Even More Fun With Research

Here's an old one, to remind me that I really do need to get back to painting.

Having turned in the manuscript for the next Hollywood murder mystery just before Christmas, I've been putting together outlines for what I hope will be the next Ben January book (# 21!) and the next Hollywood book (which will take place mostly in the film industry in New York, which was just as much a center of motion picture production in the mid-'20s as Hollywood was, and a lot more fun after hours). Writing up an outline is like pre-writing the book. I, at least, have to figure out what happens, and how; who's the villain, who gets killed, and why. Any murder mystery is actually two stories: the story of the crime itself, and then the story of how Mr. Holmes or Lord Peter or Professor Tamar figures out whodunnit. And, in my case at least, to give a picture of the world, the society, in which such events take place, which is a large part of the fun.

It's one reason I love historicals. How do you tell whodunnit if fingerprinting hasn't been developed? Or if it'll take three months to hear back from Scotland Yard about the guy you suspect is really a serial murderer on the other side of the Atlantic? (Well, the other reason I love historicals is that I just love research. What song WOULD you have been dancing to at a speakeasy on Broadway in November of 1924?)

And because I'm on medication that is making me VERY tired, I've been spending a lot of time doing research-for-fun that has nothing to do with either the Battle of New Orleans or what Long Island looked like in 1924. (F. Scott Fitzgerald never once mentions what the place looked like, in a book that takes place pretty much ENTIRELY on Long Island in 1922). I've added Lucy Worsley's If Walls Could Talk to my list of books to tell me what was going on in the background: Did these people have an icebox or a refrigerator or a clay jug buried in the ground in a corner of the kitchen? Was there a servant sleeping in the bedroom? At what point would there have been indoor plumbing? (Sir Paul McCartney's kid brother writes - not in this book, naturally - of the McCartney house still having an out-house in the 1940s). Would a modern house in Hollywood in 1924 have a shower? (Yes). I love this kind of stuff.

So, If Walls Could Talk gets added to the list of Bill Bryson's At Home, Lesley Lewis's Diary of an English Country House, and Lisa Picard's excellent series about London - not to mention Krista Ball's wonderful What Kings Ate and Wizards Drank, and the whole BBC Farm Series.

In other news, I will be a guest at the Gallifrey Dr. Who convention in Los Angeles in 3 weeks (!), Feb. 16-18 at the LAX Airport Marriott, and at the Los Angeles Vintage Paperback Collectors Show, March 17 (a Sunday), at the Glendale Civic Auditorium. 

In the meantime, be safe out there!