Beatriz Williams,- Cocoa Beach

DEBORAH CROMBIE: It is so interesting the way serendipity throws things our way sometimes. I'd seen the notice for Beatriz Williams' new novel, COCOA BEACH, in a bookstore newsletter (the fabulous Poisoned Pen!!!!) and I thought what a gorgeous book (it is stunning) and I'd love to read an historical novel set in Cocoa Beach, Florida. 

Then, on Monday, I found out that Beatriz was actually signing here in Dallas that night--in fact, it was the debut event for our new independent bookstore, INTERABANG. (Which is fab!)

Of course, I went, and Beatriz was smashing, so interesting and vivacious, and she made me want to devour every single one of her books. Listening to her speak also gave me lots of ideas for our Q&A here.

I am the short one:-)

But first, here's a little snippet about COCOA BEACH, so that you'll have context for the Q&A.

The New York Times bestselling author of A Certain Age transports readers to lush, lawless Prohibition-era Florida in this rich historical novel—an intricate blend of suspense, betrayal, and redemption set among the rum runners and scoundrels of a paradise far from home.

France, 1917. Virginia Fortescue journeys overseas with the Red Cross in order to escape the claustrophobia of a childhood spent hiding her father’s criminal past. While driving an ambulance across the battlefields of the Western Front, she meets a brilliant, charismatic British army surgeon and falls into a passionate affair. But Captain Simon Fitzwilliam’s charm disguises a history filled with its own darkness, and as the war draws to its close, Virginia is forced into a terrifying choice for herself and their unborn child.

Florida, 1922. Newly widowed, Virginia Fitzwilliam arrives in the tropical boomtown of Cocoa Beach to settle her estranged husband’s estate, and discovers a dazzling new world of citrus groves, white beaches, and rumrunners, to which Simon’s brother and sister welcome her tenderly. But Virginia senses a predatory presence lurking beneath the hedonistic surface of this oasis. The more she learns about Simon’s life in Florida, the more she fears that the uncanny circumstances of his demise point to a sinister agency, and that her life as well as their daughter’s may lie next in its crosshairs…

DEBS: Beatriz, it was such fun getting to meet you and hear you speak in Dallas! You touched on so many interesting subjects, both about this book and your previous books, that it's hard to pick and choose questions. But I'll dive in! You have set books in many different historical periods. What was it that drew you to the early 1920s in COCOA BEACH?

BEATRIZ: Thank you so much, Debs — it was such a thrill to “open” a brand-new bookstore as its first author speaker! As you probably noticed during the course of my talk, “obsessed” is really not too strong a word for my fascination with the first half of the twentieth century, in which a mighty social and cultural transformation overturned just about every aspect of our lives. And so much of this change had its roots in the First World War and the years that followed, which is the real story of COCOA BEACH: a society disillusioned and unmoored, searching for something to place its faith in.

DEBS: I visited Cocoa Beach for the first time in February, when I was a guest of the Friends of the Cocoa Beach Library. I was fascinated by the 1950s and 60s history of the  town. My hosts showed me the famous astronaut hangouts, and we drove through the "I Dream of Genie" bungalow-lined streets--which might exist in a time capsule-- and we visited the Cape. But what was it about Cocoa Beach in the 20s that inspired you to use it as a setting?

BEATRIZ: I’m endlessly susceptible to the details of physical environment—that’s why setting plays such a role in my books—and at the time I first imagined this story, I happened to be traveling frequently to Florida. As I looked out my airplane window, my car window, my hotel window, as I walked around and drove around, I was powerfully moved by the scale of Florida’s wilderness, by its lushness, by the sense of natural mystery and that sort of tropical stillness that’s almost sinister, once you get out of the developed areas. I thought Florida would make such an evocative setting for a Gothic type of book—Daphne du Maurier set in a tropical Cornwall—that I could merge with all those 1920s themes I already had running through my head.

DEBS: Your books have many strong female characters. How do you keep from modernizing their world views so that they seem more sympathetic to contemporary readers? 

BEATRIZ: Well, that’s such a fine line to walk! I always try to keep foremost in mind that, to my characters, this is not a historical novel. It’s a contemporary novel, it’s their present, and they have no foreknowledge of the future to come, nor any sense of themselves as living in history. So it’s not the historical details themselves that matter so much as the way they’re introduced, the role they play in the story—not as a history lecture, but as elements of setting. And voice! Getting the voice right is absolutely essential, the most important thing a writer can do to immerse the reader in this historical world. I don’t mean trying to sound like you’re actually writing the book in 1922, but you’ve got to understand vocabulary and syntax and inflection, you’ve got to make it as real and natural as possible. You can’t just have a contemporary person plopped down in 1922. They don’t think the way we do, they don’t talk the way we do, they don’t act the way we do. This is their world, not ours, and the challenge is to communicate those differences in a relatable way, to find the common humanity that links us.
 
DEBS: I love the way your stories skip across time and form webs of connections. Was there a particular book (or books) that inspired you to use this device? Or just a fascination with history?

BEATRIZ: I can’t think of any particular book that inspired me to adopt the dual and even multiple narrative structure, unless it’s Sebastian Faulks’s wonderful Birdsong, which I read a couple of decades ago! Certainly it draws from my love of history, and my interest in creating that juxtaposition of different eras, but in the end I just find it’s a powerful storytelling device. If it’s done well—if you write with a sense of overlapping story arcs, each chapter borrowing momentum from the one before—it creates suspense and conviction, it allows the reader to perceive, at a visceral level, the changes taking place in the characters and—when the two narratives are decades apart—the times in which they live. That being said, I always write the narratives in a linear way, almost always beginning with the story that occurs first, which I write in its entirety before creating the second narrative around the first. In the case of COCOA BEACH, I had to know exactly what happened to Virginia in 1917 in order to understand the person she becomes in 1922.

DEBS: Your novels are not a series in the usual sense, but they are interrelated. How do you tie the different books together?

BEATRIZ: Back when I was getting my MBA, I went through a two-year binge reading of Anthony Trollope, and I loved the way that—without writing sequels, exactly—he took secondary characters from one novel and featured them in another, creating this sense of an entire alternative universe in which these people lived and breathed. So when I sat down to write THE SECRET LIFE OF VIOLET GRANT after A HUNDRED SUMMERS, it seemed natural to revisit the Schuyler family in another branch…and before I knew it, I’d created what the Marvel people call a “shared universe.” It’s a bit like a family — you might need to look up birthdates and keep track of how old everybody is in 1965, but you know who all the people are, who they’re married to, and how many children they have!

DEBS: I love the "shared universe" concept! REDS and readers, is there a particular social/historical period that draws you? If so, why?

Beatriz Williams is the New York Times bestselling author of A Hundred Summers, The Secret Life of Violet Grant, Along the Infinite Sea, A Certain Age, and several other works of historical fiction. A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA in Finance from Columbia University, Beatriz worked as a communications and corporate strategy consultant in New York and London before she turned her attention to writing novels that combine her passion for history with an obsessive devotion to voice and characterization. Beatriz’s books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and appear regularly in bestseller lists around the world.

DEBS: Beatriz is on book tour but she will do her best to drop in and chat about history and mystery and all our favorite subjects!

P.S. Debs' bonus question: who knows what an interabang is? Without looking it up. No cheating!