Clare Langley-Hawthorne: February 2010 Archives

Recently I sat down with Clea Simon to talk about her newest mystery, Grey Matters.

Give us a brief overview the second Dulcie Schwartz mystery- Grey Matters

This series centers around Dulcie Schwartz, a literature grad student at Harvard University, who is trying to write her thesis on an overlooked Gothic novel from the 1790s... only murder keeps getting in the way. In this second outing, Grey Matters, everybody has got something to hide. Dulcie's office mate is acting furtive, her roommate is avoiding her, and even her boyfriend seems to have gone AWOL. And when our grad student heroine literally stumbles over a dead body on the stoop of her professor's Tory Row home, she knows she's going to need some help. Pity her professor seems more concerned with his departmental politics - and even the loyal specter of her late, great cat, Mr. Grey seems to have gone silent.

How did the idea for this book come to you?

Within the parameters of a cozy with paranormal aspects (that ghost cat!), I wanted to play with a classic mystery paradigm - the case where lots of people seem to be reasonable suspects. I was thinking a lot about motive when I planned this book. I was thinking that most of us have secrets and things that we are desperate to keep out of the public eye, but with that in mind, which of us could be pushed over the edge? It is very important to me to have my characters be real, to feel real, despite the paranormal aspects, and that means coming up with a villain who has an emotionally believable motive.