I have long been a fan of
Elizabeth Zelvin’s work as readers here well know. I am very pleased to welcome
Elizabeth to the blog with her first guest post…..
From
Researchphobe to Researchphile: A Writer's Conversion
Elizabeth
Zelvin
When I first announced I wanted
to be a writer, at age seven, I had already had my nose in a book for longer
than I can remember. In college, I majored in English because it gave me a free
pass to spend four years reading novels. When I realized that a graduate degree
would require me to study novels, ie
analyze them and read scholars' opinions of them, I decided to skip it and
joined the Peace Corps. The first stage of this escape was from literature to
genre fiction. My conversion book was Dorothy L. Sayers's Murder Must Advertise, which I read while working at the ad agency
it fictionalized, J. Walter Thompson (in New York, not in London), for a few
months before leaving for Africa.
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| Elizabeth Zelvin |
Many years passed, and a lot of
living intervened. A midlife career as a psychotherapist and alcoholism
treatment professional led to the writing of my first mystery, Death Will Get You Sober—though not
until I left my last day job and was almost old enough for Medicare. I set it
in New York, so I was treading familiar ground in terms of setting as well as
characters. I hadn't witnessed or committed any murders, but I'd read a helluva
lot of mysteries by then. So I was still dodging research when I became a
mystery writer.
I happen to be married to a
history buff. We can converse happily for hours about the Tudors or the ancient
Greeks, the Civil War or the American expatriates in Paris in the 1920s. The
difference is that he gets his information from history books, while I've
always gotten mine from novels. It bugged me that he thought that made his
knowledge better than mine. It bugged him that I wouldn't even try research,
when he knew that if I did, I'd see how much fun it was.
I almost didn't write "The
Green Cross," my first mystery story about Diego Mendoza, the young Jewish
sailor with Columbus in 1492, because I knew I'd have to look things up. But this
character was so insistent on being heard and the information so easily
available on the Internet that I had to do it.
Research Lesson #1: You can start
with Wikipedia, but don't stop there. It's not reliable. There were no horses
on Columbus's first voyage. I fixed it in the e-book.
That story led to two historical
novels, Voyage of Strangers and Journey of Strangers, with hefty
bibliographies. In the process, I've become a devout researcher. And my husband
has a free lifetime pass to say, "I told you so."
Here's an example of how research
is like a treasure hunt, as my husband kept trying to tell me all these years.
The Jews were kicked out of Spain in 1492. Diego and his sister Rachel spent
1493-1495 in Spain and then Hispaniola, but I had to put their family
somewhere, so I mentioned they'd gone to Italy. Further research revealed that
in 1494, King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy. The Jews in Italy fled,
many of them to the Ottoman Empire, where Sultan Bayezid II offered them
refuge.
So now I look for books on the
Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Empire. I find one written by a professor at my
own alma mater and email him. He writes back, saying, My work is not in your
period, but you should contact my colleague in Israel. She's the expert in the
16th century.
I take his advice, and tucked
away in a single paragraph in this woman's book, I find hidden treasure: the
women of the Sultan's harem--not just his concubines, but his mother, his
sisters, his daughters, and all their attendants--had one link with the outside
world: Jewish women known as kiras who
acted as purveyors of goods and services, carrying out commissions, bringing
messages back and forth, and acting as the secluded women's eyes on the world.
What a perfect job for Rachel! It became a major plot thread in Journey of Strangers.
And now that I do research, do I
research mysteries too? Yes, when I need to. While working on a new story in my
Bruce Kohler mystery series this week, I've contacted a friend in NYPD to ask
which detective squad would catch a homicide in Central Park; emailed the
Central Park Conservancy to ask what flowers will bloom at Strawberry Fields in
the spring (I can see for myself in a month or two, but I'd like to finish the
story before then); and gone online to calculate the radius (of the Imagine
sign) from the circumference, read the roster of famous people who've lived in
the Dakota, and check what a dead person's face would look like after being
strangled with a ligature. My husband was right. Research is fun.
Elizabeth Zelvin ©2016
Elizabeth Zelvin is the author of
the Bruce Kohler mystery series and the historical novels Journey of Strangers and Voyage
of Strangers, as well as the cross-genre novella Shifting Is for the Goyim and Breaches
& Betrayals: Collected Stories. Her short stories have been nominated
three times for the Agatha and for the Derringer Award and appeared in EQMM and AHMM.
You can find her at http://elizabethzelvin.com and http://facebook.com/elizabeth.zelvin.
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