affecting readers as well as
authors. In l998 our path crossed with PPP's, and the rest is history, or
in our case historical fiction. The world is full of surprises. We only
hope the same can be said of our writing!
Eric Mayer: ONE
FOR SORROW is set during a somewhat unfamiliar time period. Although
Mary and I certainly maintain some sense of humor when we write, we have
also adopted a less modernized and more realistic approach than seems to
be the current trend in historical mysteries. We have tried to capture the
feel of a distant time period, rather than dressing it up in
television-age trappings. I wonder if a major publisher would’ve been
willing to buck the trends with such a book. But thanks to Poisoned Pen
Press, the book is out in the marketplace as an alternative and has done
extremely well already.
Eric and Mary: In closing, we'd like
to thank our readers for accompanying us this far along the literary road.
There's still a long way to go, with many tales to tell, and hopefully
when we reach the next crossroads, they won't rush off one way as we
trundle down the other.