Meeting Your Fences

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:   Did you see the 60 Minutes story on the Maryland Cup? And the crazy devoted talented brilliant riders who gallop four miles over fencers and water hazards and who knows what else at breakneck (oops) speeds on gorgeous horses? 

Yeah, the fabulous Sasscer Hill does stuff like that, and I cannot wait to talk to her about it at Malice.

She’s got a brand new mystery set in horse racing world, FLAMINGO ROAD, just brand new from St. Martin’s. And, dear Reds, Sasscer is about to see that the course of a book tour is almost as hazardous as a cross country steeplechase. In fact, it may be exactly the same thing.

 THE UPTOWN BOOK SIGNING

                              By Sasscer Hill

It’s a cold March afternoon and pouring as my plane skids to a halt on LaGuardia’s runway. I have arrived for the first book signing for Flamingo Road, three weeks prior to its April 18 pub date.

I rush to the baggage area, relieved to see my bag circling toward me. It has the outfit for my event at the posh ladies’ club in Manhattan where I have miraculously landed this gig. I manhandle the bag off the carousel, grab the handle, extend it, and begin marching. Except, the bag is immobile on the floor, and I am holding an unattached handle in my hand.

  

Have I just said the F word? Was it loud enough to be heard? If you’ve ever suffered an experience like this, did a four-letter word escape your lips?

This won’t do, I admonish myself, remembering the perfect, hand-written letter I received from the club announcing cell phones may not be used inside, and absolutely no photos may be taken, ever. It advised that I must not reveal the name of the club when mentioning the event on social media. A whole new meaning for “private” club.

 

I arrive at my sister’s apartment a little wet and looking like I’ve just gone ten rounds with my suitcase. The next day, as we arrive at the club, it’s still raining. I remove my rubber boots and slip on my suede Sacha London three-inch pumps. Fortified with fashion and makeup, I meet the ladies. I have never seen so many Gucci shoes and Chanel Suits outside the September issue of Vogue.

The ladies are charming, educated, and talk of their latest travels and the jewelry they bought in South America the previous month. We are having English tea and beautifully arranged pastries. I tell the head lady that I would kill for a Diet Coke and she rustles one up. Soon I’m at the podium to speak.

I go inside myself, focusing like I used to do when I’d ride in a steeplechase race. I meet my fences––which today are bullet points on a sheet of paper––and I don’t falter. Women are leaning forward, listening to every word, no one is whispering, there is perfect silence, and I know I’m winning. At the book signing, I sell out.

Have any of you experienced a recalcitrant suitcase, or wealth intimidation? How do you find your inner strength?

HANK: Heck with inner strength. I want to hear about a club that is so private you can't even talk about it.  

But WHY does something always go wrong in  situations like that? At the worst possible time? How does it know?

At least we can't get last-second runs in our stockings anymore! 

Sasscer, you are fabulous!

Author Sasscer Hill was involved in horse racing as an amateur jockey and racehorse breeder for most of her life. She sets her novels against a background of big money, gambling, and horse racing, and her mystery and suspense thrillers have received multiple award nominations.

Sasscer provided the Kirkus Review, which, she says, provides the most accurate synopsis of Flamingo Road that’s been written.

“The dark and dirty underbelly of horse racing is exposed when a Baltimore cop goes to visit relatives in Florida. Internal Affairs has been very interested in Fia McKee ever since she shot and killed the man who was choking Shyra Darnell, a hot walker at Pimlico who's so afraid of someone that she refuses to answer any questions. 

When Fia's beloved father, a racehorse trainer, was murdered five years earlier, Fia joined the police and has never given up on his case, which has now turned very cold. Put on leave, she answers a call for help from her brother, Patrick, whose wife has walked out and left him with a horse-crazy teen. Someone's been slaughtering people's horses for meat, and when Cody, her niece Jilly's gelding, becomes a victim, Fia gets mad and plots to get even. 

The night of the gelding's death, she meets a man named Zanin who runs the Protect the Animals League and is trying to stop the carnage. Zanin is sure the guilty party is a Cuban-American who lives in the dangerous and lawless area known as the C-Nine Basin, but no one's been able to prove that he's involved. Meantime, 

Fia learns that her problems back home may go away if she agrees to go undercover for the Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau at Florida's Gulfstream Park, where horses that shouldn't be winning are suddenly showing amazing talent. Fia eases into a job as an exercise rider for an honest trainer while trying to discover what new, so far undetectable, drug is turning ordinary horses into superstars. Hill boasts knowledge of horses and the very real problems in horse racing that fill this sound mystery with thrills and hair-raising action from first to last.”—Kirkus

Thinking about--well...Murder

 HANK: I am in airports most of today, and hope I'll be able to join the discussion.  But while I'm battling airport security lines and the guy next to me is taking the armrests--the wonderful Jeannette de Beauvoir has been thinking. About murder. And she wonders what you think.

Murder, We’re Writing

   by Jeannette de Beauvoir

  

Why is it that women become so engaged with murder mysteries?

Here’s the thing: while only about a third of published authors in almost all genres are women, women have long made up the majority of adult readers. We read. A lot. And, more and more, both as readers and as writers, we’re turning to crime… the crime of choice being, of course, murder.

And I’m not just talking about a gentle PBS-Geraldine-McEwan-as-Miss-Marple kind of murder, either: we’re going for violent death as wholeheartedly as have our male counterparts. Think about it: the mysteries that involve a clever theft, or blackmail, or deceit of some sort usually seem, to a seasoned mystery reader, all a little… flat. But put a little murder into the mix, and we perk right up.

Why?

The most obvious answer is that death ups the ante, makes it something worth thinking about, worth puzzling over. Reading about death (and especially, perhaps, violent death) allows us to vicariously experience something that we’re afraid of and—most of the time—don’t talk about. It’s a truism that death has replaced sex as the taboo topic of social intercourse; but our psyches still need to deal with it, and preferably in some way far removed from our eventual personal demise. It’s the only explanation I can find for the morbid curiosity that keeps people hanging around the scene of an accident or behind police tape after any tragedy, a sort of fascinated schadenfreude; and it’s a good explanation for why we read murder mysteries.

But it’s not the only one. We also like to see justice done, especially when we perceive that the real world isn’t playing fair with us. If the guilty party is caught and punished in the fiction we read, then perhaps we regain the sense of order that’s lost whenever we hear the news. Every day, we see situations that have us baffled, and our minds seek to cope with them: it often feels that everything is getting way too far out of control. Reading about Inspector Whatever arresting the culprit restores a little harmony, a little control, a little of a feeling of safety.

Ah, safety. To my mind, that’s the real pointer toward why women love murder mysteries. Safety is, for us, an all-important consideration. As women, we understand what it feels like to live with fear humming constantly in the background of our lives. Most of us grew up being consistently told—by the media, by our protective parents, by horror tales at summer camp, by the experiences of our older sisters—just how vulnerable we are. We’re not to wear short skirts. We’re not to walk alone at night. We’re not to smile at men in bars. We’ve been told effectively that just by virtue of being female we’re wearing a big sign proclaiming, “Victim here! Victim here!”

I’m not saying that any of us have consciously adopted that mantle; what I am saying is that most of us were socialized to at least be aware that bad things could happen to us. And they do; statistics show they do. One out of six women in the United States will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. I’m one of the one-in-six. Perhaps you are as well. And even if we’ve never personally experienced violence, we live in the awareness that it’s out there, that it’s always a possibility. We listen for footsteps behind us on city streets at night. We keep out keys in our hands, ready for quick escapes. We lock our doors. We have male friends leave greetings on our voicemail.

That low hum is always there in the background; but when we read or write crime fiction, we can explore our fear safely—and we can see it resolved.

Okay, the reality is that women are frequently the victims in murder mysteries. In real life, of course, men are actually more frequently the victims of violent crime (for a number of reasons, a few of which should be immediately evident); but it’s different in fiction: from mid-century pulp fiction onward, women are routinely stabbed, raped, shot, and battered, leading a number of writers to criticize the genre for a perceived misogyny.

I think they’re missing the point. True crime that focuses pruriently on female victims may well be misogynist; but remember that we’re dealing here with fiction, and as other writers have said far more eloquently than I can, fiction is all about metaphor.

And so are its victims.

It’s a truism that those investigating a crime must often remind themselves that it’s the victim who is at the center of the drama, and not the murderer. The hunt for the killer is so intense, the need to live inside that person’s mind and life, sift through clues to find motive, means, opportunity, to pinpoint the fateful moment when their path crossed that of the person they killed, that it can be easy to remember how the whole case began: with the ending of a life.

So in a sense the victim is really only the starting-point, the launch of the hunt for the killer. Victim as accessory.

And not just as accessory. Woman as murder victim is an exact embodiment of what many cultures are constantly informing women (and men) that women should be: a collection of body parts. In murder mysteries, those body parts are disassembled, dissected, and weighed in autopsy suites. In pornography, those body parts are used, assembled and reassembled, augmented. In capitalism, those body parts are used to sell lipstick, clothing, and plastic surgery. In all of those cases, the body parts are isolated from the woman herself: her mind, her soul, her life, her being.

The truth is that we’re used to being reduced to our body parts. In real life, it’s radically damaging. In fiction, however it can be empowering. When we’re young we’re expected to chase beauty; when we’re mature we’re expected to chase invisibility; but crime fiction gives our rightful place back to us—we don’t have to be either beautiful or invisible. Crime fiction awakens the Medea in each of us: it gives us permission to unlock all the things that we really feel about that victim in the autopsy suite. We feel rage. We feel aggression. We feel vengeful.

We feel powerful.

The woman victim in a murder mystery is Everywoman. She is vulnerable. She has absolutely been used and thrown away. She is a potent symbol of our struggle to get away from all the words that define us: wife, mother, slut, caretaker, mistress, bitch. Those words represent life-sucking roles; in crime fiction, we reject them all. We have been victims, and we will have our revenge for it. We will fight it. Whether we are the detective avenging the crime or the criminal exulting in her decision to act, we have reclaimed our power. We are that body in the autopsy suite, and by God, we will rise from it fierce and renewed.

And many of our crime novels feature a woman protagonist, the solver of crimes, the avenger of the innocent. She’s usually more harried than her male counterparts: they tend to be divorced loners—she’s still trying to hold it all together. Yet she’s the one who takes that body emotionally home with her, she’s the one who always remembers that it’s the victim, and not the killer, who is central to her case. As women readers, we identify with this female protagonist. As much as the victim in the autopsy suite, she is us, too: she is working hard to make the world a better place while remembering to pick her 12-year-old up after hockey practice and getting the mammogram scheduled and buying the broccoli and trying to figure out whether her 15-year-old is smoking pot. And yet with all her imperfections, she’s the one who’s going to solve the crime. She’s the one who will restore our faith in balance in the world. She’s the one who will speak for the victim.

And that’s a very good reason to read mystery fiction.

 

 ***************************

Jeannette de Beauvoiris the author most recently of Deadly Jewels from St. Martin’s/Minotaur, the second book after Asylum in the Martine LeDuc Montréal mystery series. 

Someone was murdered in Montréal during World War Two over some stolen diamonds (from the British crown jewels, no less), but Martine finds that the murders aren’t over yet as she investigates neo-Nazis, diamond merchants, fake jewels, and very present motives that reach back into the concentration camps and forward into her own family. 

More at jeannetteauthor.com.