Deborah Crombie's To Dwell in Darkness: A stunner!

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HALLIE EPHRON: FANFARE!! Our very own Deborah Crombie's new Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James novel, TO DWELL IN DARKNESS, is out today(!) and it's a stunner. I read the last page and just sat there, literally gasping for breath. And came away loaded with questions for Debs to answer.

Starting with... At the start of this book, almost every one of your returning characters is out of his (or her) element and profoundly uncomfortable or in scary new situations. Especially Duncan Kincaid. Challenging for you, having to create a whole new setting and supporting cast, but also fertile ground, yes?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Yes, very challenging, but fun. I particularly liked getting to create a new team for Duncan at Camden’s Holborn Police Station.

HALLIE: Duncan Kincaid has a new foil, DI Jasmine Sidana — 35, single, smart, fiercely ambitious, prickly, starched, judgmental, complex… a teetotaler (do Brits use that word?)--if not the un-Duncan, certainly the un-Gemma. She is an inspired choice, so I’m wondering what inspired you to create her?

 DEBS: Ah, Jasmine. Duncan has always been a bit of a charmer. He’s used to everyone liking him. And as I wanted to throw him even more off balance, I thought why not give him a prickly female colleague who not only resents him taking what she thinks should have been her job, but just plain doesn’t like him, and see how he responds to that? And I liked the idea of a smart, ambitious female officer who didn’t fit into the “one of the blokes” mold. I don’t usually physically model my book characters on real people, but with Jasmine I was thinking of the British actress Parminder Nagra. Oh, I would love to see her play Jasmine Sidana!

HALLIE: The plot has some fantastic twists that I will not reveal, multiple narrators, and yet you manage to play fair with the reader. Do you know all the twists in advance, or do you come upon them as you write, and does that mean you have to go back and revise all the time (the way I do!)

DEBS: I did know most of the twists from the beginning, but I wasn’t sure how I could make them work. But instead of doing a lot of revising, I wrote REALLY SLOWLY, trying to figure out how to structure things.

 HALLIE: What was the hardest thing about this book to pull off… what was the easiest?

DEBS: The family scenes are always fun to write. I think there were too many difficult things to list! I had given Gemma a case with the idea that she would be able to make a parallel between the personality of the murderer in her case and the murderer in Duncan’s case, even though the crimes were quite different. And then I realized she actually had to solve what seemed an unsolvable case!

The compressed timeline was a monster, too. Most of my books take place in a fairly short time period, but I realized once I got into this book that this one was going to be very short. Everything happens over four days, which meant that every single scene had to count.  In the final revision I cut about forty pages, the most I’ve ever had to axe.

And then there was the continuing crime storyline—the one that is NOT resolved in this book—which is giving me fits as I’m working on the next book…

HALLIE: There’s a lovely subplot in the book about a cat and kittens that Duncan’s and Gemma’s children rescue. And knowing what an animal lover you are, I’m wondering if this echoes anything that happened to you in real life?

DEBS: Yes, actually, something like this happened to us in real life, but it didn’t have a happy ending. We had a female cat turn up on our front porch, literally starving. But she was very tame and very, very sweet, so we brought her in (isolated from the dogs and other cats) fed her and looked after her.

After a few days we decided we should have her checked over by our vet. He scanned her and she was chipped. The owner lived a few blocks from us. We had to surrender the cat to the vet for the owner to reclaim. We were devastated, but happy that she was back with her family. Then we learned a few weeks later that they’d let her out again and she’d been hit by a car and killed.

So I wrote a happy ending for Xena—and yes, I had named the real cat Xena.

HALLIE: I am dying to know, did you know how the novel would end when you started, and if not, where in the process of writing the book did you find it, because it’s a stunner?

DEBS: I did know from the very beginning. I knew, in fact, when I was writing the previous book how this book would end.  Sometimes I write the end of books part way through, if it comes to me. But this time, even though I knew what was going to happen, I wouldn’t let the scene play out in my head until I actually got to it. And then I wrote it almost without stopping to breathe, and I didn’t change a word.

HALLIE: Wow. I love this picture of Debs because she's got that mischievous look, like she knows something we don't. Like she's got more plot twists already up her sleeve.

So now we'll open it up for questions... Cats, kittens, continuing timelines, prickly sidekicks, and taking your characters OUT of their elements. Let 'er rip!