Guest Author - Carolyn Chambers Clark

I talked with Mary Reed and Eric Mayer, authors of historical mysteries, including Five For Silver. Here's what I found out!

Carolyn Chambers Clark: Tell me about your new mystery, Mary and Eric, where
it's set, what it's about, who's publishing it.

Mary Reed/Eric Mayer: Five For Silver is set in Constantinople during the great plague of 542 AD, during which hundreds of thousands of residents died or fled the city. Our protagonist, John the Eunuch, Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian I,begins his latest investigation when his elderly servant Peter tells him ofa visit from an angel who told him, Peter, an old friend of his has been murdered. Which as it turns out is true, and thus John begins the task of finding a murderer in a city full of chaos, death, and deceit.
As with John's previous novel-length adventures, Five For Silver will be published by Poisoned Pen Press. Publication date is 1st March 2004.

CCC: What obstacles did you have to overcome to write this story and how did you do it?

MR/EM: Researching for the book was no problem at all! We both enjoy research so much that grappling hooks have to be brought out to get us away from delving about in ancient texts and back to the actual writing. But it's from such research -- or from being inspired by it -- that many colorful background details have appeared in the novels, such as assorted automata (including a mechanical whale) and the herd of fortune-telling goats in Three For A Letter. Sometimes it works out in a strange fashion. For example, in Two For Joy we invented a religion based upon a Quadrinity rather than a Trinity (such religious matters were very much part of the fabric of society in John's time) and only much later discovered that such a belief had in fact been held at one time. Again, regarding Five For Silver, in beginning research for Six For Gold we discovered that a specific action we'd deduced from research for Five For Silver and made part of its plot had been written about by an Egyptian jurist living around the time of the novels -- sorry to be so mysterious 8-} but we can't reveal more for fear of spoilers!

Once the scrivening begins, however, the main obstacle is always finding a block of time sufficient to complete the book in one stretch. Since we're both self-employed writers, we can usually arrange our deadlines so that we have the three month period we'll need for the actual writing, although the necessary loss of income means a lean stretch down the road a way. However, so far we've managed to hack it..

CCC: What is your working schedule?

MR/EM: We keep mirror hours to most, inasmuch as we hit the sack in the early hours of the ayem and get up late, so the bulk of our writing is done from about ll am onwards, and often continues until very late at night or the early hours of the following morning. When the Muse smiles and we're on a roll we'll stay up even later.

CCC: How do you breathe life into your characters and make them seem real?

MR/EM: That's a difficult thing to pin down! Perhaps it's largely due to the fact we've got to "know" them so well, having written about them to the tune of almost half a million words to date. In fact, quite often it's as if we're relating a story about people we know in real life rather than inventing a tale from whole cloth. Indeed, a couple of times the plot line has been changed because one of us will declare "John wouldn't express himself that way!" or "Anatolius do that? Never!"

To Eric the whole idea of "wooden" as opposed to "life-like" characters is rather a mystery, especially since one reader will see wood where another sees flesh. However, if there is a trick to writing characters, it may be in trying to imagine characters who have motivations beyond their duty to fill their assigned spot in the novel, characters who are somewhat more complicated thanis strictly necessary to fulfill the authors' purposes. For Mary, presenting the characters is probably much aided by her method of imagining scenes, projecting them onto a mental screen, and then transcribing what she sees as best she can. Now if someone would invent a thought transference machine so that *all* the details of a scene, even relatively minor things such as a brief description of the sinister-looking street urchin hanging about at the mouth of an alley leading off the street in which the main action is taking place, or specifics of the patterns on the embroidered robes of the empress' attendants, could be moved ready-written onto the page, ah, think how even more colorful the enterprise could be!

One thing we find of great help in fleshing characters out, as it were, is thatthere's a fair bit of information available about Justinian and Theodora's public actions, although not much about their private lives except for Procopios' scurrilous Secret History. Procopios' account has been very useful for mining details about such things as the imperial couple's physical appearance, various historical incidents, and descriptions of certain high ranking citizens and officials.

The scandalous scuttlebutt Procopios relates we take with a pinch of salt, although it's marvelous material for providing possible plot points. In
fact, the jumping-off point for Four For A Boy -- as well as one of Four For A Boy's main characters, a real city official nicknamed The Gourd --came from a particular incident related in the Secret History, which tells of a man murdered in the Great Church in broad daylight. Just to be even-handed, other details have at times come from the writings of the Church Fathers, which has its irony inasmuch as John and a couple of the other main characters, Felix the excubitor captain, Gaius the palace physician, and Anatolius, Justinian's secretary, are all practicing Mithrans, which was extremely dangerous in that time and place.

CCC: What is it about writing mysteries that appeals to you?

MR/EM: Part of the appeal lies in constructing the puzzle and along the way working out where best to hide the clues in plain sight, so readers get a fair chance to solve the mystery before John tumbles to its explanation. Another very appealing aspect of writing mysteries is that, unlike many real life situations, fiction writers can ensure that justice is done, albeit not always in a way that would satisfy modern ideas of punishing wrongdoers. Then too, the mystery format provides a constant reminder that there's a story to be told. For many of us the attraction of writing is telling an interesting story, but it is easy to become too wrapped up in hitting readers over their collective heads with messages or, Mithra forbid, straining to bring forth capital "L" Literature. Even so, bits of our personal philosophies and the occasional verbal ornament can be hung on the framework of the mystery without getting in the way of the story.

CCC: What else would you like to tell readers about your books?

MR/EM: In some sense the John the Eunuch books are traditional or, some might say, "old fashioned". They each tell a story and contain a mystery to be solved.
Every writer can't be breaking new ground, defying genre conventions, and generally upsetting the applecart every book. Some of us still like apples. We don't go in for sensationalism. We do not, for example, dwell on the injury John suffered while in captivity years before our series began. The high administrative position of Lord Chamberlain was typically held by a eunuch, so ironically, John's "disability" (to use a modern term) has helped him succeed in the Byzantine court. No doubt it also contributes to his powerful desire to see justice done for others. However, readers unfamiliar with the books need no t fear being subjected to endless clinical details about John's condition. He is matter of fact about it, and so, when it needs to be mentioned, are we. That sort of detail may be popular these days, but it isn't our way.

CCC: Do you have a web site where readers can find out more about
you and your books?

MR/EM: Sure do! If your readers would care to point their clickers at
http://home.epix.net/~maywrite they'll find not only information about our novels and short stories (not all of the latter are about John, by the way) but also other idiosyncrasies such as personal essays, a free, downloadable reading guide to the John series, an archive of our bi-monthly newsletters, and an ever-growing lists of various mystery-related newsletters and freebies as well an interactive game created by Eric -- we are nothing if not generous! 8-}

CCC: Final thoughts?

MR/EM: We'd like to thank you for this opportunity to talk about our characters! Meantime, if readers have any further questions, we're always happy to hear from them. There's an email link from our web site or they can write to us at maywrite@epix.net.