HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: True royalty on Jungle Red today! I mean Laurie King, the queen of us all.
Somehow in my conflated fiction/reality brain I can begin to believe that Laurie actually knows Sherlock Holmes. I mean, personally. And if there’s any group in which I can say that without hoots of laughter, this is the place. Right?
She certainly knows Mrs. Hudson. Because listen to this: she also knows Mrs. Hudson is not at all what we were led to believe by Dr. Watson.
Laurie’s most recent Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes novel, Riviera Gold, finds the former housekeeper living amidst the millionaires and retired party girls in 1920s Monte Carlo.
Mrs. Hudson! How can it be?
Here’s the fabulous Laurie to tell us all about it. And a—whoo hoo—giveaway below!
THE FEISTY OLD LADIES
I once knew a pair of aged anthropologists, man and wife, known for their detailed and subtle reports on various African peoples. The papers, books, and academic degrees were all in his name—but no one seemed to remark on how unlikely it was that this eminent academic always managed to ingratiate himself into the women’s world with so little fuss.
Of course, he hadn’t. Instead, his diminutive English wife would leave him by the men’s fire to slip into the women’s quarters, admiring a baby here, stirring a pot there, soothing a fallen toddler, then settling down to needlework, conversation, and note-taking.
Invisible, subtle, all-seeing.
Similarly the grey-haired ladies of crime fiction, especially those Golden-Age women rendered “superfluous”—the actual term used in newspapers and government reports—by the deaths of the Great War. Miss Marple and Miss Climpson, like the widows Pargeter and Pollifax of the next generation*, pull out their knitting, fumble for their spectacles, don a look of wide-eyed innocence, and come out with questions that would make a man stammer and blush. Even Lord Peter Whimsy recognized what a terrible waste of talent this was.
One might think that a century later, with average life expectancy hovering near eight decades, the grey-haired lady detective might be coming into her own…
Well, no.
The feisty old lady has yet to have a #MeToo movement of her own, and is as blithely overlooked by society as ever she was.
But that doesn’t make her any less of a blast to write.
To be fair, the old lady I’ve been writing about this last year is not a detective, being far too occupied with beating crime off with a stick.
And though this femme d’un certain âge is more limited than the story’s 25-year-old protagonist when it comes to physical strength and quickness of step, she is compensated by the migration of strength upwards to her heart and her wits. A woman in her seventieth year has seen enough of life to know what matters and what—or who—does not. She knows when to go around barriers and when to confront them face-on, forcing an opponent into retreat. She knows how to bully and to charm, when to call on friends and when to strike out alone, when to warn and when to step back and let people make their own mistakes.
Writing an older woman also lets me put together scenes where the younger folk are as shocked—shocked, I tell you—by her uncompromising attitudes and her hitherto unseen skills as they are by the unexpected contents of her lingerie drawer.
Subversive, entertaining, colorful, and just a little thought-provoking: what more could a writer ask for, as she delves like an anthropologist into characters who keep her occupied for a year of writing? Especially when the writer is in her sixties herself. Role model, anyone?
But I’m curious: if you’re in the neighborhood of 70, is it what you imagined? And if you live far from that neighborhood, what do you think you’ll be like when you get there?
(*Miss Marple is a long-lived character by Agatha Christie; Miss Climpson is in two Dorothy Sayers novels; the Mrs. Pargeter series is by Simon Brett, and Mrs. Pollifax comes from Dorothy Gilman.)
HANK: Oh, what a fabulous question! Yes, I am in that precise “neighborhood” of seventy. Is it what I thought it would be? In absolutely no way. I always burst out laughing when anchorpeople talk about “senior citizens” or “elderly people” who then turn out to be younger than I am. And I realize, full well, that I have no idea what I look like to the rest of the world. I do have clothing that I have donated away because it’s “too young for me”—but that’s not a disappointing thing. And when we go to the movies—er, when we used to go to the movies—I would always remind the cashiers I was due for the senior discount.
How about you, Reds and readers? And a copy of RIVIERA GOLD to one super-lucky commenter!
RIVIERA GOLD
The Jazz Age has hit the Riviera when the world’s greatest detective—with her husband, Sherlock Holmes—arrive in Antibes during the summer of 1925. When Mary Russell steps ashore, she is astonished to find everyone from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Pablo Picasso there, baking in the sun. And among them, their long-time housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson. Mrs Hudson's racy past has already started to come out, but that doesn’t begin to explain the body of a beautiful young man in her front room…
Riviera Gold: June 2020. Excerpt, buy links, and book club extras are here.
