DEBORAH CROMBIE: One of the most fun things we get to do here on Jungle Red is to introduce debut authors. I was lucky enough to read Kim Hays' novel, PESTICIDE, pre-pub--here's what I had to say about it!
“Kim Hays brings a sparkling new voice to police procedurals, giving us engaging and realistically drawn detectives who struggle to balance their personal lives with the demands of a gripping investigation. Set against the fascinating backdrop of modern Switzerland, Pesticide will delight crime fiction fans--a standout debut for 2022!” —Deborah Crombie, New York Times-bestselling author of the award-winning Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novels
And how cool is it that PESTICIDE was shortlisted for the 2020 Debut Dagger award by the Crime Writers’ Association!!
It's also a very special treat to host Kim today as she's a regular JRW commenter!Here's Kim to tell us more about the challenges of writing from a cross-cultural perspective. Welcome and congratulations, Kim!
Conveying
Swissness
Last year I read a five-minute excerpt from one of my
mysteries at a writing workshop for English-language authors living in
Switzerland. By coincidence, I was the
only American—everyone else was British, and we’d never met before. The fictional
scene I shared was a confrontation between two young Swiss men at a dance club:
description, dialogue, action. When I finished, after a few polite mumbles,
someone in the audience announced, “It just doesn’t work.” “No, it doesn’t,”
someone else agreed. “But why?” There was a moment of silence, and then the
first speaker said, “I know what it is. It sounds too American.”
Now, if I’d had one of my Swiss say, “He really threw me a
curve ball,” or “You’re way out in left field, buddy,” I’d have understood the
criticism. Putting baseball slang into the mouths of Swiss is truly odd. But since
I hadn’t done anything like that, I couldn’t grasp why my audience was so
upset—until I realized what the problem must be. To my listeners, British
English wasn’t “British”—it was neutral, so it was what Swiss characters had to
speak to be acceptable. My English, being American, called attention to
itself, so it sounded bizarre.
This is just a small pitfall among the many traps waiting
for authors who, like me, write novels about people who speak a language and
inhabit a culture different from their own. I speak Swiss-German, I have Swiss
citizenship along with American, and I’ve lived in Bern, the city where Pesticide
takes place, for thirty-three years; my husband is a Swiss-German, and so
are most of my friends. But I didn’t grow up here. So now and then, I find
myself having to think hard about how to convey the Swissness of my characters
to my American readers. (My British ones clearly raise different problems, but Pesticide
is about to be published in the US, not the UK, so I don’t have to cross that
bridge yet.)
Swissness is a familiar concept to me. Before I started
writing novels, I worked fifteen years as a cross-cultural trainer for an
international relocation company. My job was to provide a cultural orientation
to non-Swiss employees who’d moved to Switzerland to work for multinational
companies like Kraft Foods or Johnson & Johnson. Whether my clients were Columbians,
Danes, or Indians, I spenT one or two days with them and their spouses, sharing
advice about living, working, and raising a family comfortably among the Swiss.
Because of this background in cross-cultural work, I had no
trouble coming up with generalizations about the Bernese when I decided to
write a book set in Bern. I’m aware that most Swiss-Germans truly are
exceptionally punctual; that they rarely take a stand on anything controversial
right away, because they need to consider all the possible consequences and get
everything right the first time; that they are often uncomfortable with
conflict; that they are very egalitarian but still formal (at least by US
standards) with people they don’t know well. Something else I have always respected
is how the Swiss cherish the magnificence of their landscapes—they never take
Switzerland’s natural beauty for granted.
But generalizations aren’t enough. The trick to portraying
appealing Swiss in a novel written for Americans is to give the characters a
certain amount of Swissness but not enough to keep them from being interesting
and distinctive individuals. This is easier said than done, and, whereas I
believe I’ve managed it, it’s my readers who’ll get to decide whether I’ve
succeeded. If I have, it’s probably with the help of one character in
particular: Renzo Donatelli.
Renzo is what we call a Secondo—someone perhaps born
and certainly raised in Switzerland but with parents who emigrated here as
adults. The word originally referred only to Italians (Switzerland’s biggest
immigrant group in the 1960s and 1970s), but now it’s used for anyone in that
second generation of immigrants. Secondos are assimilated. Most are bilingual,
many are double citizens, and quite a few, like Renzo in my Polizei Bern series,
marry Swiss spouses and feel at home with Swiss colleagues. But every once in a
while, they see a friend do something that strikes them as so quintessentially
Swiss and so completely not what they themselves would do that they have to
laugh or roll their eyes, even if it’s only afterwards, in private.
So in Pesticide, I use Renzo as a foil to convey the
attitude and behavior of a typical Swiss-German man. Most of them don’t
consider it second nature to be carefully turned out and fashionably dressed; nor
do they flirt good-naturedly with any woman who gives them the slightest signal
of interest. Swiss-German men are also unlikely to feel so attached to their parents
and siblings that they see their families often, not dutifully but with
pleasure. Renzo, by contrast, does all these things.
In other words, by presenting one character who embodies a
number of typical Italian values, I’m better able to highlight what makes another
character Swiss-German—without having to hammer anything about Swissness into
my readers’ heads.
So what about you, fellow writers? What goes through your minds while you’re creating non-American characters (something Rhys and Debs do all the time)? And you, readers? Do any examples occur to you of fictional characters who appear to represent another culture particularly well? Or badly? (They don’t have to be foreign—think of Jim Chee in Tony Hillerman’s books.)
Kim Hays lives in Bern with her Swiss husband, but she grew up in San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm as well as in the States. She’s worked at a variety of jobs, including forewoman in a truck-engine factory, freelance journalist, and lecturer in sociology. Pesticide is the first mystery in her Polizei Bern series; it was shortlisted for the 2020 Debut Dagger award by the Crime Writers’ Association. You can learn more about Kim, Bern, and Pesticide at www.kimhaysbern.com.
Here's more about PESTICIDE:
