Julia Buckley's Blog, page 15

A Noble Man

A special tribute to my father appears at Meanderings and Muses today.

An Early Halloween Treat?

Just click here and get a head start on fall. :)

Classic PRIME SUSPECT

Since a new PRIME SUSPECT is in the works (with Maria Bello in the role made famous by Helen Mirren), I've been revisiting the first episodes from the early 90's, produced by Granada television and written by the talented Lynda La Plante.

I had never heard of Helen Mirren before I watched this series, and I've been a fan of hers ever since. Looking back now, I can see why Prime Suspect got so big, and why the San Francisco Chronicle called Detective Jane Tennison "perhaps the greatest role and performance of a female police detective, ever."

Mirren is utterly assured as the cop who wants to prove herself to a slew of sexist colleagues, but her performance is nuanced enough to show us her moments of vulnerability--moments that never happen in front of the men she must lead. I still love this series after 20 years; it is a testament to the fact that good writing and good acting produce a chemistry that lasts.

I fear the new cast has impossibly large shoes to fill, and the comparisons to Mirren's version will be inevitable. In any case, I highly recommend a look back at the original series, which you will want to plow through with obsessive speed (or at least I did). :)

For Norway

My thoughts and prayers are with the people of Oslo, Norway today.

In their honor I share two quotes by Anne Frank:

"I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains."

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death."

In all of the helping hands that surround you today, may you see the beauty that remains beyond the horrifying acts of one man.

Mystery Writer Clare O'Donohue Chats About Rediscovering Chicago, Playing in the Ocean, and Getting Free Food

[image error] Clare O'Donohue's Kate Conway mystery, Missing Persons, is available now.

Hi, Clare! Thanks for doing an interview. Your book, MISSING PERSONS, is set in Chicago, with many recognizable locations. Are you a Chicagoan?

Yes, I grew up on Chicago's South Side and have lived in several neighborhoods throughout the city as an adult. But I also spent years living away from Chicago – in London, Los Angeles and New York. I sometimes feel I know those cities better so setting the Kate Conway Mysteries in Chicago has meant taking the time to rediscover my hometown.

Your hero, Kate Conway, must investigate the death of her estranged husband, which creates plenty of drama beyond the standard murder mystery. Did you like this premise because of all the possibilities for conflicting emotions?

In a divorce, the tendency is to focus on the negative aspects of the former partner. But in death, the tendency is to focus on the spouse's most positive traits. I loved the idea of Kate being caught between the two opposing narratives. Ignoring her feelings would be her first choice, but once she becomes a suspect, she has to deal with them – and solve two mysteries. The overload of emotions, plus her in laws, the husband's girlfriend, a job she's conflicted about – piling it all on her seemed like a great way to introduce her to the world.

Kate works for a company which makes exploitative television programs, and she is the first to admit that people's pain makes for good tv. As a television producer, do you experience crises of conscience about whether or not your work is exploiting people?

Sometimes. Unlike Kate, I usually warn people how their interviews will be used. I don't want to see anyone blindsided, and I don't want to deal with the angry phone calls. On true crime shows, victim's families are always treated well, and should be, but sometimes "suspects" aren't. The shows are on the air, and available for viewing so I have the opinion that people know what they're getting themselves into. While I am always respectful, even with killers, I have a job to do.

One of the characters owns a bakery and is always giving people free baked goods. Is she based on someone real, and if so, where can I find this person?

I've done a number of Food Network shows and whenever I've produced an episode in a restaurant, whether it's a pizza joint, a bakery or a high end five-star place, the owner is always giving us food. My advice is take a camera crew into a restaurant and shoot an episode for the Food Network. You'll eat yourself silly.

Time for a career change! Seriously, though, you have some neat details about running a bakery. Did you observe in one (and write off any cake consumed as a professional expense)?

My familiarity comes from working on episodes of TV shows set in bakeries – so I'm truly stealing from my own experience there. And I've eaten my fair share (or more) of baked goods both on and off the job.

Kate meets her almost-ex-husband's girlfriend and actually starts to like her. This makes for some fictional surprises; do you know of people who have been achieve this sort of friendship?

I don't, though I think Kate's reluctance allows for that aspect of the story to feel real. She doesn't want to like her, but Vera is very likeable. I think Kate also has the agenda of wanting to understand why Frank chose Vera over her and uses the guise of friendship to get that access, then discovers – to her dismay – the many reasons why he might have loved Vera.

Kate is producing a television show about a young woman who has been missing for almost a year. Sadly, it often IS young women who are missing, and the rhetoric of missing woman, slain woman, molested woman, has become constant news fodder. Do you think there's anything that can be done in the world of television to somehow change our perception of women as perpetual victims?

Years ago I read a study about what men and women fear from the opposite gender. According to the study, a man most fears a woman laughing at him, and a woman most fears a man killing her. TV plays to those fears – men on sitcoms portrayed as emasculated idiots being laughed at by their wives, and women on TV movies and true crime shows are shown as victims of violent crimes. There are lots of shows where this isn't the case, thankfully, but I think some TV shows play to these fears, because we're drawn to them, wanting to tell ourselves, "that isn't going to be me."

Interesting that the people in charge of programming are interested in perpetuating some of these destructive ideas.

On a different note, when on a shoot, Kate rides around with a sound guy and a cameraman who are pretty fun companions. Would you say they are realistic depictions of a camera crew?

Very realistic. When I'm working I almost always travel with crew. It's just easier to get to locations, parking etc…if we're together. We talk about our lives, the story we're working on, and lots of conversations about where we'll have lunch. On true crime shows, my camera man and I will go through the case as if we're detectives, much like Kate and Andres. The sound guys, like Victor, are frequently musicians, though not always as adorably sensitive. But it's a team, and often a close team. Between the hours and the intensity of the work, you get to know each other well, and if you're lucky, become good friends.

On your website you suggest that freelancing creates a lot of "downtime." Has this been a perk, in your experience, or just a time to worry about finding more work?

It's both. I love having free time. It's made writing books, and especially book tours, possible. But being freelance is, in many ways, an endless search for jobs. The oft-spoken truth of freelancing is that when you have time you have no money, when you have money you have no time.

MISSING PERSONS is the beginning of a series; I felt that in the book Kate formed a sort of bond with the detective who was investigating her husband's death (or at least I got the sense that he was interested). Am I barking up the wrong tree, or might Kate at some future time meet up with that policeman?

It's a funny thing. You create a small character, and then some of them become real, like a character actor in a movie who steals the scene. At the beginning of Missing Persons, I saw Det. Podeski as a one book guy, as I did with Det. Yvette Rosenthal, who worked the other case. Both could come back in future books and probably will. I don't see anything romantic with Podeski, if that's the question, but I do think that Kate has a friendship with him, and if she gets into trouble, she might be willing to ask for his help.

You've written a series about quilting and now a series about a television producer, both of which are topics with which you've had some experience. So I'm curious—-as a writer who is all Irish, do you envision ever setting a series in Ireland?

I was just talking today with my cousin, Patrick O'Donohue, who lives in Galway City, about heading there next summer to "research" a possible book aka hang out and have fun. I would love to set a series, or at least a book, in Ireland. So often it's depicted in books and movies as cute and magical, as if leprechauns pop out of teacups, and not as a modern country with ordinary people just living their lives. I'd like to show that Ireland – the real Ireland.

And on another note of heritage: were you named for County Clare, or did your parents just like the alternate spelling?

I'm named after the county. My father was born and raised on a farm near Lahinch, Co. Clare. Lahinch is a lovely town on the Atlantic Ocean and some of my favorite childhood memories are walking on the beach with my brothers, sister and cousins, and playing in the ocean. It was so calm, so beautiful. Of course now I would think – what a great place to set a murder.

Thanks so much for answering my questions, Clare!

Happy 4th

[image error] However you celebrate Independence Day, may you enjoy this great American weekend and the freedoms that come with being American.

Today at PDD, I'm discussing this sad percentage: more than 20 percent of Americans interviewed were uncertain of the country from which we had won independence. Check it out here.

Falk's Fond Farewells

[image error] A lovely tribute to Peter Falk and his much-loved tv detective, Columbo, appears at The Rap Sheet today.

I'm sure all mystery lovers are saying fond farewells to Falk these days, whether on blogs or merely in their hearts. I loved the character of Columbo and the way Falk gave life to him. Even in the 21st Century I was showing Columbo clips to my students to enhance our study of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, since Columbo was loosely based on the investigator Porfiry Petrovich and his methods of detection.

Falk was not a one-dimensional actor, but all of his roles were invested with a sort of crusty charm. My husband loved him best as Vince Ricardo in The In-Laws; I have happy memories of him as Max, the assistant to Jack Lemmon's cartoonish Professor Fate in The Great Race; and of course we both loved him as the gruff grandfather reading a book to his sick grandson in The Princess Bride.

It is sad and sweet that we don't want our television and movie heroes to ever grow old and die, as though they are beloved members of our own families. Falk died of Alzheimer's--the same disease that claimed my mother-in-law--and therefore I can guess at his slow decline, his gradual separation from life, his growing emaciation. I'm sure for all that were near him, it was clear that it was his time to die.

How lucky we are that his memory is preserved in many wonderful movies and youtube clips that we can watch forever. I wish that I could say the same about some of my family members.

(photo link here)

Craig Johnson on The Bighorn Mountains, The Third Man Syndrome, and "The Bulwark Between Justice and Chaos."

[image error] Hi, Craig! Thanks for agreeing to chat once again.

Your new Walt Longmire mystery, HELL IS EMPTY, is a fascinating read, especially, for me, because of all of its literary parallels. Dante's INFERNO plays an important role in the story. Did you have the idea that you wanted Walt to go, symbolically, through many levels of hell?

It's a novel that I've had in the works for a few years now, and it took that long to get all the pieces into place. I knew when I introduced Virgil White Buffalo in Another Man's Moccasins that I was committed to the idea of an allegorical tale that would utilize Inferno. I knew that Walt was going to return to the Bighorn mountains, specifically to the area where he ventured in my first novel, The Cold Dish—but I didn't want the book to simply be another manhunt in the snow (I figure that's been done to death), so I started thinking about which works of literature explored the things I'd be dealing with in Hell is Empty.

Two things most people aren't aware of are that there are only one or two sentences describing hell in the Bible--that the majority of the images we have of hell actually come from Dante, and that the further you go down into Dante's hell, the colder it gets, the epic poem finally ending in a frozen lake with snow and wind. The parallels were there--I just had to find a way to use them so that people who were familiar with Inferno weren't bored and so that readers who weren't wouldn't be intimidated.

Even though you reference Dante continually, the title is taken from a line in Shakespeare's THE TEMPEST, one of my favorite plays. I see many parallels between your book and that play—specifically the recurring theme of illusion versus reality. On Shakespeare's magical island, one can rarely tell what is and what is not. Did you try to use that idea in your mystery?

Yes, illusion and reality is certainly primary in Hell Is Empty, but its discussion was also a problem in the sense that I didn't want to replicate what I'd done in The Cold Dish. Taking the idea in a new direction was challenging, so I decided to use Walt's disbelief. The main question at that point was when was Virgil there, and when wasn't he? It's called 'Third Man Syndrome' when you're out on the trail and suddenly feel as if someone is there with you, even to the point of pouring them a cup of coffee or offering them your canteen. [image error]

Because this mystery takes place almost entirely outside, in the vast wilderness, it is not so much a who-dunnit as it is an odyssey. Did this make it easier or more difficult to maintain the tension in the plot?

Well, it's an odyssey disguised as a thriller with mystery elements to the plot; questions not so much about who done it, but more of why or how. It's pretty obvious who the bad guys are in Hell is Empty; something is going to happen, it's just a question of the inevitable when, and that defines the momentum.

The outdoors setting wasn't a hindrance to the tension of the plot—hell, most of the exciting times in my life have been out of doors! The location of the novel was crucial in that the setting becomes a character unto itself. I know that phrase sounds a little hackneyed, but it's true. The spiritual elements of The Old Cheyenne are tied to the land. My type of people have only been in this country for a couple hundred years, whereas my Indian friend's ancestors have been here for thousands—is it hard to believe that they might know a little more about the place than we do?

No--but fascinating! Walt experiences several existential yet beautiful moments in which he questions the meaning Nit all. One of my favorites is this: "Maybe our greatest fears were made clear this high, so close to the cold emptiness of the unprotected skies. Perhaps the voices were of the mountains themselves, whispering in our ears just how inconsequential and transient we really are." This is lovely, and again has me thinking of THE TEMPEST and Prospero's realization that everything fades ("We are such stuff as dreams are made on . . . ")

So here's the question: Does the experience of being in nature for a long period of time make one aware of his or her lack of importance, or even make one question the reason for existence?

Thank you. I've often described the eastern part of the US like an oil-painting, whereas the high plains are more of a charcoal sketch, and that's okay because things become clearer in a sparse environment. The landscape is humbling and introspective, but it's also invigorating. As Wallace Stegner said, "We must protect and preserve the open spaces if for no other reason than the way they make us feel when we look upon them."

And here's the answer: It's an amplifier for whatever your particular philosophies might be. I do know that it changes you; we go through our lives believing in the artificial world, the man-made world, but every once in a while we get a glimpse of something more. For me, a lot of the time, that's in Wyoming 's Bighorn mountains .

A beautiful answer.

Eyes are a recurring symbol in the novel, especially those of Reynaud Shade, your disturbing villain. I read significance into the fact that Shade had only one working eye, but that it was the "dead one" that seemed to be looking at Walt. How did you come up with Shade; did you always envision him as a one-eyed man?

"In the land of the blind…" Well, you get the point. His perspective of humanity is unfinished, uneven, out of balance—so I thought it was a way of expressing that in a physical sense. His past and the cycle of violence that produced him is one of the mysterious elements I mentioned before. I take the antagonists in my books very seriously. I'm not particularly a fan of the bad man character; there has to be a reason for this monster: how was he assembled, who assembled him, and where did he come from?

The Cheyenne say you can judge a man by the strength of his enemies, and Walt is pushed to his limits in confronting Raynaud Shade, a man whose glass eye shows more life than his own biological one. My favorite quote, of course, is Vic's—"The voices in that fucker's head are singing barber shop."

Speaking of Shade, I love your character names, as you know. Walt Longmire is a terrific moniker for a tragic hero, and Reynard has come to be a word for "fox" in French. Did you choose the name to suit the man who outfoxes Longmire (and everyone else)?

Yes. I like playing with names; it's just too much of a temptation. If this fox was going to play halfway between the lands of the living and the dead, what better last name than Shade (an archaic term for a ghost)?

And a mythological one! Walt has good friends and loyal colleagues, but he is ultimately a solitary man. Did you purposely create a protagonist whose essential loneliness is a reflection of his landscape?

One of the first images I had in assembling the novels was a vertical figure against a horizontal landscape. So I think, yes, Walt speaks to the place and the Western genre as a whole in that sense. And, there's a percentage of crime fiction that derives its impact from some very basic questions about existence—who are we, why are we here, what are the rules, are there any rules? I think the sheriff walks that cosmic line and provides a bulwark between justice and chaos; that's a pretty lonely beat.

But nobly so. At many points in the book people advise Walt to stop his quest. Aside from the fact that he is the sheriff, what quality is it that most pushes Walt forward into further conflicts?

It's almost easier for Walt to keep moving than it is to stop; he's definitely the unstoppable force. I think there's a responsibility that comes from inheriting the mantle of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and the rest of those white hats. Walt is a product of a more sophisticated time, but he still adheres to the cowboy code of ethics. He's aware that, at times, he's putting his ass on the line, but it's who he is and what he does. There's a chivalry to the man that's inherent, a trait you can trace through crime fiction from Sam Spade, Spencer, Joe Leaphorn and Walt Longmire.

In every novel, Walt learns more wisdom and legend from Native American characters. Did you research these ideas in books, learn them from friends on the reservation, or make them up?

You can pretty much tell from my acknowledgements that I'm indebted to my Northern Cheyenne and Crow friends for allowing me access to their lives and culture. Most of the Indian characters in my books have a basis in individuals I know up on the Rez. I research the living daylights out of everything, but it's the primary research of talking to my friends that trumps it all. Sometimes its not big, textbook history, but rather, small, social history that finds its way into the novels just because those moments can be more informing.

I was driving up on the Rez with my buddy, Marcus Red Thunder, and we came upon this ten-year-old kid walking along route 212 with only one shoe.

Marcus told me to pull over because he knew the kid. I stopped, and Marcus said, "Hey, you lost your shoe!"
The kid turns around with this beatific smile and says, "No, I found one!"
Now, that says a lot.

It does. Walt has difficulty switching from wilderness and isolation to civilization and other people. Have you ever experienced this phenomenon?

Oh yeah. I've mountaineered my whole life, and I don't know how many times I've come out of the mountains, unlocked my truck and just sat there in the seat trying to remember what all those switches and buttons do. It's the same with people; a lot of times I'll go to a restaurant or café and just sit there and listen to people, attempting to reacquire my power of speech.

How do you feel about the casting of your Walt Longmire television series, and when does it come out?

It's been a phenomenal experience; Shephard/Robin and Warner Television have pretty much kept me in the loop, which really isn't something I expected. They made me an executive creative consultant and had me on-set for the entire shoot. The casting, the direction, just about everything has been amazing.

The pilot, which will become the first episode if the project is picked up, was shipped from Warner Horizon over to A&E this week. A board will have input, and it'll be shown to a number of test audiences. By September we should have a definitive answer on whether it is that 'Longmire' will ever see the light of day.

Keep your fingers crossed.

I will! Thanks for a great series and a fine interview.

Bargain E Books Site

"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?"

--Stephen Wright

Mr. Wright is a guru for the modern age, and so correct: we can't have everything (although I suppose we can WANT everything). :)

One thing I do have is a coveted spot on Bargain e-books today. Check it out here.

Books and Summer

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"There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs."

~Henry Ward Beecher