Author R&R: Carolyn Hart

Author Carolyn G. Hart was born in Oklahoma City "where the sun almost always shines and the wind almost always blows." She first used Oklahoma as a background in "Spooked," published in the anthology Murder on Route 66, which tells the story of a 12-year-old girl in a northeastern Oklahoma town during World War II. Carolyn has always been inspired by strong, courageous women and often features such characters in her writing. Fellow author Nancy Pickard named Carolyn the heir apparent to the Grand Dame of the traditional mystery novel, Agatha Christie.

Carolyn has authored 46 published novels, including a series featuring one of the literary world's only ghost detectives, Bailey Ruth Raeburn, and another with retired newswoman Henrie O. Collins. But her most popular continues to be the Death on Demand series, so named because the protagonist, Annie Laurance, sells books in her small town bookstore named Death on Demand. Annie also "solves murders with equal flair," says Library Journal, which called the first installment in the series a "library essential." Carolyn's mystery awards include the Agatha, Anthony and Macavity, and a standalone WWII novel was nominated for the Putlitzer Prize by the Oklahoma Center for Poets and Writers at Oklahoma State University.

Next week (April 3), the 22nd Death on Demand book, Death Comes Silently, is being released by Berkley, in which Annie and her husband Max try to piece together a puzzle involving an overturned kayak, a stolen motorboat, a troubled love affair and a reckless teenager, and how they all tie in to the murder of Annie's friend, Gretchen Burkholt.

In celebration of her new release, Carolyn stopped by In Reference to Murder to discuss her thoughts on "Author R&R" (Reference and Research) in writing novels:

Research is just another word for the excitement of learning facts I didn’t know. Sometimes the facts are exciting, sometimes amazing, sometimes chilling. Books can require everything from intensive investigation to simple fact checking.

In Death Comes Silently, the 22nd in the Death on Demand series, I needed to know about Personal Flotation Devices, hypothermia, and alternative energy sources. I discovered that the support of a PFDs isn’t sufficient if the swimmer is in cold water that causes hypothermia. When the swimmer loses consciousness, the head falls forward and the swimmer drowns despite remaining buoyant. I can’t say more about alternative energy because it would tip a canny reader (and there are no readers cannier than mystery readers) to the solution.

Because I have been writing for so many years about a sea island off the coast of South Carolina in the Death on Demand series, I have an extensive collection of books about the South Carolina Low Country. In past titles I have shared these (to me) fascinating facts:

• Alligators can outrun a fast man for fifty yards.
• The Golden Silk spider can spin a thirty-foot wide web in a tree. 
• Spanish moss is not a parasite, but an air plant which simply hangs from live oaks but causes them no damage.
• Poisonous cottonmouth snakes can drape themselves in trees to surprise the unwary.
• That thrashing in the underbrush may be a wild boar.
• To survive a riptide, swim with current until the force eases and the swimmer can turn back toward shore. 
• Palmettos are the state tree of South Carolina.
• The breeze is onshore during daytime, off shore at night.

When writing, I try to give readers a sense of the island’s essence, the smell of saltwater or marsh, the humidity in summer, the forest inhabitants including cougars, bobcats, wild boars, alligators, and snakes, and the magnificent live oaks, longleaf pines, and cypress.

In the past, I have written books prompted by my interest in World War II. I was a child during the war years and as a young adult read extensively about the war. That reading provided the basis for two of my early suspense novels, Escape from Paris and Brave Hearts.

The complete and original manuscript of Escape from Paris was published in fall 2011. It is the story of two American sisters who help British RAF fliers escape from the Nazis after the fall of France. The Gestapo sets a trap and on the bleak Christmas Eve of 1940, death is only a step behind. The research entailed reading books published after the war that gave personal accounts of Paris during the Occupation.

I was also very interested in the experiences of Americans in the Philippines. I did extensive research about the nurses on Corregidor. I wanted to write a non-fiction book but the papers of the nurses weren’t open then for public inspection. (Since then, a superb non-fiction book has been published about American nurses captured by the Japanese: We Band of Angels by Elizabeth M. Norman.) Instead, I used the material to write Brave Hearts, which is scheduled to be reprinted. Brave Hearts recounts the desperate efforts of a band of Americans who escape from Corregidor.

Just as readers learn from the novels they enjoy, writers explore present and past to create characters who become for a while a part of particular worlds. Sometimes it’s fun as in my Death on Demand and Bailey Ruth books.

The Death on Demand books are set in a mystery bookstore and afford a happy reason to read lots and lots of mysteries.

Bailey Ruth is a redheaded ghost who returns to earth to help someone in trouble. When I finished the first book, Ghost at Work, I asked my favorite priest to read it to be sure I hadn’t made some egregious error about the Episcopal Church. His response: "Well, Carolyn, until Edward R. Murrow returns with a first-hand account, your version of Heaven is as valid as anyone's." I thought that was very generous of him.

So writers are always looking for information. Sometimes the knowledge is simply intriguing or interesting. Sometimes research is sad and gripping as in the WWII novels. Whatever we learn adds depth and resonance to what we write and makes our own world larger.

Comments

[Radine Trees Nehring]

A wonderful accounting of a wonderful lady and her work. And--I learned a few things, including background material about each of her three series and the WWII stand-alones.