RHYS BOWEN: Jungle Reds are so excited today to celebrate the launch of Laurie King's new book,
BACK TO THE GARDEN! And she's here today to visit us and give us insights into this new venture.
I'm sure, like me, you're all big fans of Laurie's work. I'm addicted to Mary Russell.
Well--exciting news, everyone. This book is so different from Holmes and Russell. It's a thriller/suspense novel set in two time periods--the San Francisco area in the 1970s and the present. So 1970s now counts as historical, right? The book introduces a new protagonist--Inspector Rachel Laing, a tough broad!
So without further ado:
RHYS: This book is quite a departure for those who love Mary Russell. What was your motivation to write a tense, more contemporary thriller?
LAURIE: I like to change things out regularly, when it comes to writing. If I don’t, I find that I’m doing increasingly awful things to my series characters. (Whether this is due to writerly instincts or some unconscious and pathological urge to hurt the people I love, I couldn’t say.)
A lot of writers are happy to work with the same characters year in, year out. Others of us—like you, Rhys—need to explore different settings, voices, and moods. We have stories to tell that don’t fit within the limitations of a given series. Writing about Mary Russell and her mentor-turned-partner Sherlock Holmes gives me wide scope when it comes to where they go and what issues they face, but there is always an underlying degree of whimsy that would strain a tense and realistic plot to the breaking point.
Plus that, writing a book such as Lockdown (2017) or Back to the Garden lets me return to Russell & Holmes with added enthusiasm. And less of an urge to hurt them….
RHYS: This story is clearly set in an area you know and love in Northern California (therefore delightful for me to read as I too know it well ). The Gardener estate—is it based on a real house? Heart Castle?
LAURIE: The Gardener Estate is very very roughly based on Filoli, a historic house and garden 25 miles south of San Francisco. My fictional estate is in more or less the same place, and it has a vaguely similar history, architecture, and grounds, but I didn’t want to be limited by the real thing. (In another life, I might have been an architect…if I’d had any math and geometry skills at all.) And you’re right, the Gardener Estate is indeed similar to Hearst Castle in its era and in the ambitions of an owner aiming to build a power base.
RHYS: Tell us about Raquel Laing, where she came from. Is this designed to be a stand-alone or may we see Inspector Laing in more adventures?
LAURIE: As I wrote Inspector Laing, I was surprised, and amused, to find strong elements of Sherlock Holmes settling into her bones, from an extraordinary ability to spot and analyze key elements in an investigation to a nature that might generously be called “aloof.” Yet she’s also a cop, and the police only function as a communal enterprise. That pull creates some interesting tensions, in her and in her work.
Back to the Garden is definitely the first in a new series. I admit that when I first started writing the story, I thought of it as standing alone, only to realize how much more I wanted to know about the characters. Fortunately, my publisher agrees!
RHYS: Real life serial killers—there certainly were a lot of them in the 1970s in our part of California. To what do you ascribe that? Are there really cold cases, serial killers still never caught?
LAURIE: So bizarre, isn’t it, to think of peaceable “Surf City, USA” Santa Cruz (my home town) as a place infected with murders? But it was, back in the 70s, with one spree killer and two serial killers all within the same period. It was that time that changed how the FBI investigated deaths that seemed to be unrelated, leading to nation-wide forensics units, a data base of criminal information such as fingerprints and DNA, and an encouragement of inter-agency communications, all of which together catch killers.
Estimates of how many serial killers are working today vary hugely, from a tiny handful to a couple thousand. And those who simply stop, such as Dennis Rader (“the BTK killer”) and Joseph DeAngelo (who gave rise to three separate nicknames), are the hardest to identify—DeAngelo’s crimes ran from 1976 to 1986, but he was only caught in 2018, in part because he was a cop and knew how to avoid detection. Others, as you say, will probably never be caught, or only identified after they are dead.
RHYS: What strikes me after reading this book is how multi-layered it is. As well as the mystery/thriller aspect we have underlying themes of wealth, corruption, the Vietnam war, etc. What was your aim in writing the story?
LAURIE: One of the joys of crime fiction is that it can be about anything, so long as the story moves forward exploring the crime. And like a lot of mystery writers, I revel in the possibilities for being subversive, slipping in ideas, facts, or episodes from the past that linger in the reader’s mind.
The best mystery novels—the best novels, period—open a door into an unexplored world of riches. On the one hand, my only aim is to entertain, creating interesting people and sending them off on a satisfying adventure. But if the reader closes the book reluctantly, suspecting that there might have been more on the pages than what they saw, well, I’ve done my job.
RHYS: did you write this planning that the garden would be a symbol? For healing? Beauty? Secrets?
LAURIE: The idea of “garden” does get a lot of play in this story, doesn’t it? The family name, the actual garden, the way changes in the estate’s identity are reflected in its garden—from a formal stage for a family out to establish a political dynasty in the 30s to a 70s commune’s joyous celebration of organic vegetables to a modern setting for tourists and wedding parties. There is also the theme of the garden of Eden, a place of innocence with a serpent in the background—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel are glimpsed throughout. And of course, the title itself, evoking Joni Mitchell and the Woodstock era.
A person might almost think the author enjoyed gardening.
RHYS: Did you find it a challenge to write in two time periods?
LAURIE: Any cold case story has to choose how to weave together its then-and-now timelines. What you want—as a reader and as a writer—is two stories that come together as one, even if they’re separated by many decades.
I also wanted the reader to see events as they happened, from the point of view of the people experiencing them at the time, with details that might be peripheral to the actual investigation. Weaving “THEN” and “NOW” together, so that the reader learns things more or less simultaneously with the investigator, allowed me to give the cops the facts that they need to know, while filling in the wider picture for the reader’s deeper understanding.
Which was, as you say, was a challenge.
RHYS: I've just read the book and I can say you are in for a treat! Big thanks to Laurie and wishing her all the best for this new venture.
