Pesticide--Kim Hays

DEBORAH CROMBIE: One of the most fun things we get to do here on Jungle Red is to introduce debut authors. I was lucky enough to read Kim Hays' novel, PESTICIDE, pre-pub--here's what I had to say about it!

“Kim Hays brings a sparkling new voice to police procedurals, giving us engaging and realistically drawn detectives who struggle to balance their personal lives with the demands of a gripping investigation. Set against the fascinating backdrop of modern Switzerland, Pesticide will delight crime fiction fans--a standout debut for 2022!” —Deborah Crombie, New York Times-bestselling author of the award-winning Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novels 

And how cool is it that PESTICIDE was shortlisted for the 2020 Debut Dagger award by the Crime Writers’ Association!!

It's also a very special treat to host Kim today as she's a regular JRW commenter!

Here's Kim to tell us more about the challenges of writing from a cross-cultural perspective. Welcome and congratulations, Kim!

Conveying Swissness

Kim Hays

Last year I read a five-minute excerpt from one of my mysteries at a writing workshop for English-language authors living in Switzerland.  By coincidence, I was the only American—everyone else was British, and we’d never met before. The fictional scene I shared was a confrontation between two young Swiss men at a dance club: description, dialogue, action. When I finished, after a few polite mumbles, someone in the audience announced, “It just doesn’t work.” “No, it doesn’t,” someone else agreed. “But why?” There was a moment of silence, and then the first speaker said, “I know what it is. It sounds too American.”

Now, if I’d had one of my Swiss say, “He really threw me a curve ball,” or “You’re way out in left field, buddy,” I’d have understood the criticism. Putting baseball slang into the mouths of Swiss is truly odd. But since I hadn’t done anything like that, I couldn’t grasp why my audience was so upset—until I realized what the problem must be. To my listeners, British English wasn’t “British”—it was neutral, so it was what Swiss characters had to speak to be acceptable. My English, being American, called attention to itself, so it sounded bizarre.

This is just a small pitfall among the many traps waiting for authors who, like me, write novels about people who speak a language and inhabit a culture different from their own. I speak Swiss-German, I have Swiss citizenship along with American, and I’ve lived in Bern, the city where Pesticide takes place, for thirty-three years; my husband is a Swiss-German, and so are most of my friends. But I didn’t grow up here. So now and then, I find myself having to think hard about how to convey the Swissness of my characters to my American readers. (My British ones clearly raise different problems, but Pesticide is about to be published in the US, not the UK, so I don’t have to cross that bridge yet.)

Swissness is a familiar concept to me. Before I started writing novels, I worked fifteen years as a cross-cultural trainer for an international relocation company. My job was to provide a cultural orientation to non-Swiss employees who’d moved to Switzerland to work for multinational companies like Kraft Foods or Johnson & Johnson. Whether my clients were Columbians, Danes, or Indians, I spenT one or two days with them and their spouses, sharing advice about living, working, and raising a family comfortably among the Swiss.

Because of this background in cross-cultural work, I had no trouble coming up with generalizations about the Bernese when I decided to write a book set in Bern. I’m aware that most Swiss-Germans truly are exceptionally punctual; that they rarely take a stand on anything controversial right away, because they need to consider all the possible consequences and get everything right the first time; that they are often uncomfortable with conflict; that they are very egalitarian but still formal (at least by US standards) with people they don’t know well. Something else I have always respected is how the Swiss cherish the magnificence of their landscapes—they never take Switzerland’s natural beauty for granted.

But generalizations aren’t enough. The trick to portraying appealing Swiss in a novel written for Americans is to give the characters a certain amount of Swissness but not enough to keep them from being interesting and distinctive individuals. This is easier said than done, and, whereas I believe I’ve managed it, it’s my readers who’ll get to decide whether I’ve succeeded. If I have, it’s probably with the help of one character in particular: Renzo Donatelli.

Renzo is what we call a Secondo—someone perhaps born and certainly raised in Switzerland but with parents who emigrated here as adults. The word originally referred only to Italians (Switzerland’s biggest immigrant group in the 1960s and 1970s), but now it’s used for anyone in that second generation of immigrants. Secondos are assimilated. Most are bilingual, many are double citizens, and quite a few, like Renzo in my Polizei Bern series, marry Swiss spouses and feel at home with Swiss colleagues. But every once in a while, they see a friend do something that strikes them as so quintessentially Swiss and so completely not what they themselves would do that they have to laugh or roll their eyes, even if it’s only afterwards, in private.

So in Pesticide, I use Renzo as a foil to convey the attitude and behavior of a typical Swiss-German man. Most of them don’t consider it second nature to be carefully turned out and fashionably dressed; nor do they flirt good-naturedly with any woman who gives them the slightest signal of interest. Swiss-German men are also unlikely to feel so attached to their parents and siblings that they see their families often, not dutifully but with pleasure. Renzo, by contrast, does all these things.

In other words, by presenting one character who embodies a number of typical Italian values, I’m better able to highlight what makes another character Swiss-German—without having to hammer anything about Swissness into my readers’ heads.

So what about you, fellow writers? What goes through your minds while you’re creating non-American characters (something Rhys and Debs do all the time)? And you, readers? Do any examples occur to you of fictional characters who appear to represent another culture particularly well? Or badly? (They don’t have to be foreign—think of Jim Chee in Tony Hillerman’s books.)

DEBS:  This was so interesting to me. I've deliberately never used a non-British character as a foil for my British characters, although I did have a Texan play a very minor part once. Of course, the British tend to be quite culturally self-reflective, so it's not that unusual for a Brit to think about the idiosyncrasies of the British. I think what Kim has done with her Renzo is brilliant!

Kim Hays lives in Bern with her Swiss husband, but she grew up in San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm as well as in the States. She’s worked at a variety of jobs, including forewoman in a truck-engine factory, freelance journalist, and lecturer in sociology. Pesticide is the first mystery in her Polizei Bern series; it was shortlisted for the 2020 Debut Dagger award by the Crime Writers’ Association. You can learn more about Kim, Bern, and Pesticide at www.kimhaysbern.com.  

Here's more about PESTICIDE:

After a rave in medieval Bern morphs into a brutal riot, a young man is found beaten to death with a policeman’s club. Twenty miles away, an organic farmer turns up dead on his land, drenched in pesticide. Assigned to these two different cases, Swiss homicide detective Giuliana Linder and fellow cop Renzo Donatelli uncover unexpected connections between the two corpses; soon they’re looking for a killer together while dealing with their attraction to one another.

DEBS: REDS and readers, Kim will be here to chat throughout the day! Kim will also be signing books in person at the Mysterious Book Shop in New York City on April 19th!