Pushing the Boundaries of Mysteries with Sulari Gentill

It was actually my husband who just suggested it one day;  I have another series that's mainly for young adults called the Hero Trilogy that was released in Australia, but not in the US.  I wouldn't have said that I was an expert in the genre at all. But I just started writing. 

So somehow over the years, reading and watching television and movies, I have absorbed the form of crime writing. It seemed like a very natural way to write. The wonderful thing about mystery is that it allows you to give your characters something to do. You don't have to come up with some artificial contrived reason for them to be in the same room, they are investigating a murder. 

But after several years of writing in that genre, I feel the need to push the envelope and to write something that's truly novel. I suppose that's where Crossing the Lines and The Woman in the Library came from. It's my need to actually do something in a way that nobody else has done before. Now, you can't be sure that that is that nobody else has ever written a book like those two before, but I haven't read them. 

I did want to actually twist not just the plot, but the structure of the novel itself. I also quite love removing that fourth wall and talking directly to the reader. So what metafiction is is the ability to say to the reader, “Let's talk about the fact that this is a story.”

So we started, but the problem is that Larry's a much, much better researcher than I am. I tend to sort of sketch things and he does an oil painting. So not only would he answer my question, but he would also send me maps, menus, and weather reports.

Then one day, there was a murder a couple blocks from where he was staying. And he thought “Sulari is a mystery writer, it might be useful for her to know what an American crime scene looks like.” So he took himself off down to the crime scene after the body had been removed and he took footage of the crime scene.

So this email comes in from Larry with a movie file attachment and it opens up to a crime scene. My husband happened to be standing behind me at the time and he said, “Gee, I hope Larry's not killing people so he can send your research.”  He certainly wasn't. But it did strike me as a really interesting idea for a novel. Of course, I didn't cast Larry as a psychopath without knowing. I told him what I was doing. 

Thank you to Sulari Gentill for a wonderful interview and delightful books!