Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Mindy: We're here with Elizabeth George, author of the Lynley Mystery series, which features Thomas Lynley. The 21st Lynley book will be coming out soon. So I think one of the biggest questions that I have for you as a writer and, with my listenership being composed of writers as well, how do you keep not only your Readers, but yourself interested in your characters after 21 books?
Elizabeth: I think that it helps to create more than one continuing character And it also helps to create a character who has a significant background and who has brothers and sisters as well. In doing that, what I did for myself is, I also created many areas for exploration in the lives of all of these different characters that I have. So that keeps the characters really fresh for me.
Additionally though, I think it's super important to create characters that you actually come to love. I heard P. D. James speak, once upon a time, about Dorothy L. Sayers. She said that Dorothy L. Sayers was actually in love with Peter Wimsey, which may or may not be true. However, that was the strength of her books. She made Peter Wimsey an unforgettable character and I think that it's really important to do that because otherwise you run the risk of saying - oh my God, I've got to write another book with this person in it! Which is the kind of the position that Agatha Christie found herself in with Hercule Poirot, especially. And she said at one point, much later in her career, that she really wished she had created someone different as her main sleuth. Because she was really sick of Hercule Poirot. He was a limited character in that he was by himself. I mean there was Captain Hastings, but he's essentially by himself. We never learned anything about him other than what we learned in the beginning that he's Belgian, that he's a retired detective. He has an egg shaped head and mustache, wears patent leather shoes and likes chocolate. I wanted to paint with a bigger brush than that.
Mindy: They have to have the depth of real people. We have real people in our lives that we continue to interact with for decades, if not a lifetime. So I think characters in fiction need to reflect that as well and have that depth.
Elizabeth: That's what I was going for. And as a result, when I do a new novel with these characters, the moment that any of the continuing characters appear on stage for the very first time in that book, is always really delightful for me.
Mindy: So, a specific question about writing with a character over a long series of time - and the mystery genre is particularly a great example of this. I was speaking with another mystery author who has been writing a character for a long time, and one of the things that we talked about is the passage of real time, and the character and their aging. Do they exist out of time? Do they exist in time? And how do you handle that? Because for example, you've been writing this character since 1988. How do you handle that particular element when you're working with such a long tail of time?
Elizabeth: You have a choice. You can freeze the character in time, place and circumstance, the way Agatha Christie did with Hercule Poirot. Or you can move the character through time and I chose to move all of my characters through time. But time has really slowed down for them. In the very first novel, Lynley is 33 in the first novel And I believe he is now 39… 39. Could be 36 - I'd have to do the math, but he's aging very slowly. That was a deliberate choice on my part because obviously if time passed for him the way it passes for me right now, he would be long since retired, probably dead as well.
So that was, that was the first decision I made. I'm going to move him forward, but it's going to be really slow. But then what happened is that technology has changed so much over the years. When you consider that when I wrote my first book, there were not even cell phones, let alone the internet and everything is associated with the internet. So as a result, um, I had to make a decision: are these people going to be moving very, very slowly through time so that circumstances are going to move slowly? Or are they going to move really slowly through time, but circumstances will be allowed to change - specifically technology. And I went for that option. The characters stay relatively youthful, but technology has changed a lot. And so far, nobody has ever said to me, wait a minute, wait a minute. He starts out when they're using telephone boxes, now they’re talking about cell towers, I just choose to ignore that. And what's really funny is nobody's ever mentioned it to me, personally,
Mindy: If I were writing a long series with that type of success, I would go the same route. I think about these things just as a writer. I also think that within the mystery genre, well within all genres and within fiction and usually per novel, there's something that you're just asking the readers to accept. Suspend their disbelief for just a moment about this one thing and I've always called it a gimme. Your character is existing through time while not necessarily aging. Right?
Elizabeth: Exactly, yeah, it's just more fun that way. I did the math on Adam Dalgliesh in PD James's books. When he finally gets married in her final book… and you know, I mean he would have been pretty darn old at that point. Had she been mentioning his age, which she didn't do. Otherwise, I think he would have been 100 years old and getting married. Most of these books begin with the main characters - being professional crime fighters or they are independent sleuths - but you begin writing their adulthood.
In the case of the late Sue Grafton, her decision was that she was going to do 26 Kinsey Millhone cases as if they were one right after the other in her life and so she was going to freeze time. As a result though, she had a lot of trouble remembering what things were like. And I think the books were set in 1988. That was really tough. Think of it. We have to go back and go like, what did we know at that time? And there's no technology the way it is today. But additionally, forensic science was totally different in 1988. That's when they first started using DNA profiling and even then that was in its super infancy. Anyway, so it's a lengthy answer.
Mindy: It's a wonderful answer. I think it's something that writers have to take into account if they want to be working with a recurring character. It's something that you probably have to have mentally established early on so that you're taking the right steps at the beginning.
Elizabeth: I think that's true. You really do have to make that decision otherwise you're up the creek.
Mindy: So you mentioned technology and this is something else that comes up when I'm speaking with mystery and thriller authors today. I think one of the big things that we come across is putting a character in peril. One of the first things you have to do if you're writing in a contemporary setting is to either get rid of their phone or get rid of their cell service.
Elizabeth: That's right, that's right. It's tough to disappear a character in this day and age. I think this is the first book where I got into significantly using mobile phone service as it exists in London and pinging and following phones based on pinging, which I had never done before and had to learn about. It's really true. And additionally you have to ask how easy is it to commit a major crime? Especially in London. Because in London there are cameras everywhere, CCTV cameras. If you're out on the street in London you are photographed about 300 times a day. The fact that people still decide to commit crimes is sort of a mystery to me because generally what happens is that they broadcast the CCTV film on television and then people can help identify who the person is. And they have those not only for pedestrians but they also have two different kinds of cameras that are dealing with cars. And they have one, it's called the ANPR system. Not only do they show a car passing but they also record everything that is available about that car too. So I mean, you might be driving one of 6000 Ford Transits in London, but if the ANPR. Camera gets your license plate, and it's all done by computers, they are like – did dit dit, did did dit – okay, here's who owns that car.
Mindy: Yes. Yes. And now with the prevalence of doorbell cameras and porch cameras, I remember seeing on the news not that long ago, a woman I believe like forced into a van and she was yelling, screaming out the window when the van went past someone's house. They happened to catch it on their porch cam, called the cops and boom, like luckily the woman was safe and everything was fine. But it is a conversation that I have with mystery and thriller writers, often, as a human being moving through the world today and especially as a woman, it makes me feel much safer. But as a writer I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so much more difficult now.
Elizabeth: Yeah, it really is. It's very difficult. Of course in England you can take care of that by having something actually take place out in the countryside. They wouldn't even have these because there's never been any, any historic need to have CCTV cameras everywhere. There might be a shop that would have a CCTV camera or somebody's house might have one, but as far as having it the way they have it in London. No, as a writer, you don't really have to worry about that.
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Mindy: So you brought up London quite a few times and I wanted to ask you about writing British police procedures when you yourself are an American. The differences, essentially between these two cultures. I don't know how deep they are or how you go about that research process.
Elizabeth: Initially, as far as learning about policing in London, the only way that I could learn about policing in London or in any other part of the country was to actually stop police on the street and ask them questions. Things have really altered for me. When I was writing a book called For the Sake of Elena that takes place at Cambridge University. How do I get my Scotland Yard detectives involved in Cambridge University?
What happened is that I went to the police station, told them what I was doing and told them I needed to speak to a detective. They asked me to put the request in writing, which I did and then a detective called me that night. And from that point forward, I had a really wonderful relationship with him. And if I needed something in a certain police station, he would make the contact for me. And now what happens is my editor's assistant in London is really, really good at putting me in touch with people in, not only in the police, but in various other organizations as well. So, it's gotten a lot easier over the years to learn about policing.
The tricky thing, though, is that the Metropolitan Police in particular keep changing their setup. So now they have these, I think it's like five policing areas in London, and they all are represented by these really big buildings. In the new novel, Something to Hide the building is called Empress State Building. They take care of a number of boroughs in London as they continue to shut down police stations and try to centralize more and more.
Mindy: I obviously use the internet for all of my research, and I've had it at my disposal since I began writing. I cannot imagine how much more complex the research process would have been before the internet, because it's really tough.
Elizabeth: My third novel was called, Well Schooled in Murder. I wanted to write about a British boarding school, and having never been to a British boarding school, I had to learn about them. The best way to learn is always to talk to the people who are there. Where are these schools? And can I find somebody within the school to talk to me? So, I started out by locating a book that was about British schools. And the only copy of this book was at the library at Stanford University. One of my former high school students was a student at Stanford University at the time, so I asked him if he could look at this book and if he could find for me six different boarding schools that might be willing to talk to me. And so he found them and then I got in touch with them the old fashioned way as I wrote them each, the headmasters, a letter to ask if I could come and interview them and see their school. So that's what it was like in those days, where were we before Google Earth? That's an incredible tool.
Mindy: I use it often if I want to understand my setting and it's somewhere I haven't been. All of the work that you just listed off, and that was just to make initial contact.
Elizabeth: And that's how I got the information on the British boarding school system and you know, talk to headmasters, talk to teachers and talk to students. Pretty big tasks to set something like that up first. Oh my gosh, it was really tough.
Mindy: Speaking of specific cases or crimes, how do you go about finding inspiration when you're at the 21st novel in the series? How do you ensure that you're not doing any replication?
Elizabeth: One of the things that is the benefit of writing about London, and especially about England, there are so many diverse locations to be explored and very often it's the location that gives me the inspiration to do the story. For example, in Cornwall, here is a very small part of England that has within it, the surfing community, the hiking community, they have the mining community and they have the fishing community. And so these are all separate walks of life and each of them provides me with inspiration. So when I did Careless In Red, I knew that I wanted to do something that involved the surfing community. Most people would not associate surfing with England, it is a big sport in England. And there are surfing areas all over the coastline, but I figured people really didn't know about that, and so that became the foundation of the novel.
So what happens when I explore a place is that I get suggestions all the time and I get ideas all the time. And sometimes what happens is that somebody will just say something to me. Years ago I was doing a book signing and this woman gave me her book and she said, you need to set a book in Lancashire. I said really, why? And she said because it's the witch country. And so I handed her a piece of paper and said, write down every place you think I should go.
And so sometimes it just happens like this. Someone will say, why haven't you written about? And then I add something to it. And then there are times when I take an area that's really familiar to people like the Lake District and I'll find out something in the Lake District that people probably don't know about. In this particular case, it was these towers that were built to protect people from the marauding Scots who would come across the border. I never knew that that existed. That became part of the lives of the characters in that novel.
Mindy: Yes, you never know when something is going to land in your lap like that and you basically have to be ready. If you could please let my listeners know where they can find you online and where they can find your books.
Elizabeth: My website is Elizabeth George Online dot com. They can follow me on Instagram EGPIX. They can follow me on Twitter at LynleyMysteries and to get the book - wherever you have a bookstore. But it's out now. The book is in your local bookstore, be it large or small.
Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.