LUCY BURDETTE: Today I'm delighted to welcome Laurel Peterson to the blog. She doesn't only write novels, she writes poetry, and in fact spent three years as poet laureate of Norwalk CT. She's visiting today to chat about the inspiration for her new novel, The Fallen. I can't wait to hear the discussion...welcome Laurel!
LAUREL S. PETERSON: Thanks so much, Jungle Red Amazing Women for giving me a spot on your blog, and for doing so much for the mystery world. I’m so honored to be here.
Really, this millennium hasn’t been that great so far. We started off with 9/11, pitched into war in Iraq and Afghanistan, endured floods and multiple “once in a lifetime” hurricanes, watched the rise of political extremism, and now are in a pandemic. That’s why I love mysteries; there is always justice at the end. (True confession: I spent the pandemic rereading all my Dick Francis. Love! Horses! Justice! What more could a girl want when the world is falling apart?)
But back to the subject at hand. People ask where ideas come from, and sometimes it’s even possible to answer that question. The idea for my latest mystery, The Fallen, came from a number of places, but most centrally from the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, the anniversary of which we just “celebrated” with Hurricane Ida. We are now blessed with the technology to predict these monsters, which allows some crazy weatherperson to stand in the middle of it, soaked in his Channel 2 windbreaker saying, “Look at those waves,” thus giving us the horror and the thrill in real time. This is sort of like a mystery novel.
Katrina was the first of its kind in the U.S., not only destroying our sense of safety, but also our superficial sense of ourselves as an egalitarian nation. People of color already knew that, but when a group of Blacks trudged over the bridge in Gretna, everyone saw the fear in their white neighbors’ faces. We heard how police officers left town rather than serve, making it that much harder for those left to do their jobs. What would it be like to be a black officer in that situation, I wondered. What would be the long-term effects of living through that trauma? What if there were unfinished business, even years later?
From that came The Fallen, the story of a black police officer who moved to Connecticut to be chief in a small town. He is escaping his Katrina past, and the racism that damaged his career and his relationship with his family. Now, he is involved with Clara Montague, the protagonist of the first book in the series (Shadow Notes). She is a white woman. How can he explain what it was like to endure that storm? And how would he explain to his family that he’d fallen in love with a white girl? (Meanwhile, someone in his new town is shooting at him. So there’s that.)
Portraying a black man as a central character was a scary choice. The reaction to Lionel Shriver’s speech on cultural appropriation at the Melbourne Literary Festival made me wary of this territory. On the other hand, I wanted to see if I could imagine it fully enough to represent it honestly and truthfully—the trauma, the blackness, the policeman. I wanted to make my readers think while they were having a good time with the mystery.
Plus, mysteries are often about creating order, right? We are just beginning to emerge from that pandemic disorder, so being able to heal trauma in a piece of writing, if only a little, felt like a good kind of power. Mystery fiction permits us, at least temporarily, to believe that things will turn out all right. Maybe they will. You be the judge.
What are the risks you are willing (or not) to take in writing or in life? How do you approach ideas or characters that scare you?
Laurel S. Peterson lives and writes in Connecticut with her husband and dog. Find her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter or at www.laurelpeterson.com.
