When people think of the Depression era, they think of food lines, hungry children and the dust bowl. But in California, film making was just taking off as an industry and there was plenty of glitz and glamour that made people forget about the pains of the rest of the country. The time and place are the perfect setting for a detective with moxie to get ahead, and Linda L. Richards's heroine, Kitty Pangborn, is just the gal for the job. Contributing editor Cathy Clamp sat down with Richards to get the dirt on Kitty.Tell me a little about the story and what Kitty's all about.
Kitty Pangborn is secretary to a drunken Los Angeles gumshoe named Dexter Theroux. She doesn't care about solving cases. It's the Depression, there's not a lot of money to go around: she cares about getting paid. But her drunken boss spends so much time messing up, Kitty finds herself helping him out, just to make sure clients don't drop him and so her paychecks keep coming.
This is Kitty's second outing. Readers first met her in 2008 in Death Was the Other Woman. In Death Was in the Picture, Dex is hired to keep tabs on a movie star. Before his first day on the job, though, the movie star is charged with a murder that takes place at a party that Dex attended. In figuring out what happened, Kitty and Dex realize that they are embroiled in a conspiracy of moralities and that the hands putting everything into motion may be at the very highest reaches of both film making and organized religion.
I'm a HUGE fan of Noir detective stories. Tell me a little more about your influences for creating a hard-boiled story set in California.
The Kitty Pangborn stories are set in Los Angeles, although the most recent book, Death Was in the Picture, is set partly against the world of 1930s filmmaking and Hollywood.
I was greatly influenced by the work of Raymond Chandler - whose stories are mostly set in Los Angeles and environs -- and Dashiel Hammett, whose stories are mostly set in San Francisco. That being the case, it seemed to me that Kitty had to be a Californian. Since I was raised in Los Angeles and have spent only limited amounts of time in San Francisco, it really had to be L.A.
Do you live there now, or did you have to do a lot of research to create the Depression-era world?
I don't live in Los Angeles now, but I have at various times in the past. I sometimes joke that, these days, research trips to Los Angeles just confuse me. Most of the L.A. I write about no longer exists. Or rather, it exists more vividly in my mind and heart than it does in the real world! I mean, let's face it: almost every place looks very different 75 years on. But Los Angeles? It's transformed completely.
So, either way, a lot of research is necessary, yes. To both create and maintain it. I think that's one of the challenges of writing historical novels. I have to know very well what everything looks like from every angle. But I need to give the reader just enough for them to get a sense of it: too much is too much, no matter what we're talking about. So I might spend two days researching - say - Depression-era cocktails (That's not a for instance. I actually did.) and it ends up being just a paragraph or two - perhaps even less - that gives color and flavor and that sharp ring of truth and recognition.
Do you foresee a future for her in other books?
Right this second I don't know. I always write the book that's in my heart. At the moment, the book I'm working on is a contemporary thriller. But I adore Kitty. And I love spending time with her in 1931. I'm quite sure I'll go back there. I think she has other stories to tell. And the time traveling to spend time in her world is a lot of fun!
What surprised you most when you were researching for this book?
The more research I did on the Motion Picture Production Code - what people sometimes call The Hays Code - the more passionate I got about this project. I kept thinking about how much the Production Code altered the history of American film. We really will never know - and have no way of knowing - what movies would have looked like had there not been such severe creative restrictions placed on the studios during the time the Production Code was in effect. Some people argue that the Code forced filmmakers to be more creative in order to get their stories told. And in some cases, that's probably true. However, it could also be argued that in some ways it completely subverted American culture. That the prudishness the world sees in the American people can be completely laid at the door of the Production Code. And not for what it did to film, but in how American filmgoers began to view themselves.
Obviously, being the founder of January Magazine, you have your finger on the pulse of what readers are hungry for.
Readers are hungry for good books, don't you think? I think it's a mistake for an author to write a book simply because it's thought that the market is waiting for it. For one thing, what the market wants now is not what it will want in a year. So writing a book in order to satisfy a market will always put you behind the curve: it just has to.
More than that, I give a lot of myself to my books. It's just how it works, right? It takes everything I've got to write a book: all my emotional goods, every time. So the book I work on - the book I decide to give all that to - needs to be important to me. Important enough, in fact, that there's nothing else I'd rather be doing. So every book I've written is the book of my heart while I'm writing it. Have those books always found their markets? They have not. And that doesn't matter, because every one contained a story I wanted to tell; one I figured I could tell better than anyone else and I told it just as well as I was able. So I'm happy.
Do you think readers are starting to turn back to noir stories looking for the action combined with elegance from that era?
I don't know about that. To me, noir isn't an era, it's a state of mind. I've read some fantastic books that I would call noir that had contemporary settings. And some that were science fiction. Arguably, noir itself isn't a time, it's a state of grace.
That said, the Kitty Pangborn books are set in the very brief moment near the end of Prohibition and the beginning of the Great Depression. That time in history is a tremendous breeding ground for crime. So much corruption and greed and - ultimately - need. The time period is actually slightly ahead of what we think of as noir as instructed by film, which was the mid-to-late 1940s.
Tell me a little about you and what drew you to writing mysteries.
The funny thing is, with my first novel I didn't even know I was writing crime fiction... but then I kept stumbling over the dead bodies in my prose.
Again, I always write the book that's in my heart. I don't think about where it fits or how someone might place it in a bookstore. I write the story I want to tell. So far, they've ended up being thrillers and mysteries.
Tell readers a little more about you. What makes you tick?
I write every day. Seven days a week. Even when I'm busy. Even during holidays. Even when I'm on the road. I want my work in progress to live in the same place in my mind that a really good book lives when you're reading it: the special spot in the subconscious that your mind goes back to when you're doing other things. The only way I've found to do that is to work on it at least a little bit every single day.
Where can readers find out more about you and your books?
They can visit my website at http://www.lindalrichards.com or chat with me on my blog at http://lindalrichards.blogspot.com. I'll be doing signings and appearances around the time of the release, and that's where I'll announce them.
Contributing editor and USA Today bestselling author Cathy Clamp
has co-authored nearly a dozen award winning paranormal romantic
thrillers for Tor Books with C.T. Adams, along with multiple short
stories and outdoor articles for magazines and anthologies. The duo's
next urban fantasy thriller, MAGIC'S DESIGN, under a new joint pen name
of CAT ADAMS hits the shelves in February, 2009. She and her husband
live in the Texas hill country where they raise goats--which (usually)
keeps them out of trouble.
I don't live in Los Angeles now, but I have at various times in the past. I sometimes joke that, these days, research trips to Los Angeles just confuse me. Most of the L.A. I write about no longer exists. Or rather, it exists more vividly in my mind and heart than it does in the real world! I mean, let's face it: almost every place looks very different 75 years on. But Los Angeles? It's transformed completely.So, either way, a lot of research is necessary, yes. To both create and maintain it. I think that's one of the challenges of writing historical novels. I have to know very well what everything looks like from every angle. But I need to give the reader just enough for them to get a sense of it: too much is too much, no matter what we're talking about. So I might spend two days researching - say - Depression-era cocktails (That's not a for instance. I actually did.) and it ends up being just a paragraph or two - perhaps even less - that gives color and flavor and that sharp ring of truth and recognition.
Do you foresee a future for her in other books?
Right this second I don't know. I always write the book that's in my heart. At the moment, the book I'm working on is a contemporary thriller. But I adore Kitty. And I love spending time with her in 1931. I'm quite sure I'll go back there. I think she has other stories to tell. And the time traveling to spend time in her world is a lot of fun!
What surprised you most when you were researching for this book?
The more research I did on the Motion Picture Production Code - what people sometimes call The Hays Code - the more passionate I got about this project. I kept thinking about how much the Production Code altered the history of American film. We really will never know - and have no way of knowing - what movies would have looked like had there not been such severe creative restrictions placed on the studios during the time the Production Code was in effect. Some people argue that the Code forced filmmakers to be more creative in order to get their stories told. And in some cases, that's probably true. However, it could also be argued that in some ways it completely subverted American culture. That the prudishness the world sees in the American people can be completely laid at the door of the Production Code. And not for what it did to film, but in how American filmgoers began to view themselves.
Obviously, being the founder of January Magazine, you have your finger on the pulse of what readers are hungry for.
Readers are hungry for good books, don't you think? I think it's a mistake for an author to write a book simply because it's thought that the market is waiting for it. For one thing, what the market wants now is not what it will want in a year. So writing a book in order to satisfy a market will always put you behind the curve: it just has to.
More than that, I give a lot of myself to my books. It's just how it works, right? It takes everything I've got to write a book: all my emotional goods, every time. So the book I work on - the book I decide to give all that to - needs to be important to me. Important enough, in fact, that there's nothing else I'd rather be doing. So every book I've written is the book of my heart while I'm writing it. Have those books always found their markets? They have not. And that doesn't matter, because every one contained a story I wanted to tell; one I figured I could tell better than anyone else and I told it just as well as I was able. So I'm happy.
Do you think readers are starting to turn back to noir stories looking for the action combined with elegance from that era?
I don't know about that. To me, noir isn't an era, it's a state of mind. I've read some fantastic books that I would call noir that had contemporary settings. And some that were science fiction. Arguably, noir itself isn't a time, it's a state of grace.
That said, the Kitty Pangborn books are set in the very brief moment near the end of Prohibition and the beginning of the Great Depression. That time in history is a tremendous breeding ground for crime. So much corruption and greed and - ultimately - need. The time period is actually slightly ahead of what we think of as noir as instructed by film, which was the mid-to-late 1940s.
Tell me a little about you and what drew you to writing mysteries.
The funny thing is, with my first novel I didn't even know I was writing crime fiction... but then I kept stumbling over the dead bodies in my prose.
Again, I always write the book that's in my heart. I don't think about where it fits or how someone might place it in a bookstore. I write the story I want to tell. So far, they've ended up being thrillers and mysteries.
Tell readers a little more about you. What makes you tick?
I write every day. Seven days a week. Even when I'm busy. Even during holidays. Even when I'm on the road. I want my work in progress to live in the same place in my mind that a really good book lives when you're reading it: the special spot in the subconscious that your mind goes back to when you're doing other things. The only way I've found to do that is to work on it at least a little bit every single day.
Where can readers find out more about you and your books?
They can visit my website at http://www.lindalrichards.com or chat with me on my blog at http://lindalrichards.blogspot.com. I'll be doing signings and appearances around the time of the release, and that's where I'll announce them.
Contributing editor and USA Today bestselling author Cathy Clamp
has co-authored nearly a dozen award winning paranormal romantic
thrillers for Tor Books with C.T. Adams, along with multiple short
stories and outdoor articles for magazines and anthologies. The duo's
next urban fantasy thriller, MAGIC'S DESIGN, under a new joint pen name
of CAT ADAMS hits the shelves in February, 2009. She and her husband
live in the Texas hill country where they raise goats--which (usually)
keeps them out of trouble.
