The hardest part of writing crime fiction has turned out to
be something I didn’t expect, and something I’ve only now, after nine novels,
started to think about. Working out some of the clues in the third Anita Ray
novel, For the Love of Parvati,
taught me some important lessons about keeping up with my characters.
.jpg)
In graduate school I read through all of Agatha Christie’s Miss
Marple novels without ever being troubled by the woman’s age, or her failure to
age along with the world around her. The elderly woman of the 1930s accepting
invitations to weekend parties in the country was the elderly woman of the
1950s exploring the new housing developments on the edge of the village. In
contrast I also read Ruth Rendell’s Inspector Wexford series, and enjoyed the
subplot of the inspector’s personal life, including the challenges of dealing
with his growing children.
When I started writing the Mellingham series with Chief of
Police Joe Silva, I hadn’t considered how his life would change. He was a man
in his fifties when he walked onto the page, and I thought I would find enough
murderous business while he was in that decade to not worry about anything
else. I was wrong. He fell in love at the end of the third book in the series, Family Album, and his beloved came with
a ready-made family.
Things have evolved differently for Anita Ray. I hadn’t
given much thought to her getting married and starting a family, but I assumed
that would happen, and was waiting for the right setting to develop. But again,
I was wrong. Instead of the traditional passage, Anita becomes more deeply
involved in photography. She appeared as a photographer in the first line of
the first story, and in every adventure she’s using her camera to solve crimes.
Anita uses a Pentax because I use one. I have my eye on
another camera but that will have to wait. Meanwhile I find myself trying to
keep up with Anita. She’s curious, so she has opened her camera to see if
there’s anything wrong inside. Professional guidebooks always warn against this,
but Anita doesn’t take advice. And apart from the advice for beginners,
professional photographers like to know their equipment intimately. This was a
challenge for me, but I rose to it and opened my camera and took a look inside.
Anita looks at everyone and everything as though she were
looking through a lens. This gives her distance and a sense of the narrative of
what she’s looking at. To her everything is an image, and everyone is telling a
story.
For a while Anita has had a gentleman friend, someone her
aunt doesn’t approve of. This has provided me with numerous opportunities to
play with Auntie Meena’s prejudices and frustrated dreams as a mother and
marriage broker. But the man in question is leaving Anita in Book 4, and will
not return as her beloved.
Anita runs a photography gallery, which brings her a modest
income and gets her out of her aunt’s Hotel Delite, with its attendant duties
and mini crises. I have mounted two photography exhibits for a local library
gallery, so I know how much work it takes. I’ve also submitted to juried shows
(and been accepted for a few).
I’m keeping up with Anita, but just barely. For each story I
have to learn about and do more with my camera. Usually when writers talk about
characters getting away from them, they mean the characters say unexpected
things. With Anita, she veers off in directions as a photographer that make me
scramble to keep up. She forces me to learn, and perhaps in the end I’ll be as
good a photographer as I think she is.
For more about Susan and the Anita Ray series, including links to her books, go to http://www.susanoleksiw.com
