What we're writing... Hallie introduces a character

HALLIE EPHRON: A character I’m (still) working on for a new novel that I’ve barely begun is an elderly woman (Helen) who runs Spiritualist meetings for people who want to send messages to their dead loved ones, queued up in the astral plain waiting to send messages back. It’s easy for me to understand why people would be seduced by the notion that the dead aren’t gone gone.

I don’t want to make Helen a fraud or a fool. Or silly or clownish. She believes she’s helping people who are dealing with loss reach that most elusive of goals: closure.

So, I’m working and reworking paragraphs that introduce Helen to the reader, trying to take a page from the authors who’ve introduced memorable characters in the pages of their mysteries.

Take Jane Marple, for example. Here’s how Agatha Christie described her in the “The Tuesday Night Club,” the 1927 short story in which she was first introduced:

Miss Marple wore a black brocade dress, very much pinched in around the waist. Mechlin lace was arranged in a cascade down the front of the bodice. She had on black lace mittens, and a black lace cap surmounted the piled-up masses of her snowy hair. She was knitting, something white and fleecy. Her pale blue eyes, benignant and kindly, surveyed her nephew and her nephew’s guests with gentle pleasure.

What’s so cool about this description is that Christie is seducing the reader, at first at least, into writing Miss M off as a ditzy old lady. Which she turns out to be anything but. What is she doing? What she’s best at: watching and listening.

Here’s how Elizabeth George introduces Barbara Havers in A Great Deliverance:

Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers tugged the door of the super’s office shut, walked stiffly past his secretary, and made her way into the corridor. She was white with rage.

God! God, how dare they! She pushed her way past a clerk, not bothering to stop when the folders he was carrying slipped from his grasp and scattered. She marched right through them. Who did they think they were dealing with? Did they think she was so stupid she couldn’t see the ploy? God damn them! God damn them!

She blinked, telling herself that there would be no tears, that she would not cry, that she would not react. The sign LADIES appeared miraculously in front of her and she ducked inside. No one was present. Here, it was cool.

Had it really been so hot in Webberly’s office? Or had it been her outrage? She fumbled at her necktie, jerked it loose, and stumbled over to the basin. The cold water gushed out of the tap beneath her fumbling fingers, sending a spray onto her uniform skirt and across her white blouse. That did it. She looked at herself in the mirror and burst into tears.

“You cow,” she sneered. “You stupid, ugly cow!” She was not a woman easily given to tears, so they were hot and bitter, tasting strange and feeling stranger as they coursed down her cheeks, making unattractive rivulets across what was an extremely plain, extremely pug-like face.

“You’re a real sight, Barbara,” she upbraided her reflection. “You’re an absolute vision!” Sobbing, she twisted away from the basin, resting her head against the cool tile of the wall.

And there you have it, the debut appearances of two of the most irresistible characters in crime fiction. And it’s all those carefully chosen details that bring them to life--Miss Marple listening, in repose; Barbara Havers in high dugeon, mired in self-loathing.

So as I write my Helen, I try not to drive myself crazy by holding myself to standards set by Christie and George. But I am on the hunt for the details that readers will remember, the character doing something that somehow defines her.

I’ve decided I’ll introduce Helen as she prepares to host one of her Spiritualist meetings in her apartment on the top floor of a Brooklyn brownstone. She’s trying to prepare a welcoming setting for her guests, one in which the’ll be receptive to overtures from the spirit world.

Here’s a bit of what I’m working with:

Shifting to the astral plane from this corporeal midway took some doing. Helen checked the clock as she set out a tub of cheddar cheese spread, Ritz crackers circling it like the ouroboros—a snake eating its own tail: birth and death, a perpetual cycle of renewal.

She poked a dollop of cheese onto her finger and licked it off, probably exceeding her quota of fat and salt for the week. What the heck, you only live once was what her daughter would have said. But Helen was pretty sure that wasn’t so but she knew better than to argue with Caroline. Such a stubbornly closed mind in that one, even if she was a perfectly lovely human being.

I go on, giving Helen a bit of a tremor and occasional heart palpitations. Her apartment has lava lamps on the shelves and photographs she’s taken of her own of aura on the walls. Her jewelry is ancient amber. She lights incense, or maybe dried sage in a more of a native American tradition.

None of the choices are random. And I won’t tell the reader if she’s tall or short, chunky or slim, the color of her hair or eyes, or any of the details of her appearance that a police detective would want to know if she went missing. I want the reader to feel her, not pick her out of a lineup. I have a lot more work to do.

The opening ends with her guests streaming in, every one of them hoping for a message from the astral plain, though one of them is not at all the person they claim to be.

Writers, what do you think about when you write a passage that introduces a main character to your readers; and readers what characters made a lasting impression on you the first time you encountered them on the printed page?