A KILLING OF INNOCENTS - Celebrating Deborah Crombie's #19!

 

HALLIE EPHRON: This week we have not one but TWO Jungle Reds launching new books. Yesterday, Hank's THE HOUSE GUEST. 

Today, Deborah Crombie's A KILLING OF INNOCENTS.

I am completely out of breath from I’m reading this wonderful new novel--Deb’s 19th (YES 19th!) Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James mystery. I feel as if I’ve been watching a high-wire act. It’s absolutely brilliant the way Deb weaves the stories together so that the investigation of a heartstopping murder--in this case the stabbing of a trainee doctor in London’s Russell Square--is just the beginning.

Multiple characters narrate, one handing off seamlessly to the other. The marriage and family drama of Duncan and Gemma and Kit and Toby and Charlotte provide a steady counterpoint. These are real people living messy complex lives. When death occurs, it matters.

The characters feel so real. So I have to ask Debs, do they in some form actually live in your head while you’re writing? What about between books?

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Yes, they do. I feel as if Duncan and Gemma and all the crew are leading a parallel life that I just get to tap into for the little segments of time that we see in the books. I can’t imagine not writing and not having this other world constantly running in my head.

HALLIE: In each of your books, you introduce at least one brand new character to an ever-expanding cast, creating new sources of tension and possibility, as well as as-yet-unexplored setting, along with a new backdrop. In the last series novel, A Bitter Feast, I was fascinated by the the goings on behind the scenes of a gourmet restaurant. Another book tapped into the young music scene.

What were the neighborhoods and backdrops that you researched for this book, and did what you learned affect how the murder mystery unfolds?

DEBORAH: When I moved Duncan to the team at Holborn Police Station several books back, it was partly because I knew I wanted to set a book in Bloomsbury.

Bloomsbury has such fascinating historical and literary associations. Think the British Museum, the Bloomsbury group (Virginia Woolf, Rupert Brook, etc.) Charles Dickens lived in Bloomsbury, so did Charles Darwin for a time. Dorothy L. Sayers lived early in her writing career in Mecklenberg Square (which we managed to get on the map!) and then later she lived for many years just behind Holborn Police Station. The book also takes us into neighboring Soho, which has a very different character.

London is an amalgamation of villages and each neighborhood is very different.

HALLIE: Was there a new character you introduced or a backdrop that you think you’ll continue to write about?

DEBORAH: Although she’s not a new character, we saw a lot more of DI Jasmine Sidana in this book and she will definitely continue to play a major role. 

I imagine we’ll see more of Lucy McGillivray (why did I give a character a name that’s so hard to type??) I know a good bit more about her than we’ve seen. I’d like to see more of Duncan’s case manager, Simon Gikas, too. 

As for the new characters, I loved the bar owner Darrell Cherry, and especially Howard Quirk, the retired auction house appraiser. We may see more of him and Wallace, his border terrier. Oh, and I loved Destiny Howard, Wesley's sister, and I already have ideas in mind for her.

And I think we’ll definitely see more of Bloomsbury and Soho.

HALLIE: Another commenter wrote: “It's a perfect balance of police procedure and the couple's personal life that involves parenting three children while working demanding jobs.” Never mind Raymond Chandler’s “A really good detective never gets married?”

It’s so clever the way you manage to tie up the loose ends of the murder mystery while leaving complicated and dangling threads in Duncan and Gemma’s personal life to be addressed in the next book.

How do you keep two stories in synch – the family’s ongoing drama and the murder investigation within a single book?

DEBORAH: This is a bit of a “which comes first, the chicken or the egg” question. I usually have some ideas about what’s going to happen in the characters’ lives and will adjust the murder investigation plot to fit. And vice versa. It’s different with every book.

HALLIE: And I admire your ability to switch narrators all the time, seamlessly. As a writer, is there a trick to switching gears so that the thoughts you put on the page are in a specific character’s voice?

DEBORAH: I do think about backgrounds and accents when I’m writing a character. But mostly, their voices just develop as I’m writing the viewpoint. I hear them in my head, which makes me sound a bit bonkers.


HALLIE: Even for this 19th book I know you had to do research. Where did that take you for this book?

DEBORAH: One of my jumping off points was the history of the Victorian cholera epidemics in Bloomsbury and Soho. I was fascinated by a book called The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson about the discovery of the cause of cholera by Dr. John Snow in Soho in the 1850s. People thought cholera was caused by bad air, and Snow proved it was carried by their drinking water, which was contaminated by the sewage pouring into the Thames. It was the beginning of the science of epidemiology, and of huge importance to public health.

My original plot revolved around someone deliberately infecting people with a contagious virus, which I decided was unworkable. Weirdly, I was plotting this in late 2019, and I’m really glad I didn’t try to go in that direction! We do get a little of the cholera story but not as much as I’d have liked. Sometimes the plot doesn’t cooperate.

HALLIE: Where do you think you’ll take your characters next?

DEBORAH: It will definitely be London, partly in some areas I haven’t written about before. To say anymore would be a spoiler!

HALLIE: THANKS, Debs! And congratulations on today's book launch! 

You're probably deep into writing the next book. As for me, I'm looking forward to hearing more about DI Jasmine Sidana. She's got a prickliness I admire. Any thoughts from the rest of us about characters or neighborhoods we'd like to come back to in a future Deborah Crombie book?