Why A Mystery?
Given my bibliography up to this point, you may be wondering why I wrote a paranormal mystery all of a sudden (you probably have fewer questions about the historical part). I've mentioned several times here that I needed to do something different than I'd done before for various reasons, but I haven't really talked about why I wrote a mystery in particular.
I'd been toying with the idea for several years, even picking up various how-to books on writing mysteries and going over genre conventions and whatnot. Both Remember, November and The Raven and the Firebird have mystery elements to them, so it wasn't completely uncharted territory.
The short version of why a mystery, though is this: I write romances with my heart, and mysteries with my brain. My heart was tapped out; I was emotionally toast, and simply couldn't get another Alumita book off the ground despite three different tries. But a mystery? With low emotional stakes and what is essentially a puzzle at its heart? That's something else. Something doable, I thought. Putting a puzzle together is such a different exercise from drilling down into someone's emotional core and extracting all that they are and why and everything you need to make a romance compelling and believable. They can be emotionally exhausting. Writing a mystery was still hard, but in a different way. I could let my subconscious chew on it, and being able to bring in more external obstacles was fun. Romance protagonists have to make choices for emotional reasons that are internally driven (rejecting love, protecting themselves, being nervous and uncertain), whereas a mystery protagonist having the world dumped at their feet is kind of the point. If a couple separates in the third act because one thinks the other is dead after a bomb goes off, that's not super interesting romantically; they didn't choose that. But if a bomb goes off and destroys evidence the sleuth needs? Well, shit. Now what? The whole structure and driving forces are different, and it was an incredibly rewarding exercise that I hope has resulted in a rewarding story.
"But it's a Cameron Darrow book! What about the characters?" Don't worry! It's still character-driven. They are the focus. It's about them, the circumstances they face and why they're the ones who have to do something about them. Dizzy, Azalea and Kaliori are every bit as three-dimensional as Vimika and Millie, just with much different problems. Getting into the head of an extradimensional vampire with a wildly different sense of morality is delicious, and I hope you think so, too.
So what was my direct inspiration? Two major ones: an Australian TV show and YouTube. Let me explain:
During the pandemic, I fell down a rabbit hole of freely-available mysteries from the '30s and '40s on YouTube. There are an absolute ton of them (as the copyrights have expired and they're kind of orphans), including entire runs of radio shows and movies like the famous Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Radio shows like The Shadow and Suspense are entirely theater of the mind, very atmospheric when listening in the dark, and force you to put your phone down and pay attention. Yes, there are extremely dated and offensive portrayals in some of them, but I skipped those episodes when that crap came up. They aren't present in, and so do nothing to diminish, the brilliance of episodes of Suspense like "Sorry, Wrong Number" or "Will You Make a Bet with Death?". They're timeless--compelling, dramatic and eminently listenable just as much today as they were when they first aired 80 years ago. The Shadow is the first modern superhero, and a direct inspiration for Batman. Did you know Orson Welles was the first person to play The Shadow? Crazy! Not my favorite portrayal (Bill Johnstone FTW!), but certainly interesting. "The Old People" is a completely batshit episode of his if you want 30 minutes of Orson Welles-led WTF-ery.
The other inspiration was the "Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries" TV adaptation. They take place in Melbourne, Australia in the 1920s, and showed me just how wonderful a period mystery could be. The glamour, the costumes, the performances (I adore Essie Davis as Miss Fisher), the characterization of Miss Fisher as a well-to-do flapper who's whip-smart, well-read, in complete command of her own sexuality and doesn't take shit from anybody is so satisfying, and a large influence on Dizzy herself. (In fact, Dizzy having bright green eyes is a direct homage to Miss Fisher.) I first saw it years ago, but it stuck in my brain as my first introduction to anything like it, and jolted me out of what I thought mysteries were and had to be. I have since read many of the books the show is based on (known as the Phryne Fisher Mysteries), but I was introduced to the show before the books, so I'm a bit biased in my preferences.
So! That's my tour of the background to the Dizzy Dixon Mysteries! I hope you enjoy Death Has Golden Eyes when it comes out June 25th! If you haven't pre-ordered it yet, that would be a super-cool totally awesome thing to do. But! It will also be available on Kindle Unlimited and in paperback, so if you're waiting for either of those, that's cool, too.
Thank you so much! More to come as the release date gets closer!
Excelsior!
I'd been toying with the idea for several years, even picking up various how-to books on writing mysteries and going over genre conventions and whatnot. Both Remember, November and The Raven and the Firebird have mystery elements to them, so it wasn't completely uncharted territory.
The short version of why a mystery, though is this: I write romances with my heart, and mysteries with my brain. My heart was tapped out; I was emotionally toast, and simply couldn't get another Alumita book off the ground despite three different tries. But a mystery? With low emotional stakes and what is essentially a puzzle at its heart? That's something else. Something doable, I thought. Putting a puzzle together is such a different exercise from drilling down into someone's emotional core and extracting all that they are and why and everything you need to make a romance compelling and believable. They can be emotionally exhausting. Writing a mystery was still hard, but in a different way. I could let my subconscious chew on it, and being able to bring in more external obstacles was fun. Romance protagonists have to make choices for emotional reasons that are internally driven (rejecting love, protecting themselves, being nervous and uncertain), whereas a mystery protagonist having the world dumped at their feet is kind of the point. If a couple separates in the third act because one thinks the other is dead after a bomb goes off, that's not super interesting romantically; they didn't choose that. But if a bomb goes off and destroys evidence the sleuth needs? Well, shit. Now what? The whole structure and driving forces are different, and it was an incredibly rewarding exercise that I hope has resulted in a rewarding story.
"But it's a Cameron Darrow book! What about the characters?" Don't worry! It's still character-driven. They are the focus. It's about them, the circumstances they face and why they're the ones who have to do something about them. Dizzy, Azalea and Kaliori are every bit as three-dimensional as Vimika and Millie, just with much different problems. Getting into the head of an extradimensional vampire with a wildly different sense of morality is delicious, and I hope you think so, too.
So what was my direct inspiration? Two major ones: an Australian TV show and YouTube. Let me explain:
During the pandemic, I fell down a rabbit hole of freely-available mysteries from the '30s and '40s on YouTube. There are an absolute ton of them (as the copyrights have expired and they're kind of orphans), including entire runs of radio shows and movies like the famous Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Radio shows like The Shadow and Suspense are entirely theater of the mind, very atmospheric when listening in the dark, and force you to put your phone down and pay attention. Yes, there are extremely dated and offensive portrayals in some of them, but I skipped those episodes when that crap came up. They aren't present in, and so do nothing to diminish, the brilliance of episodes of Suspense like "Sorry, Wrong Number" or "Will You Make a Bet with Death?". They're timeless--compelling, dramatic and eminently listenable just as much today as they were when they first aired 80 years ago. The Shadow is the first modern superhero, and a direct inspiration for Batman. Did you know Orson Welles was the first person to play The Shadow? Crazy! Not my favorite portrayal (Bill Johnstone FTW!), but certainly interesting. "The Old People" is a completely batshit episode of his if you want 30 minutes of Orson Welles-led WTF-ery.
The other inspiration was the "Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries" TV adaptation. They take place in Melbourne, Australia in the 1920s, and showed me just how wonderful a period mystery could be. The glamour, the costumes, the performances (I adore Essie Davis as Miss Fisher), the characterization of Miss Fisher as a well-to-do flapper who's whip-smart, well-read, in complete command of her own sexuality and doesn't take shit from anybody is so satisfying, and a large influence on Dizzy herself. (In fact, Dizzy having bright green eyes is a direct homage to Miss Fisher.) I first saw it years ago, but it stuck in my brain as my first introduction to anything like it, and jolted me out of what I thought mysteries were and had to be. I have since read many of the books the show is based on (known as the Phryne Fisher Mysteries), but I was introduced to the show before the books, so I'm a bit biased in my preferences.
So! That's my tour of the background to the Dizzy Dixon Mysteries! I hope you enjoy Death Has Golden Eyes when it comes out June 25th! If you haven't pre-ordered it yet, that would be a super-cool totally awesome thing to do. But! It will also be available on Kindle Unlimited and in paperback, so if you're waiting for either of those, that's cool, too.
Thank you so much! More to come as the release date gets closer!
Excelsior!
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