Ellen Crosby--Magical Writing

DEBORAH CROMBIE: What a treat it is for me today to have my friend--and one of my favorite writers--Ellen Crosby as our guest. I'm so excited about her new book, THE VINEYARD VICTIMS, that I have it pre-ordered and will be waiting eagerly for it to appear on my doorstep next Tuesday morning. And I love Ellen's topic. I've called this thing that happens to writers synchronicity, but I think I like Ellen's term better.

Here's ELLEN CROSBY on Magical Writing

       

Katherine Neville, a good friend and international best-selling author, once told me that when she writes her books, magic happens. A book will fall off a library shelf open to a page containing the exact information she was searching for. A stranger turns up in her life with the precise answer to a research question just when she needed it. At first I thought this was simply Katherine, whose newsletters arrive on the summer solstice or the autumn equinox or Twelfth Night, because she is so tuned in to the karma of everything around her—until it started happening to me.

      Initially I thought it was a fluke, or maybe merely my imagination, but my husband began commenting on the uncanny coincidences that kept occurring: I’d start writing a book and, presto, the subject I was researching would turn up prominently in the newspaper or in an NPR story. Or I’d meet that stranger who had answers to my research questions. The Vineyard Victims, the 8^th book in my Virginia wine country mystery series, was no different—though with a bit of a twist. Some of my synchronicity—or just plain good luck—happened while I was writing, but for the first time it showed up when the book was done, as well.

      In my story, Jamie Vaughn, a wealthy presidential candidate who owns a vineyard in Virginia, drives his gold SUV into a stone pillar at the entrance to Montgomery Estate Vineyard and dies in a fiery crash. Though friends and family believe it was an accident on a rain-slicked country road, Lucie Montgomery is convinced what happened was deliberate. Jamie had recently lost the presidential election by a close vote—yes, he also won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College like you-know-who—and there were rumors of massive campaign debts. His last words to Lucie, who he’d nearly run off the road moments before the crash, were to find someone named Rick and ask for his forgiveness. Determined to carry out Jamie’s final wish, Lucie’s investigation leads her to Charlottesville and an elite, brainy group of friends at the University of Virginia who had kept some very old and dark secrets for more than twenty years.

      When I first came up with the idea for The Vineyard Victims, Donald Trump hadn’t even decided to run for president. Trump is not the only celebrity to own a vineyard in the Old Dominion—there are a bunch of ’em—but when he began campaigning, all of a sudden the media was full of stories that were a gold mine of research information.

      What intrigued me most about writing this book was exploring how someone as famous and instantly recognizable as, say, a presidential candidate, could keep a terrible, life-altering secret that nobody knew about or suspected—and get away with it. And what worried me as well was whether readers would believe it could really happen.

      Last weekend my husband and I flew to Boston to attend a memorial service for a dear friend who passed away in Geneva last July. Catherine was the very first person to read my manuscripts years before I was published; we met in Switzerland thirty years ago. Later I moved to London where she often came to visit and her comments and critiques continued, usually in my kitchen over a cup of tea. When our family finally returned to America, Catherine and I spoke over Skype. And when The Merlot Murders was published in the US, she left the first review on Amazon: thoughtful, honest, and constructive as always. For the last few years her fight against breast cancer—keeping the beast at bay, as she called it—meant she needed to focus her energy on more important things.

      After her service on Saturday morning, her husband arranged a luncheon at a picture-postcard perfect inn overlooking the ocean in the town where they own a summer home. A group of us had been chatting on the terrace watching her grandchildren play in the autumn sunshine with the fluffy white dog that had been her therapy dog. Out of the blue the conversation turned to the topic of the secret lives of famous people. I have no idea who brought it up—it wasn’t me. Honest.

      “Well, there’s Charles Kuralt,” someone said. “He had two families for more than thirty years. His first wife didn’t find out about the other woman and her kids until his funeral.”

      Charles Kuralt? The famous and instantly recognizable host for a quarter of a century of CBS’s “On the Road”? The man who appeared on national television each week with a voice you’d know anywhere? Everyone’s favorite uncle, who told heartwarming, nostalgic stories about a kinder, gentler America and made us feel good about our country? He duped his wife and daughters until the day he died and never ’fessed up?

      On the drive back to Logan Airport, my husband, a retired journalist whose first job was as a desk assistant at CBS in New York, said, “I never knew that story about Charles Kuralt.” 

      Neither did I. But I did know who was responsible for the subject coming up precisely when it did.

      Catherine.

DEBS: Ellen what a spine-tingling story. Coincidence. Or no? I am absolutely convinced that magical writing happens. Reds and readers, what about you?

     

For many years Ellen worked as a freelance journalist in the US and while living overseas in London, Moscow, and Geneva, Switzerland before turning to writing fiction full time. Her last job as a stringer was as a regional feature writer for The Washington Post, covering many of the places where her wine country mysteries are set.

Here's more about THE VINEYARD VICTIMS: When Jamison Vaughn—billionaire real estate mogul, Virginia vineyard owner, and unsuccessful U.S. presidential candidate—drives his gold SUV into a stone pillar at the entrance to Montgomery Estate Vineyard, Lucie Montgomery is certain the crash was deliberate. But everyone else in Atoka, Virginia is equally sure that Jamie must have lost control of his car on a rain-slicked country road. In spite of being saddled with massive campaign debts from the recent election, Jamie is seemingly the man with the perfect life. What possible reason could he have for committing suicide . . . or was it murder?

Before long Lucie uncovers a connection between Jamie and some of his old friends—an elite group of academics—and the brutal murder thirty years ago of a brilliant PhD student. Although a handyman is on death row for the crime, Lucie soon suspects someone else is guilty. But the investigation into the two deaths throws Lucie a curve ball when someone from her own past becomes involved, forcing her to confront old demons. Now the race to solve the mystery behind the two deaths becomes intensely personal as Lucie realizes someone wants her silenced . . . for good.

     

Ellen Crosby--Ghost Image

DEBORAH CROMBIE: There are books that you love so much that you hate to put the book down because you will miss the characters. And then there are books that make you want to plan tours around their locations and background. Ellen Crosby's Ghost Image not only kept me thinking about her protagonist, Sophie Medina, long after I finished the book, but it had me planning a London itinerary around the settings in the novel.

Ghost Image hit another bench mark for me: my daughter loved it as much as I did. My daughter has very discerning taste in books, so if she loves something it moves to the top of my list. We even tried to visit some of the London locations in the book on our recent trip to London.

Ellen, you have everything in this book--Washington, London, rare books, the Founding Fathers, state-of-the-art botanical research, spies--and yet it all works so well! How did you come up with the premise for Ghost Image? And how did you make it all mesh together?


ELLEN CROSBY: Long before I began writing mysteries, I worked on Capitol Hill as the economic advisor to a U.S. senator. Economics is not the sexiest subject. How many people get excited

about the gross national product or the tax code? And because part of my job entailed writing speeches and the occasional newspaper column for my boss, it soon became clear that if I didn't find a way to make a rather dull and complicated subject more interesting, no one was going to pay attention to any of it. Later when I became the Moscow correspondent for ABC Radio News, I had the same light bulb moment: listeners back home in America didn't find Soviet politics, which have always been byzantine and convoluted, to be especially enthralling. Given a choice between me nattering about the latest round of nuclear arms negotiations or listening to Lionel Richie and Bruce Springsteen sing their new hits (these were the late '80s, people) well, you see where I'm going with this.

By the time I wrote my first mystery, I had learned a valuable lesson from years of explaining the foreign earned income exclusion and who was fighting whom in Nagorno-Karabakh: if I didn't grab my audience by the throat from the get-go, they'd find something else to read or do. Which is why I always spend a lot of time on what I hope is a compelling first sentence for each of my books, because I want you to keep reading. Nothing makes me happier than a grumpy letter from someone who writes that I kept them up past their bedtime because they had to read "just one more chapter." So here's the opening line of my new book: GHOST IMAGE, due out in April 21:

Jefferson's Garden

When the old prince dies, they're going to cut out his heart and bury it in a monastery in Hungary.

Interested yet?

GHOST IMAGE is the second in a new series about Sophie Medina, a photojournalist who worked for a London-based news agency for many years before returning to Washington with her ex-spy husband. (That story was told in MULTIPLE EXPOSURE, the first book, which came out in trade paperback a few weeks ago).

Six months after the move to D.C., Sophie and Nick, her husband, are still trying to settle in to life in America. Nick is off to the Middle East on a trip for a potential new employer and Sophie, who is now freelancing, has reluctantly promised to photograph a high-profile wedding between an Austrian archduke and a senator's daughter as a favor to her old friend, Brother Kevin Boyle, a Franciscan friar and controversial environmentalist. But of course there's trouble in paradise, or more specifically at the engagement party, where the bride flirts with everyone but her finace, and Sophie overhears Brother Kevin, a holy man who took a vow of poverty, arguing with one of the wealthiest men in America.

Franciscan monastery

 The next day Kevin hints to Sophie that he might be in trouble, and that it has something to do with his latest botanical research project. A few hours later, his body is discovered in the gardens of a century-old D.C. monastery and Sophie is certain it was murder. Determined to find her friend's killer, she discovers that Kevin had been hiding a priceless seventeenth-century encyclopedia of plants from his Franciscan brothers. Before long, Sophie is embroiled in an international treasure hunt for a long-lost piece of American history with ties to London's oldest garden, the Founding Fathers, the 1814 burning of the White House, and the world's largest seed bank.

The research for this book was pure fun--and that's from someone whose previous series was all about wine. The idea for the story came about several years ago after I heard an NPR book review of The Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf, which is the fascinating account of the Founding Fathers' passion. Actually, their obsession with agriculture and gardening and how it shaped the early history

Millennium Seed Bank

of the United States. The journalist in me has to get things right so I did my homework, which included a private tour of Monticello's gardens, the gorgeous Chelsea Physic Garden in London and the Millennium Seed Bank, where nearly 25% of the world's seeds are stored in a vast underground vault in the English countryside. I had lunch in Georgetown one spring afternoon with Dr. Martin Gammon of Bonhams, the British auction house founded in 1793; he is also the rare book expert for Antiques Roadshow. And, thanks to a friend at Monticello, I met Andrea Wulf in London for breakfast at a trendy Notting Hill restaurant in between taping sessions for a BBC gardening program.

So, if I've done this right, your throat has been grabbed and you're intrigued. And don't you want to know if the old prince really did die? And what happened to his heart after they cut if out?

I hope so. 

DEBS: My daughter and I didn't make it to the Savoy Grill, or the Chelsea Physic Garden, two of Ellen's London settings, on our

Chelsea Physic Garden

recent visit to London. But there is always a next time! Meanwhile, I know what happened to the old prince!  And now I'm betting you want to know, too!

REDS and readers, what are your favorite books that have made you go straight to references to find out more about the subject??