Spotlight Profile
January/February 2009
Carola Dunn, author of the Daisy Dalrymple mystery series, was born in London and grew up in the Buckinghamshire village where William Penn is buried. With a degree in Russian and French, and no desire to take up a career, she set off around the world. She made it half way, to Fiji, before turning back to marry an American.
Bringing up her son kept her busy for several years. When the dreadful moment could no longer be postponed, she went to work in market research. Thereafter, among others, she had jobs in child care, construction, building design, and writing definitions for a dictionary of science and technology. In 1979, she sat down at the kitchen table and wrote her first book, a Regency romance, longhand in an exercise book. When, much to her surprise, it sold, she quickly wrote another. Since then she has produced thirty-two Regency romances and, since moving to Oregon, 17 mysteries published by St Martin's Minotaur, the Daisy Dalrymple series, set in England in the 1920s. The latest is Black Ship. The Bloody Tower will be out in paperback in February of 2009. Several of the series have been IMBA bestsellers. The first in a new series of Cornish mysteries, Manna from Hades, will be her 50th book.
Carola attributes her success in historical fiction to having failed history at school. On the other hand, she also failed Domestic Science, which has not led to any expertise or delight in housework--she'd rather weed than vacuum. Now a grandmother, she lives in Eugene Oregon with her large black dog, Willow, who exercises her by the Willamette River daily. Visit her website: www.geocities.com/CarolaDunn/.
IC: Your seventeenth Daisy Dalrymple mystery, Black Ship, recently came out. Tell us about it.
CD: Black Ship is set in London in 1926. Well, that's a bit misleading: four scenes are set on a "black ship", which is what the US Coast Guard called the ships of rumrunners. My sleuth, Daisy, and her Scotland Yard detective husband move to a new house. Their charming new next-door neighbours are a wine-merchant and his family. An old acquaintance from their stay in New York turns up, now a Prohibition agent hunting for British shippers of wines and spirits to the US. Then the body of an unknown American is found in the communal garden, the Prohibition agent disappears, and Alec is put in charge of the case - if only to try to keep Daisy from getting involved. Of course she's soon in the thick of the investigation.
Researching for this book, I learnt a great deal about rumrunners on the New England coast. I don't know much American history, but I bet I know more on that subject than most Americans!
IC: The Daisy Dalrymple series is very popular. Why do you think this character resonates with readers?
CD: I hear from a lot of readers that they regard Daisy as a friend with whom they enjoy spending time. They also enjoy seeing her relationship with DCI Alec Fletcher develop over time. I get enquiries about other characters, too, both those who reappear regularly and those who make occasional appearances, especially Alec's daughter Belinda and his sergeant, Tom Tring.
Also, the twenties is a period that interests people, a time of change when women were finding new roles, between the dark times of the first World War and the Depression. Though Daisy has an aristocratic background, she isn't a spoiled debutante. She has to deal with the realities of the aftermath of war, including having lost her fiancé and brother, and of having to earn her own living, not at all what she was brought up to expect. So the escapism of the books is tempered by Daisy's having to face many of the problems we're all familiar with.
Yet you can still read a Daisy Dalrymple mystery in bed without having nightmares!
IC: You also have a new series of Cornish mysteries. What can you tell us about them?
CD: The new series is set in the 1960s-70s. The first book, Manna From Hades, will be out in the spring. My sleuth is Eleanor Trewyn, a widow in her 60s who worked with her husband for a large international charity, travelling all over the world. When he died and she retired, she bought a cottage in a Cornish fishing village. She's turned the ground floor into a charity shop and she lives above it. Having no head for business, she leaves managing the shop to the vicar's wife, while she drives about the countryside collecting donations to sell. Her niece, Megan Pencarrow, is a detective sergeant with the local police (always useful to know a cop!). Her next-door neighbour, Nick Gresham, is an artist and a good friend. In Manna From Hades, Eleanor and Jocelyn, the vicar's wife, find a body in the shop's stockroom.
IC: What was it that drew you to Cornwall as a setting for your mystery series?
CD: In my long-ago youth, my godmother kept a caravan in a farmer's field in North Cornwall, with a view over the Atlantic and two spectacular headlands, Cambeak and Penkenna. We used to stay there every summer and often in the Easter holidays as well. Now my sister lives in a different part of the county, north of Plymouth on the west bank of the Tamar. So all my life I've had ties to Cornwall, and many memories of its different aspects. In fact I've already set 3 books there, one on Bodmin Moor and two (a mystery and a Regency) at Cotehele, a fifteenth century fortified manor house near my sister's home. The new series is based in a fictional village that's a cross between Port Isaac and Boscastle, both of which I've visited many times.
Also, it's a beautiful and fascinating county that many Americans have heard of and are interested in. That doesn't hurt, as my publishers and my primary audience are American.
IC: You're originally from London, but you've travelled extensively to locations all over the globe. What are some of your most notable adventures?
CD: Oh gosh, don't get me going!
There was the trip to Israel with a school friend between school and university. We went by train to Venice, then on the deck of a Greek boat to Haifa—I mean sleeping on the deck, along with a crowd of other people. One night a family of Greeks near us broke a huge bottle of wine which swilled all over the deck, soaking our sleeping bags. The smell never quite went away.
The most nerve-racking was probably my trip to Yugoslavia, as it was then, in 1968. I went with a student group. As it happened, we left London the very day the Soviets marched into Czechoslovakia. All sorts of rumours were flying at Victoria Station. People said the Yugoslav border was closed. We crossed the Channel to Belgium. More rumours flew about the train, one of which was that the trip was cancelled and we had to get off in Brussels and go home. I didn't hear that one till we were beyond Brussels, but three members of the group actually did get off the train and we never saw them again. The rest of us had a great time.
Then there was my first trip to Russia. In Gurzuf I met a group of young Russians and hung out with them. We rented rowboats and went out on the Black Sea to a couple of small islands. At one point all the boats stopped for a discussion of exactly where we were going. As we bobbed on the swells, my stomach grew more and more unhappy. And of course my two years' study of the language did NOT enable me to explain that I was going to be seasick any minute. Fortunately Sasha took one look at my green face and headed back to shore. I can claim to have been seasick in everything from a rowboat on the Black Sea, to a yacht on the coast of Belgium, to a Greek passenger boat on the Mediterranean, to a transatlantic liner.
The funniest incident happened on my second trip to Russia, in 1967, again with a student group. When we reached the USSR border, we all had to get out of the train (the rail gauge changes) and go through customs etc. The guards opened all our bags and rooted through them. There was an Irish lad with us who had all the James Bond books in his suitcase. He grew paler and paler as the men took out book after book, staring at the lurid covers, flipping through the text. Then they came to From Russia with Love, pointed at the title, muttered, and took it away to consult some other official. We thought Sean was going to faint. However, they brought it back and let him proceed with his collection intact. Three weeks later, we were in the train from Dover to London when Sean came tramping along the corridor wearing full Soviet Army uniform, complete with cap and Red Star badge. He'd acquired it from a soldier in exchange for the James Bond books.
We lost three members of that group, too, the other three Irishmen, who'd been drinking so hard they stayed in the wrong part of the train on the way home and were carried off to Paris instead of to the Channel port.
I could go on and on…but I won't.
IC: It sounds like you have fodder for many books! You set yours in a variety of international locations, and in several different time periods. Obviously, you have a lot of personal experiences to draw on. What other sorts of research do you do?
CD: I do loads of research. As well as the period and location, each book makes me learn something new. My latest curious discovery is that St Vincent Ferrer is the patron saint of plumbers. Bet you didn't know that!
I love to write about places I've been—St Petersburg, Yugoslavia, Istanbul, Costa Rica (it took some creativity to write a Regency set partly in Costa Rica!), etc. as well as many different parts of England. But it's not always possible. In the days before the Internet, it wasn't always easy to research a place, so inventing a setting was often a good alternative. Nowadays it's so easy to Google practically anywhere if you can't go there. All the same, imaginary settings—as long as they fit into the general area of the country you're using—can be useful. For Manna from Hades, I've invented a small Cornish port so that I can arrange it to suit my story, but it's very like real places I know.
When I'm writing about some particular place like the Tower of London (The Bloody Tower) or the Natural History Museum ( Rattle His Bones), I do go specifically for research, even though I visited long ago as a child. In both those cases I was in touch with members of the staff, the librarian and the archivist respectively, before I went, and they answered what must have seemed to them like half a million questions by email. The archivist showed me around the non-public areas of the museum, the back stairs, the basement, the research areas. The librarian had waiting for me a box of papers and books she thought would be useful, including the Day-Book of the lieutenant governor of the Tower for the period when Daisy was there! Both also provided me with plans of the buildings.
IC: You've written a number of regencies in addition to Daisy and your Cornish mysteries. Do you use a different approach for these different types of writing? What similarities and differences are there?
CD: I was asked about this a few months ago. That was when I realised that 4 out of my first 5 Regencies have mystery elements: a girl with amnesia who turns up among strangers; a kidnapping and attempted murder/suicide; three attempted murders; smugglers and secret tunnels.
The similarities: both require well-developed characters who engage the readers' sympathies and act in believable ways. Differences: mysteries are more difficult if you're fair to your readers. You have to plant enough clues and red herrings to give them a chance to work out whodunnit without giving away the answer too easily. Incidentally, I had two reviews of the same book, one of which said the murderer was too obvious, the other said it kept him/her guessing to the last page. So I must be doing something right, don't you think?
IC: Why do you think you're attracted to these particular genres?
CD: I like a story that has a satisfactory ending. In romance, that means a couple who will, of course, live happily ever after. In mystery it's whodunnit and to me equally important, why (That's one reason I don't want to read or write about serial killers or murderers who turn out to be insane—their motives are incomprehensible to a normal person). I like writing historical fiction because I'm an escapist and one can look at the past through rose-coloured spectacles that simply don't work in the present. Yes, bad things happened then, but they're long ago and far away and softened by the passage of time. Regencies rather than any other kind of historical romance because I adore Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, and because I like humour in my romances. And in my mysteries, come to that.
IC: When you read for pleasure, what do you read?
CD: Mysteries old and new, mostly but not exclusively British; popular science, especially about the way the brain works - I'm reading Mirroring People right now; most of the daily newspaper (I have to have my funnies fix, not to mention Dear Abby); anything I find on the Large Print shelves at the library that looks interesting.
IC: Do you have a regular writing schedule or a particular writing ritual? Do you generally write in the same place every day?
CD: I wrote my first 4-5 books longhand, the very first at the kitchen table. I found it impossible to write on a typewriter without going off the end of the line or the bottom of the page. I'd be too involved in my story to notice the warning bells. So my first computer - 256K RAM, a 10 MB hard drive, 5 ¼" floppy drive—was sheer bliss. I used a word processing program called Volkswriter, which I gave up very reluctantly when DOS disappeared. I haven't yet acquired a desktop and I'll be damned if I'm going back to pen and paper, so I write in my home office. That's not to say I don't have little bits of paper scattered around the house ready for recording stray thoughts and ideas.
Most of the time I write about 6 hours a day, 6 days a week, though as any writer knows the creative process continues 24/7, awake or asleep. If I don't get started in the morning, I find it very hard to get going in the afternoon.
IC: What about editing? How extensively do you edit? Do you edit as you go or complete the whole manuscript first?
CD: I very much edit as I go. I've tried writing drafts, simply because the majority of authors seem to do it that way, but I find I can't go on till I've got a sentence, a paragraph, a passage pretty much in its final shape. Of course, I do a final edit of the whole ms. After finishing, I print out and try to put it aside for three or four weeks, not thinking about it at all. It's amazing how much difference that space makes to one's ability to catch errors and inconsistencies. But I rarely have to change much at that point.
IC: What's your favorite part of the writing process?
CD: Research. That's pure fun. The actual writing is fun when it's going smoothly, but even then it's hard work, and when it's not going smoothly it's hellish.
IC: What do your protagonists have in common with you and with each other?
CD: They're nice people (at least, I like to think I'm a nice person). If I'm going to spend hours, days, weeks, months, and in Daisy's case years with someone, I want it to be someone whose company I enjoy.
IC: What's the best compliment you've ever gotten about one of your books?
CD: I love to hear from readers saying Daisy has helped them through difficult times. For instance, one in California told me she was going to spend a couple of weeks with a friend who was dying of cancer, and she took all the Daisy books to reread while she was there. Someone else wrote to say he'd had a terrible summer and only Daisy had pulled him through. A woman with 18 foster kids, many mentally or physically disabled, wrote to say she didn't really have time for reading (!) but she stayed up till 2 or 3 a.m. to finish a Daisy book (though, come to think of it, I don't know if that could be classed as helping her; how on earth did she make it through the next day?).
Quite recently a reader told me she passed on all my Daisy books to her daughter, who "typically only reads mysteries where she considers the sleuth to be 'a fundamentally decent, intelligent person I would not mind feeding lunch to.'" That was a nice one!
IC: Is there any one of your books that is particularly near and dear to your heart?
CD: They are my children. I don't have favourites. Except I always have a soft spot for the one I just sent to my editor.
IC: What has been the challenging part about being a full-time author?
CD: The increasing emphasis on self-promotion. I hate it. That's not to say I don't enjoy talking to readers. I go to occasional conferences and sign locally and at West Coast mystery bookstores regularly, but I would hate to have to tour the country, even if my publisher paid for it (perhaps fortunately, they haven't offered!).
IC: You're a very prolific writer. What advice can you give other members who are writers?
CD: I like Somerset Maugham's advice: "There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are."
I also tend to use the saying: There are three qualities a successful author needs, Talent, Luck, and Persistence. You can get away with two of the three. The only one you control is Persistence.
IC: What advice can you give members who are primarily readers?
CD: Don't judge a book by the cover copy, let alone the cover art.
IC: What one thing would you like people to know about you and your books?
CD: I had a review a while back in the Salem OR Statesman-Journal. It began: "Carola Dunn of Eugene must have an enormous amount of fun writing her mysteries. Her readers certainly have fun." I wouldn't mind having that on my gravestone.
IC: You're in the spotlight. Is there anything you'd like to add or talk about before we end the interview?
CD: I love to hear from readers. There's an email link on my website: www.geocities.com/CarolaDunn . Do come and visit. I blog Tuesdays at TheLadyKillers: http://tinyurl.com/66q19u. Two FREE Daisy short stories, originally published in anthologies, are available at www.BelgraveHouse.com.
And lastly, my Regencies are now available as ebooks at www.RegencyReads.com.
This interview was conducted for SinC-IC
by Elizabeth Terrell.
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