Authors on Authors
Chris Vanier: To start the ball rolling, Cara, why does a Californian resident like yourself write stories set in Paris?
Cara Black: Paris intrigues me, Chris. But you know Benjamin Franklin said ‘all Americans have two countries, one of them is France.’ I grew up near San Francisco with a Francophile father who loved good food and wine. He sent me to a French Catholic school with nuns who taught us archaic French and gave us summer subscriptions to ELLE magazine. Even now people show surprise at my arcane knowledge of Florence Dorleac, Catherine Deneuve’s sister who died young and the first affair between Mireille Darc and Alain Delon.
CV: And how do you research these stories?
CB: Research is the best part of my job. I need to come to Paris and visit the archives, Bibliothéque Nationale, the map room at Chateau Vincennes. I’m a mapaholic. I take members of the Brigade Criminelle out for drinks, ply them wine and even get to visit the shooting range with them. But for the historic aspect, I’ve joined several historical societies in the arrondissements I write about.
CB: Perhaps Aimée’s a bit of my alter ego. But she does things I never could or would do ie climb over rooftops, run in heels over the cobbles (though my Parisian friends do). She’s a lot smarter than I am with computers and has the gene (unlike me) for finding gently worn couture in the flea market. A gene I really wish I had.
CV:When you are researching criminal groups in various parts of Paris, have you ever felt menaced?
CB: I always feel safe in Paris, even late at night walking home from the Metro. But there was one time in Belleville during the day when my friend and I were walking on the boulevard with our children - my son, her daughter - who were about six and seven years old at the time. I remember sketching out the shops, diagraming the street corner for a scene in my book that involved a storefront Mosque next to a halal butcher shop. I wanted to get the location and proximity to the Metro right for the logistics of the scene and what Aimée would see. The second time we walked by a man from the Mosque told me to stop writing/drawing and to move on. I tried to explain that I meant no disrespect but...he interrupted me and said ‘that’s not allowed, we’ve noticed you, move on before we make you leave’. That scared me since I was with my son and I’ve never really figured out what he objected to. But he didn’t want to enlighten me.
CV:Who are your core readers, people who live in Paris, those who visit occasionally, or those who've never been here?
CB: Probably a combination of all these people. Readers tell me it’s like a trip to Paris without the airfare. Some people take my books to Paris and follow ‘Aimée’ on her journeys through the quartiers. Also mystery readers who liked Inspector Maigret novels by Simenon and want a contemporary view of Paris with a female PI who knows computers, is savvy, strong and vulnerable.
CB: So far, ‘pas mal’ has been the response. Which to me is a big compliment. I often run plot lines, procedural issues and details by a retired Brigade Criminelle inspector to check for plausability concerns.
CV:How do you strike a balance between a thoroughly French atmosphere with French vocabulary and a text more comprehensible for Anglophones?
CB: I feel common French words should be sprinkled in the text to add flavor and that feeling of being in Paris. Not too heavy but with a light touch. My publisher SOHO has put the Aimée Leduc Companion guide online to download for free - there’s a glossary of French-English words, interactive maps to the arrondissement where each book takes place, summaries and character lists - it’s fun. Here's the link and it's a free download http://www.sohopress.com/companion.pdf
CV:Aren't you tempted to move your plots closer to the present to become more topical?
CB: Good question. So far Murder in the Marais - the first book - took place in November 1993 and now eleven books later in Murder in Passy we’re only up to November 1997. This four year span saw many changes in France; Chirac’s speech admitting French collaboration with the Germans and apologizing the for first time since the Occupation, truths coming out about the Algerian ‘conflict’ in the 60’s and of course the legacy of Colonial Indochina coming to the fore. It’s a fascinating time forecasting what’s contemporary today, after all the past doesn’t go away. I like that people pay in francs, you could smoke in the cafes and Aimée has to use dial-up. (This is pre-Google, texting and Facebook)
CB: I never thought I’d write a book, or a book set in Paris, much less a mystery series set there. My only qualifications stem from being a library kid in California - we went every week - and thinking one day I wanted to write but not ready for the hard work of doing it. I think all writers are readers. Now eleven books later, I still can’t say I had a master plan but the mystery series with Aimee Leduc has just evolved.
My driving force to write, the story I grew passionate about, was the story which simmered for ten long years and became my first book, Murder in the Marais, I’d heard a story in Paris, in nineteen eighty four, from my friend. We were standing on the cobblestones in front of an old apartment building in the Marais, the old Jewish district, and she pointed to the window. ‘My mother lived there during the German Occupation in World War Two. She had to hide, she wore a yellow star because she was Jewish.’
She told me her mother had been fourteen years old in nineteen forty-three and came home from school one afternoon to find her family gone. No word, no note, no message. Not knowing what else to do she asked the building concierge for help. The concierge kept her presence from the police, furnished her with ration coupons and she waited. Every day she went to school, lived in the apartment, and kept hoping her family would return. In nineteen forty four at Liberation, she searched for her family at the train stations, at the Hotel Lutetia on the Left Bank where the Red Cross had a terminus center for returning deportees and the hundreds of thousands of displaced people. My friend’s mother searched every day for her family, like so many people at the time, only to discover by chance that a woman had seen her sister get off the train at Auschwitz.
That’s all she ever learned. And it touched something in me. I never forgot my friend’s words or wondering how it would feel for a fourteen year old to suffer such loss.
Ten years later when I returned to Paris in nineteen ninety four the story came back to me in full force. I had a young child then and it made me wonder what I would have done if we had lived during that time, what sacrifices would have been required to put food on the table or keep a roof over our head. What things people had to do to survive that they would regret later. It was now fifty years after the war and I wanted to explore the issues of the past, the collaboration era during the war, the grey area of how people survived, perhaps like my friend’s mother did. Find the old stories I sensed lingering in a generation that was leaving us and how war still touched every generation.
Many people didn’t want to discuss the past or the painful memories. So I learned from shuttered looks, the pointed changes in conversation, to discover an era I would find in historical accounts, memoirs and by research with those willing to talk to me. And along the way I was figuring out how I could make the story current, bear on the present day Paris of the nineteen nineties and the remnants of anti-Semitism in the government.
I liked to read mysteries, I liked the format and resolution and along the way figured the detective novel was a great framework to hinge the story. I knew I couldn’t write as a French woman, I can’t even tie my scarf the right way. We know they have a scarf tying gene that Americans don’t have. But I grew up in a Francophile family, I’d lived in Europe when I was younger. So Aimée developed into a character having an American mother and French father. I interviewed three female detectives in Paris who ran their own detective agency and took qualities from each. It was important to me that Aimée be a young, contemporary woman like the Parisian women I know, independent, hip, with a penchant for ‘bad boys’, be a strong female protagonist, have a French fashion sense, wear great clothes and be fierce in her pursuit of justice. The justice that eludes people sometimes in daily life.
CB: Murder in the Marais, my first, holds a special place in my heart and it touches me so much that it has been published in French. But of course, all of my books are my ‘children’ and it’s hard to say you love one more. Each are special, deal with social issues, things I’ve learned and Aimée has grown as a character along the way.
CV:Do you have any advice that you could share with our Paris writers?
CB: Be passionate about what you want to write.
CV:You are currently on a mega book tour in the USA. What's the best and the worst thing about touring? In which cases would you recommend it to writers.
CB:The best part is meeting readers and we all seem to share this love of France. A woman in Wisconsin came up to me after a reading and thanked me for writing about Paris because it brought her son back to her. For his 18th birthday she’d taken him to Paris and during a stormy relationship for once they shared a wonderful exploration and experience of the City. He died the next year, so sad, but she said my books brought that time back to her. I had tears in my eyes.
Worst part - airport food!
CV:What will you write next after having covered the 20 Paris arrondissements?
CB: I’m thinking of a historical mystery set in WWII. But there’s always crime in Marseilles, non?
Cara Black is a San Francisco Library Laureate and a member of the Paris Sociéte Historique in the Marais. Her nationally bestselling and award nominated Aimée Leduc Investigation series has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Hebrew. She's included in the GREAT WOMEN MYSTERY WRITERS by Elizabeth Lindsay 2nd editon published in the UK. Her first three novels in the series MURDER IN THE MARAIS, MURDER IN BELLEVILLE AN MURDER IN THE SENTIER - nominated for an Anthony Award as Best Novel - were published in the UK in 2008 and MURDER IN THE LATIN QUARTER comes out in the UK in 2010. Several of her books have been chosen as BookSense Picks and INDIE NEXT choice by the Amerian Association of Independent Bookstores. The Washington Post listed MURDER IN THE RUE DE PARADIS in the Best Fiction Choices of 2008. MURDER IN THE LATIN QUARTER is a finalist for Best Novel Award from the NCIBA Northern California Independent Booksellers Association. (You can follow Cara on twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/carablack and facebook at http://www.facebook.com/cara.black1)
Christopher Vanier, the author of a 2010 memoir "Caribbean Chemistry", was born on the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies and now lives in Paris. He won the Caribbean-wide sesquicentennial Lincoln Essay Prize, graduated from Cambridge University in 1965, followed by a Ph.D. from Syracuse University. His non-fiction writing has won him several awards.
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