Interview with Author Laurie King

A Letter to Mary is Lauire King's third novel about Mary Russell, the feisty independent woman who married the retired Sherlock Holmes. This novel involves a great mystery about Zionism and Palestine. NPR's Fresh Air strongly praised it as a book of the year. Publishers Weekly says it sets "a new paradigm for Homsian scholarship... If you can't imagine the misogynist Sherlock Holmes sharing domestic bliss, this novel will make you a believer."

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LK: ...that involved Holmes. The Conan Doyle stories all concern a man who is deeply passionate about his quests for justice and righting the wrongs of the world... I mean it's a very Victorian way of looking at things that we can do something about the way things are. And, this passion of his is what drives him all the way through the Conan stories. What is different is the fact that Mary Russell is looking at him instead of this rather reserved medical doctor, Watson.

BC: Instead we have a young woman brilliant in her own way, a scholar, and his partner not just in marriage but in solving things. That kind of match up of minds, because Dr. Watson, himself, um... I'm going way back with conan doyle. I must confess I haven't read him in a while. But I always remember Dr. Watson appearing slightly foppish, a little slow, mostly in awe... I mean he had some abilities of course but he was second banana in terms of the candle power of the intellect and that's not true with mary russell.

LK: Part of that is the sort of Nigel Bruce of the rather bumbling Watson which unfortunately is what most people tend to think of watson as and is not really that way in the story. The stories that he is much more competent. He is certainly is a competent doctor but by comparison he is made to look rather dull.

BC: But here you have come along and said well what if he... what if Sherlock Holmes actually had a partner? Who was his match in most every way intellectually speaking. What would that look like? What would that feel like? And, on top of it, why don't we make them husband and wife.

LK: Well, why not.

BC: Did you go back and reread a great deal of Conan Doyle?

LK: Oh yeah. In fact, when I first started writing I hadn't read anything since, oh, you know the speckled band in high school. Which was a long time ago. And, I started writing this Mary Russell character and a sort of cliché holmes and quickly went back and read through the cannon to really bring him to life. And, as an interesting experience to come to the stories as an adult to sort of circumvent all that adolescent excitement about the fantasy of being a detective and the rest of it. That, when you come to them as an adult they really are very fine stories.

BC: As craft.

LK: As craft, as understated emotion, as a way of showing as I was saying passion in a very subtle way. Things that you don't get in a lot of fiction nowadays. Nowadays, you just bring on the bludgeon and tell people what you're telling them. And Conan Doyle was very much of the school that if you allow the character's actions to speak for him, it is a much more powerful effect.

BC: Give me some more paint brushes in my palette not wider swaths of paint. Something like that.

LK: Yeah.

BC: Here's an interesting comment. Early on there's a woman named Dorothy Ruskin, I don't know if she's related to John Ruskin or not it doesn't say, she's an amateur but very dedicated archeologist working in Palestine... I don't want to go too much into the plot because this is a mystery but, she had known T. E. Lawrence and she's telling Mary Russell that she sees this kind of remarkable similarity between Holmes and Lawrence. Can I quote this?

LK: Feel free.

BC: She says to Mary Russell, the wife, "I like your Mr. Homes. Very much like Ned Lawrence do you know. Both of them positively quivering with passion, always under iron control, both stuffed full of ability and common sense, and that backwards approach to a problem and that marks a true genius. And at the same time this incongruous tendency to mystify, a compulsion almost to ? and to conceal themselves behind an air of mystery and myth." I thought that was a fascinating sentence. First of all, is that somewhat accurate about t e lawrence not knowing much about him other than the movie?

LK: I think so. He was a very brilliant man who really was run ? over by media attention after the first war. And, he became sort of a super star and never could go back to his life. He never could go back to being an archeologist he couldn't even be a lowly mechanic in the tank division because people sought him out. And, part of it was his own fault.

BC: The notion of looking at Holmes and Lawrence as men of passion under iron control. Their own iron control really... it struck me as an interesting one.

LK: Well, I'm glad.

BC: The plot itself, I wanted to spend a little time on the plot. How does one talk about a plot in a mystery without going too far. That strikes me as a conundrum here.

LK: Yeah, you have to give what they call a spoiler alert so people stick theyre fingers in ther ears and don't listen.

BC: well for the next minute I just wanted to sketch out this plot her and if you want to start in at the beginning of this sparkling novel A Letter of Mary then stick your fingers in your ear. Spoiler alert... I like that> The mystery is around a letter and A Letter of Mary actually cuts both ways it is a letter of Mary Russells in a way because she comes to own this letter. But, its a letter possibly written in the first century by...

LK: Mary Magdelan.

BC: And, I just wanted to say this is how the mystery gets rolling. And where did this come from? And what if Mary Magdalan was not just a parable in the bible but was one of Jesus Christ's true disciples, true followers, who in fact took up his mental after Christ's death?

LK: Well, you have to look at the difference here Eric between Fiction and actual academic theology. And, not to spoil anything for anybody but it's actually not that radical an idea. It would be if there were proof concerning the Magdalans apostleship. But, depending on how one defines what an apostle was what a disciple was um, magdalen probably counted as that. There was a lot of women leadership going on in the first century. There's been some interesting archeological work there's a very fine thesis by a woman named bernadette bruton on just this... women leadership. She's working in synagogues. But, you find these inscriptions concerning women who are case synagogues, the head of the synagogues in first century palestine. Well, why not mary mag? she certainly was an authority in the early church. And in the period after the death of jesus disappeared when it became an organization, when it became the church.

BC: Part of the fascinating aspects of this whole and there discussed in here, and I like how they're discussed in here by nuance. But, what would the church look like if one of its first leaders was in fact a woman? How would history, how would women themselves be different? And also, the notion that this is something that even in 1923 when you've written your novel, it's setting, that the world really wasn't ready for it. When would the world be ready for this kind of thing?

LK: Well I think that there are any number of religious communities who were christian in the early times who were headed by women. So there definitly was woman leadership. But when christianity became the religion of the empire, that really put a lot of the more flexible sides of what christiantiy is capable of to one side, and it became a power structure and therefore because the existing powere structures were males, it became a male power structure.

BC: Well one of the aspects of this, Mary even reflecting herself, to turn her life over to this struggle in proving the veracity of this letter, and all its implications would have been a life long commitment dropping everything else in her life until the day she died. She had that sense of how huge this was.

LK: Yes. Which is used in the book to explain why she doesnt' then come out in public with it. Because the thought of it is just more than she can take.

BC: I managed to steer away from... there is in fact a murder in here, in fact there's four, although not too gruesome. Am I giving this away?

LK: Are there four?

BC: Four people die. Have I misread. I'm not going to say who so I'm not spoiling it too much for people. Part of it is exactly who has killed who and its a classic mystery. And, I must say part of the sheer delight in reading this novel is watching and listening to the repertoire, the intellectual feast really, that goes on between Holmes and Russell, who by the way and I guess is appropriate, never refer to each other as Sherlock and Mary. Holmes always calls his wife Russell.

LK: Can you imagine calling your husband sherlock?

BC: Well on top of that he has an older brother named mycroft. It sound like a new start up company in Silicon Valley.

LK: There parents had a lot to answer for.

BC: So they call each other Holmes and Russell and I moved right into the ease of that and they have, and I'm sure you've heard this from other readers, listening to their conversation with each other is just a real delight in this novel.

LK: It's a funny novel, this particular one, because they spend a lot of time doing their own independent things, mary goes off on one branch of the investigation and Holmes goes of on the other and they come back to each other and go off again, It's a sort of combination of individual stuff and the two of them as a team. Which I found a little more interesting I get bored with just having the two of them pulling a harness together.

BC: We're speaking with writer Laurie King. Santa cruzan who has written a series of mystery novels actually two different series, one's contemporary sf that's the way things are done in the mystery world today, you write series you don't just write a novel

LK: Well I'm doing a one off now it's creating a lot of problems in the mystery world.

BC: That's what they're called 'one off'?

LK: One off Yes it's a non series novel

BC: Well from what little I know about the book world that's kind a no-no in the mystery circles.

LK: apparently. I was very anxious to define that but apparenlty at the higher levels of the mystery circles they're trying to get away from series. The biggies don't necessarily write series all the time.

BC: So you're ascending to the biggie realm.

LK: Well here I am.

BC: The series involving Sherlock Holmes and his now wife Mary Russell started out with the Beekeeper's Apprentice, then went to the wonderfully titled immonstrous regiment of women, and now volume three a letter of mary. Where did that second title come from by the way, you pulled it from somewhere didn't you?

LK: John Knotts and his treatise against all the queens that gave him a hard time and kept making him have to flee the country he didn't think women had any right to ruin him at all and so he wrote a track date called a first blast of a trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women. He never got around to writing a second blast.

BC: He was a one note guy. A letter of mary. Published by saint martin.

BC: The comment here Holmes says you know he walks this nice line between condescension. He's not really a condescending person it's just that he's so intellectually superior he says at one point 'everyone is allowed a weakness even a woman of the 20th century'. I wondered in interpreting that, is Holmes then expressing a little bit of disdain for the modern day women.

LK: I don't know if it's so much disdain as an early recognition that women take on the need to be superman. This is a very late 20th century sort of remark. That women are not allowed to be in a position of weekness.

BC: and yet it is set it 1923. Here's one other one and because you have a graduate degree in the subject I wanted to see if this reflected any of laurie king's thinking. 'russell that theology of yours is rotting your brain even faster than I had anticipated' know he doesn't always talk to mary russell that way.

LK: well usually

BC: no there are other times. The affection between them is palpable it's just you have to go a little under the surface. Does laurie king actually think this way about theology rotting brains.

LK: No. but a lot of the more antagonistic side between russel and holmes is involved with her interest in theology and his real commitment to pure scientific rational thought. There are one or two places actulally in the cannon in conan doyle stories, where holmes will go off on talking about a rolse and how a rose is an indication that there is a god and there's this sort of I suppose you'd call it kind of a social idea of god than a religious one in his mind. All good victorian gentlemen recognize god if only because he wears the right kind of hat. But as far as spending time and energy on studying theology this is an ongoing problem betweem holmes and russell.

BC: She's due to return back to Oxford in a month in this novel and obviously that's taking her away from him perhaps at some consequence.

LK: Her great interest in life is theology and he thinks that it's a waste of her time.

BC: and one more mary russell comment here. 'One of the most difficult things about marriage I was finding was the absolute honesty it demanded. I mean I could say that this novel is also about a marriage and marriage in general.

LK: I suppose you could.

BC: Or rather a unique marriage I might add.

LK: Yes, I suppose I ought to make a disclaimer that it's not necessarily entirly autobiographical. But you's have to ask my husband about that.

BC: We could do that at some point in the future. but this leads to the inevitable last question which probably novelist like to hear or hate to hear or both, which is there are more Mary russell, Sherlock Holmes mysteries around the corner?

LK: Oh yes, in fact the next one will be out in november because I told them I wouldn't tour in Jan twice. I'm going to be in Minneapolis next week eric.

E: lucky you. So you timed the publication date according to the time of the year when you'd have to travel to publicize this book.

LK: I told them I wouldn't go after nov. and then there will be at least one after that.

BC: and possibly more?

LK: probably.

BC: It is such a fertile relationship the conversation watching sherlock holmes and mary russel at work intellectually, whether it's on a small bit of evidence or this large conundrum or even the box which I'll leave as a mysterious statement, even the box at the end. It's just marvelous. The book is a letter of mary and it is published by st. martins. Thank you for being here.