Please
welcome prolific author Jeannette de Beauvoir to the blog today as she shares
some background on her book, The Everest Enigma: An Abbie Bradford Mystery.
What Happens When
Reality Catches Up to Our Stories
My
mystery series have a tendency to stay put. One takes place in Montréal,
another in Provincetown. And by and large I like that: it gives me the
opportunity to really root the stories in a sense of place, of history, of
community.
And
then sometimes stories come to me that don’t fit those strict guidelines. I’ve
occasionally dealt with them by simply writing a standalone, but the truth is,
I like series, I like being able to see characters grow and
change over time.
So
I needed a new series. A series that didn’t stay put, that collected all the
places and stories I’ve had swimming around in my head for years. I came up
with a protagonist who could afford to travel and wasn’t tied down to a 9-5
job, thanks to her family inheritance. And I knew exactly where I wanted the
first book to take place: a decade or so ago, I co-authored a mystery set in
Nepal, and there was so much more that didn’t go into that book that I wanted
to write about. Excellent!
A
brief aside here: I’m a big believer in at least a prolonged visit to anyplace
I write about. There was a thriller writer back in the 1960s, Adam Hall, who
wrote fantastic novels that took place literally all over the world. When you
read them, you really feel you’re there. I was astonished after his death to
learn that he didn’t travel. His widow revealed that he studied maps with a
ruler and a stopwatch and apparently got it right, all his car chases and descriptions
of buildings and so on. I am in awe of that but certainly wouldn’t ever emulate
it!
I
also wanted to indulge my own desire to create a dual timeline, so I started
reading everything I could about the history of mountaineering on Mt. Everest,
mostly because I wasn’t fully able to understand why people do it—that’s
another hallmark of my writing, working out motives behind practices I don’t
understand. This touched all the high points.
So:
the history. We all know that Everest was first summited in 1953 by Sir Edmund
Hillary and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa. Or—do we? Turns out there’s a real mystery
there, the question of whether George Mallory and Sandy Irvine got there first,
in 1924. Trouble was, they died on the mountain… but did they die going up or
coming down? It is hotly and passionately debated to this day.
Photo: At 22, Sandy Irvine (back row far left) was the youngest member of the 1924 expedition. Standing beside him is George Mallory, with whom he would vanish. Photograph by J.L. Noel for the Royal Geographic Society.
The
mystery deepens with the knowledge that the two men had with them a Kodak Vest
Pocket camera, and the Kodak company has indicated that, should the camera be
found, there’s a slight chance the images can be recovered. The first summit
selfie!
So
I started writing the book. George Mallory’s body had been discovered by a
National Geographic expedition in 1999—no camera, but some intriguing hints
that he may have summitted and died on the way down. Efforts to find Sandy
Irvine’s body over the next years weren’t successful, however, so I could play “what-if”
with that portion of the story… and I did. I tied it in to my fictional
current-day mystery: a Chinese climber had supposedly found Irvine and the
camera, and the controversy would be laid to rest should he be able to defect
to Nepal.
The
novel completed, it went out to beta readers, and on to rewrites, and finally
to the editors, which as we all know is a lengthy process. I had additional
rewrites because of the 2015 earthquake that changed the geography of the
mountain and indeed of Kathmandu itself—I’d spent time there, but long before that
cataclysmic event.
By
last October, the book had gone to the publisher and was well in-process, and
on October 24 another National Geographic team found part of Irvine’s remains
that the glacier had released. It looked as though my “mystery” wasn’t going to
be a mystery for long! The main climbing season on Everest is in the spring,
and my book was due to be published in June, so I was pretty anxious: a little
awkward if its publication coincided with the discovery of the camera!
To
the climbing world’s disappointment—and to my relief—no one found any
additional traces of Irvine this past spring: The Everest Enigma
still makes sense. And it’s proven to be at least moderately successful. But it
also points to the problems inherent in any writing: we capture the world as it
is when we create our stories, but after that, all bets are off.
Like
many other mystery writers, I am a big fan of the Golden Age of detective
novels: I adore writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie and G.K.
Chesterton… but, as we all know, some of their work hasn’t aged well. And
that’s okay, because we’re all intelligent enough to understand that times
change—until recently, generally for the better.
This
is a mystery that may one day be solved—or at least put to rest. Nepal’s
government is never stable, and it will change, no longer provide the context I
wrote about. Ten years from now the background to my book will be incorrect.
But I have confidence that the story I’ve told will endure despite all the
inaccuracies that will some day come to light, because it’s really, always, the
story that counts.
Amazon
Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/48zPslk
Jeannette de Beauvoir is the author of historical and mystery/thriller fiction and a poet whose work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She has written three mystery series along with a number of standalone novels; her work “demonstrates a total mastery of the mystery/suspense genre” (Midwest Book Review) She’s a member of the Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, International Thriller Writers, and the Historical Novel Society. She lives and works in a seaside cottage on Cape Cod where she’s also a local theatre critic and hosts an arts-related program on WOMR, a Pacifica Radio affiliate. More at jeannettedebeauvoir.com
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