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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 6, No. 28 |
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SPEAKS OUT |
 King's latest novel-- ninth in the Mary series |
King talks about Sherlock, Kate Martinelli & movies
of TheColumnists.com
Laurie R. King is one of my favorite people from the mystery world. She's a prolific novelist who's always fresh and original. And she's also a witty and engaging woman with a wry sense of humor that spares no one, including herself. On top of all that, she also lives in scenic Santa Cruz County, my California homeland, so I grow wistfully nostalgic at the very sight of her.
Which surely explains why I'd hike barefoot through a snowstorm for the chance to hear Laurie talk about a new book, as she did last week at Village Books in Bellingham, WA, near Blaine, my present hideout in the Pacific Northwest. Fortunately, we were having a spell of nice weather, so I didn't need to risk frostbite to renew my acquaintance with this fascinating woman.
The new book is "Locked Rooms" (Bantam, $24.95), the ninth in her series of novels about Mary Russell, the young American wife of world-renowned consulting detective Sherlock Holmes. If you love this series as much as I do, you'll be happy to hear "Locked Rooms" is one of her very best, offering further proof that King gets better and better every time she tackles a new Russell yarn.
This time Russell and Holmes stop in San Francisco, circa 1924, to clear up some dangling business affairs of Russell's deceased parents and sell some of her inherited property. Before they're able to unpack all their trunks, they've stumbled into a murder mystery involving two Chinese servants who used to work for Russell's family. It's darn serious business, too, because Mary is very nearly assassinated by a gunman just hours after they arrive in the U.S.
Now I'm sure some of you won't even approach
any of the Russell books because you disapprove of writers who
take up famous characters after the original author has died.
Laurie King has done all she can to draw a line of distinction
between her novels and the so-called Holmes "pastiches."
Her fallback position always is: These books are about Mary Russell
and Sherlock Holmes is never the main focus.
At the same time, King has worked hard to make sure all her references to Holmes are accurate and that the spirit of the original Conan Doyle character is preserved, not exploited. My advice to any reader is: Try one of them. If you don't think they're extraordinarily good novels, I'll be surprised. And if you don't think Holmes is treated with great respect, then you must be a really hard case.
"Russell is really Sherlock Holmes in a different body," King explained last week at her book-signing event.
They have the same sort of analytical mind, the same keen powers of observation and nearly identical reserves of seemingly limitless energy. King's Holmes is older, wiser and considerably mellower now that he has found a soulmate. Russell is tolerant of the Holmesian quirks that might drive others to distraction, probably because she has a good many of her own. Holmes seems to have responded well to having found a woman who can match him in nearly every way. It may be my imagination, but I sense he's a good deal less persnickety than he used to be while rooming with John Watson at 221B Baker Street.y
Some might suggest the presence of a vital young woman like Russell in his bed might calm down any old reprobate, even the famously fussy Holmes. King says she has been alerted to the occasional "Russell-Holmes pastiches" posted on the internet by fans of the books "who seem to have a special interest in the wedding night."
King says these writings don't bother her,. In fact, she pays them little attention. They constitute what she calls "a sub-genre of Holmes erotica" on the internet.
King offers no help to such ruminations. She underscores the fact that her "steamy scenes" between Russell and Holmes are those rare ones in which Holmes might casually touch Russell's hair or make some remark that might be construed as complimentary. This seems to make good sense to me. King would gain nohting but criticism from Holmes purists if she wrote sex scenes for them. Moreover, if Holmes and Russell ever engaged in bedroom activities worth repeating, surely Holmes himself would have described them for posterity in a carefully-footnoted monograph.
In "Locked Rooms," King also dredges up another celebrated persona from the history of mystery: Dashiell Hammett. When Holmes discovers he's being tailed by someone through the streets of San Francisco, there's a confrontation and the culprit turns out to be Hammett, who in real life was a private eye for the Pinkerton Detective Agency in the San Francisco Bay Area, before he wrote "The Maltese Falcon," "The Thin Man" and helped found the "hard-boiled" style of American mystery writing.
"I thought he'd just make a cameo appearance," King explained, "but he didn't seem to want to leave. He had his foot in the door like any good private detective."
Hammett sticks around to help Russell and Holmes unravel the mystery of "Locked Rooms." (Joe Gores' best-selling novel "Hammett," which was made into a movie by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, also involved the real-life sleuth/author in a fictional murder mystery.) Ironically, King wound up being introduced to Hammett's real-life daughter at a mystery convention right after she finished "Locked Rooms." She felt she had to confess she'd used the lady's father as a character in her new novel.
"That's all right," said Hammett's daughter. "People have done worse."
King has resisted suggestions she take the the Russell-Holmes relationship places she would never go. That's why she has been known to shudder whenever somebody like me suggests the books would make a great series of movies, which I do darned near every time I see her.
"I have a Hollywood agent whose main job is saying 'No!'" King said.
However, CBS has scheduled a future movie-of-the-week for next season, based on a Laurie R. King novel, though not a Russell-Holmes story. They bought the rights to her 2003 best seller "Keeping Watch," which is about a Vietnam War veteran who helps battered women escape from their violence-prone husbands.
"They've already changed him to a Gulf War veteran," she said, explaining that she's had nothing to do with the production.
Asked if her editors have ever pushed her toward somehow intersecting her two long-running series of novels, she admitted the notion of having her contemporary San Francisco police detective Kate Martinelli appear in the same story with Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. At first she thought the idea ridiculous since Martinelli wouldn't even have been born while Russell and Holmes were still alive.
But then, she teased, she thought about it a bit more and ended up finding a unique way to actually do it. That book is coming down the pipeline soon. When her fans in the audience begged her to tell what the link between the characters will be, King played it coy.
"Don't tell me Kate Martinelli turns out to be their granddaughter?" I asked.
Let's just say Laurie shot me a bemused look that more or less convinced me she's more than happy I'm not the guy who supplies the ideas for her novels.
©2005 by Ron Miller.
The book cover illustration is courtesy of Bantam Books. The
photo of Laurie R. King is ©2005 by Seth Affoumado and is
courtesy of the author. This column first posted July 4, 2005
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine
and teaches classes in mystery for the Academy of Lifelong Learning
at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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