Joseph Olshan on the story behind BLACK DIAMOND FALL

Photo by Todd Wolk

HALLIE EPHRON:  Meet Joseph Olshan, Vermont-based author whose mysteries are praised by reviewers as "literary," "evocative," and "bracing." Read the opening of his new novel, Black Diamond Fall, and you'll experience vicariously a ski run so compelling that it leaves you breathless. Joe is here today to talk about the true crimes, personal experiences, and great writers that inspire the mystery.

JOSEPH OLSHAN: On my way to do a book event yesterday, I was chatting with a friend of mine—perhaps the only person in the United States who teaches suspense and mystery writing in an MFA program.  And she said something to me that resonated: that if one decides to write within a mystery and suspense framework, then one can write about anything and the reader will follow. That trope is a perfect description of what I’ve been trying to embrace in my last two novels: Cloudland; and the recently published Black Diamond Fall—both of which are deeply personal, autobiographical works. 

Black Diamond Fall was galvanized by two unrelated events that occurred within a short period of time of one another in Vermont: the disappearance of a Middlebury College student, and the vandalism of the Robert Frost Homestead in the nearby town or Ripton.  Each of these occurrences became national news, and for a time before the student’s body was found, it was theorized that he might have been the victim of the Smiley Face murderers who’d been abducting and killing male college students nationwide; a smiley face was actually found painted on a warehouse in Middlebury near to where he disappeared.  

But this turned out to be a false lead. The young man, who was staying on the college campus during winter break, went for a walk after a particularly intense conversation with a friend.  He may have had a drink or two, and it seems that he fell down close to the Otter Creek, lost consciousness, and succumbed to the extreme cold. There was a search organized but he was never found.  Months later his body was discovered at the bottom of that river. It was never determined what might have set him off on that nightly stroll except that ultimately he was responsible for his own harm.

Paradoxically, if it had been proven that someone actually had accosted him, I might not have been drawn to writing a fictional account of his life.  It was his own missteps that drew me. They created a way for me to write about a short-lived very intense relationship I’d had, a relationship that because it was seamless and perfect in its brief life, never descended into the reality of the inevitable ups-and-downs of love.  And in writing about that relationship I was also able to write about what had been troubling me at the deepest level of my life: that I, as a fit, exercise-obsessed middle-aged man, was struggling with getting older as evidenced in these lines:

It was real life now, maybe even real love, named hours before in a sort of fever, a shiny token tossed into a deep well that still glimmered from far below. But Luc was gone by 8 a.m., and listening to his car drive away with a crushing sound of gravel, Sam felt terribly alone.

And so I created a man very similar to myself who gets involved in a secret relationship with a much younger man, and while the character based on me is out in Utah trying to prove himself on an extremely challenging off-piste ski run, the younger man is playing a game of pick-up pond hockey and after the game is over he suddenly disappears.

The greatest challenge of writing the novel was perhaps finding a way to write about the vandalism of the Frost Homestead.  I started the novel without knowing how I was going to link it to the disappearance. But then, as I went along an idea came to me: make the mother of the young man who vanishes a friend of the late poet, give her some connection to the Frost Farm.  I did this and then with a bit of imagining was able to conjure up a jaunty pair of blond dreadlocked body-builder twins who have a personal vendetta against Robert Frost and, therefore, a motivation for breaking and entering the homestead museum dedicated to his Vermont life. They, among several other people, come under suspicion for having a hand in the college student’s disappearance.

Lastly, I invented pair of detectives investigating both crimes, two seasoned professionals who, from the very beginning, suspect there is a link between them.  But how to bring these characters to life, especially investigator Nick Jenkins in whose point of view the novel at times comes to rest. And then it came to me that my detective should be the same age as my middle-aged male protagonist in whom he recognizes his own struggles with getting older, and, in an interesting twist, as a straight man in a dying marriage who comes to envy the intense passion of a gay man suspected of murdering his younger lover.  

Nobody has pointed this out yet, but I named the detective in Black Diamond Fall after the protagonist in Anthony Powell’s series of sequential novels called Dance to the Music of Times published in the 1950’s. My Nick Jenkins is a kind of homage to Powell’s Nick Jenkins, although admittedly my Jenkins has little resemblance to his, except, perhaps for sharing a kind of unvarnished earnestness.

Indeed, in all my suspense fiction I try and pay tribute to great writers.  In my last novel, it was Wilkie Collins and a forgotten manuscript that my narrator comes to own.  In Black Diamond Fall it’s Robert Frost’s life and his poetry that the mother of the missing college student turns to for solace.  And then placing all of it under the umbrella of Anthony Powell whose novels are so beautifully orchestrated that I have to believe they will be read forever.  

HALLIE: Wilkie Collins, Robert Frost, Anthony Powell; poetry and winter sports; true crime and true love.  Joe's sources for Black Diamond Fall reminded me of the quote, attributed to "Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed." 

Reds and readers, do you see echoes literary greats in the crime novels you love? Shakespeare? Steinbeck? Austen?