Jessy Randall
Carol Berg writes fantasy novels full of murder and mystery.
I recently heard her speak at an Authors' Day event in Colorado Springs and found her thoughtful and
engaging. I wanted to know more about the mystery side of her work.
Q: You've published thirteen novels. At what point in your writing career did
you feel like you were really a writer?
I’ve felt like "a person who spends a lot of time
writing" since halfway through my software engineering career, when an
engineering friend persuaded me to exchange email letters "in
character." That was so much fun
that I wrote novels for nine years, just for the fun of it, never imagining
anyone could want to read any of it. But
I didn't call myself a writer in those days. For better or worse, I didn't do that until I started getting paid for
it.
But if the real question is when did I come to think of
myself as one of those people whose books I've read my whole life...well, just
between you and me, I still feel like
a bit of an imposter. I'm not one of
these people who's imagined myself a writer since I was three years old. Writing happened to me late, after I'd done a
lot of different things: teaching, parenting, engineering. And it's taken a while to convince myself
that it's not just a fluke. But it's certainly
true, that when you start getting emails from readers, telling their reactions
to your stories and which characters are their favorites - that makes you feel
like maybe, yeah, you are really legit.
Q: Your books take place in a medieval kind of world, a world without private
eyes, police detectives, guns, or car chases. How does this affect the murder
mystery parts of your books?
All of us who've read novels like Ellis Peters' Brother
Cadfael stories know that you can create wonderful, believable murder
investigations in historical settings.
Observation, logic, information gathering, research, perceptive
interviews, shaping a theory of the crime from collected evidence—all those
techniques translate well, whether the victim is poisoned with herbs, stabbed
with a poignard, or shot with a 45.
The trick with a fantasy/mystery crossover like my novel, The
Spirit Lens, is the role of magic. One
of the worst sins a fantasy writer can commit is allowing magic to solve too
many problems, or, heaven forbid, lack rules, boundaries, or consequences. I did not want to write CSI Collegia Magica,
where magic could come up with instant identifications or replace autopsies or
fingerprint analysis. (CSI is a lot like unrestrained magic.)
For the most part, my investigators use ordinary observation
and knowledge to formulate their theories of the crime. For example, a student of magic turns up dead
after going missing for several months.
She has died from a stab wound, but she is also emaciated and marked
with bruised circles – cupping marks – as result from the practice of bleeding. As the marks were all over her body, this was
more than just some primitive attempt at healing. Someone had a use for her blood, but didn’t
want to kill her. In the Collegia Magica
world, the blood of a sorcerer has power when used in formulating (wicked)
enchantments. The tips of the dead
girl's fingers were also removed – which tells my investigators that she had
worked some magic for her murderers and they didn’t want that magic identified,
because one of the "rules of magic" in this world is that every
sorcerer leaves a trace of his or her own personality on any spell worked.
Magical forensics do have a place as well. My double agent sorcerer has the skill to
take apart enchantments to reveal their purpose, the materials used in the
work, and how the particular enchantment can change the nature of its
object. Like a forensics specialist
doing chemical analysis, he can determine, for example, that an arrow used in
an attempted assassination "is an implement of death, precisely made from
living wood, steel, and poison.
Splintered now, but made to fly straight, to
penetrate…everything." It can
penetrate armor, in fact, which changes the meaning of the actions surrounding
the crime. It is very much fun to come
up with the techniques and their usefulness - and their limits.
Q: Since I'm a librarian, I'm always curious about research that writers do
for their books. You mentioned the importance of doing research for your
fantasy series. What kind of research do you do? Do you have any help with that
side of things? Can you give an example of research that ended up influencing
the plot (or characters, or setting) of a book or books?
One of the pleasures of writing fantasy is getting to create
an entire world as the background for a story.
But I can't just throw anything together to make a mishmash. I want to make readers feel as if the people
and places I write about really exist.
To make a coherent and realistic world, I need to give thought to
everything from climate and geography to history, religion, politics, and social
and family structures. But then again, I am not
a person who likes to do months and months of research before beginning to
write. So I always begin with just
enough research to be able to set the opening scenes. I need to get the feel of the era I'm trying
to create, and a sense of the local geography, weather, and customs in my
particular version of the world.
For my Lighthouse Duet, I wanted to begin with my renegade
hero taking sanctuary from famine, civil war, and a winter that doesn't end in
an approximation of a 12th century monastery.
So first off, I spent some time reading How the Irish Saved
Civilization and A World Lit Only By Fire. I browsed the internet, which has a treasure
trove of plans of Cistercian monasteries in Britain and journals of daily life
in the monasteries. I also did a little
reading about the Little Ice Age in Europe in the 17th century, and about the
geography of Germany
- since it’s easier to get the geography and climate to make sense when they’re
based on a real place - and about medieval maps. I had decided that I wanted my renegade's obnoxious
family to be a family of cartographers. As it happened my hero's grandfather had
produced a famous book of maps that supposedly could lead one into the realm of
angels, if one knew how to invoke the particular magic of the map.
As I moved on through the first book, Flesh and Spirit,
I needed to give Valen tasks in the monastery, which led to reading about food
and recipes of the era, about beer-making, about stripping a pig (I can show
you a step-by-step how-to!), about manuscript illumination, and making
ink. Most of my research goes into writing
just a few evocative details to give the feel of the time. Some goes into the "business" a
character is occupied with as a conversation takes place. You would never want to burden a book with
everything you can learn about monasteries or stripping pigs! Later on in the series, as I developed my own
version of the fae, who dance in the moonlight for a very special purpose, I wanted
to know more about rigorous dance training – so I read a wonderful book called
Mao’s Last Dancer – and I watched White Nights with Mikhail Baryshnikov, and other
ballet movies.
For the Collegia Magica books, set several centuries later
in a different world, I spent a lot of time with scientific timelines. Because I create my own worlds, I feel like I
can adjust the time of certain discoveries, as long as the prerequisites are in
place. I replicated both Foucault’s
pendulum and Isaac Newton's parlor demonstration of splitting light through
prisms as features of the "Grand Exposition of Science and Magic,"
which is where our mystery takes a sudden deadly turn. I also researched blindness when one of my
investigators was left blind by a villain's enchantment, visiting medical sites
and even discovering a blog where newly blind discussed their experiences. Networking is part of research as well. I have a friend who is partially sighted, and
she passed my questions on to a man who became profoundly blind at just the
same age as my character. There is
nothing like having a real person at hand to answer questions.
I manage my own research, though I'll always use the
recommendations of other friends, writers, and librarians about where I can
find a good dictionary of swear words or such like.
Q: What's the best: getting the idea for a book, working on the manuscript,
finishing the manuscript, selling the manuscript, holding the published book in
your hands, or, in your case, winning various and sundry awards for a book? You
can only pick one.
All of the above are wonderful. But the best is when you hear from a reader
who says she stayed up much too late because she couldn't put it down, or when
a young man walks up to your signing table at a convention and says he pulled
one of your books out of a box of donated books in Iraq and the story both took
him away from a place he didn't want to be, and made him feel better about why
he was there. Nothing compares to that.
Q: What's the worst job you've ever had?
Most likely the semester where I was teaching three sections
of 10th grade plane geometry and two sections of 9th grade algebra, comprising
about 185 students total. That was rugged. But then again, I actually enjoyed the math
and the teaching. I just wasn't ready
for the teenagers, being barely not a teenager myself! Mostly I’ve been very lucky about jobs.
Q: What do you like to eat for
breakfast?
Most days it’s cereal and fruit:
strawberries, blackberries, or - the best - Colorado peaches. Occasionally it’s oatmeal
and blueberries. But on a frosty winter
morning, my Southern roots cry for satisfaction, and nothing does the job like
homemade biscuits, sausage, and scrambled eggs from our friend Dave's happy
chickens. And always, always, as I sit
down to write, I have a cup of Raspberry Royale black tea in hand.
Q: You mentioned in your talk that you love mysteries. Who are your favorite
mystery authors?
I've loved mysteries since Nancy
Drew days. Probably my all time favorite
is Dick Francis. I am not a horse person
at all, but I marvel at how he introduces a sympathetic heroic main character
in about ten words and draws us into an adventure so smoothly. He was a master at spare prose. I also love Dorothy Sayers, Tony Hillerman,
P.D. James, Ellis Peters, Elizabeth George, and Charles Todd. All different, but all entertaining.
Q: You mentioned that the main character in one of your
books (or series?) is a librarian -- could you talk a bit about that --
obviously I love that!
Coming from a family of teachers, librarians, musicians, and
engineers, I often look to those professions for my heroes and heroines. I wanted to set my Novels of the Collegia
Magica in a world experiencing an explosion of scientific discovery and
exploration, much like our early 17th century.
In our history, this was the age of Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Champlain, and
Sir Francis Drake. It was the time of
Sir Francis Bacon, the philosopher credited with devising the scientific
method, who once said, "Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the
unlearned to be magical."
My narrator Portier de Savin-Duplais really wants to become
a sorcerer. He has the intelligence, the
knowledge, the dedication, and the blood inheritance, but he just can't make
enchantments come together. Determined
to discover why, he accepts the position of the librarian at a collegia magica
– a school of magic. He becomes an
authority on the history and practice of magic – and a whole lot of other
things besides. Nine years later, someone
tries to assassinate the king of Sabria. The king goes looking for someone to investigate the matter, and he
recalls a very distant (and poor) cousin. Yes, our librarian. So he summons Portier and offers him the job. The inquiry must be secret, because the last
man who tried to look into matters has vanished. And the king requires an investigator
familiar with magic, because the evidence left from the attempted assassination
implicates a sorcerer doing Very Ugly Things.
Portier doesn't feel he’s capable. "Yes, I've read widely," he
says. “But who would ever separate knowledge of sorcery from its practice?” But the king replies: "Skills can be
bought. Knowledge takes much longer to
acquire, and the ability to question, analyze, interpret, and deduce longer
yet. The capacity for loyalty is born in
a man, reinforced, I believe, with family connection. I believe you the fit person to pursue a
confidential, objective enquiry into a matter of sorcery..."
Portier takes the job, and gets a whole lot more than he
bargained for.
Q: Now, a question for our readers. Here's a drawing of Portier de Savin-Duplais by one of Berg's many fans. Ain't the internet grand?
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