Meet Darcy Graves

Thanks to Partners in Crime blog tours for the opportunity to interview author Darcy Graves about The Harlot of St. Cecelia's. Check out my review next week. Don't miss the first book in the Inspector Garrett mystery series - complete with buttoned up Englishman, curious American expat and beautiful French actress. Don't miss the giveaway at the end of this post.

Jodi: I’m with you on the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Love it! If you could be one detective from the Golden Age, who would you be?

Darcy: Lord Peter Wimsey, without question. He’s just so cool and classy. I love the combination of intelligence, charm, wit, and that slightly detached air he has. He can move comfortably through all kinds of social spaces, and he always seems to know more than he lets on. There are probably detectives I’d trust more with my life, but if I actually had to be one, I’d choose Wimsey.

Jodi: How did you make the leap from loving detective fiction to writing it?

Darcy: The Harlot of St. Cecelia’s was actually my first mystery novel. I’ve been a huge mystery reader for as long as I can remember, especially mysteries set in England. I love the Golden Age writers, but also Martha Grimes, Elizabeth George, Ellis Peters, Jacqueline Winspear, and many others.

At some point, it became very simple: I loved the mysteries written during the Golden Age, and I wished there were more of them. But obviously there won’t be, short of time travel. So I decided to write one.

I didn’t want to simply imitate those books, though. I wanted to capture some of what I love about them, the atmosphere, the social observation, the puzzle, while creating characters who felt fully alive to me in the twenty-first century.

Jodi: Why do you think everyone loves an amateur detective?

Darcy: I think amateur detectives are appealing because they let the reader imagine, “Maybe I could do this.” A police detective has training, authority, and access to evidence. I certainly don’t. An amateur has curiosity, intelligence, and usually a very personal reason for refusing to leave something alone. It gives you the sense that even ordinary people can control extraordinary things.

 Jodi: Is it difficult walking the line between making your character a person who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and giving them enough knowledge that they can actually solve the crime before the professionals?

Darcy: That balance is definitely tricky. Eden Brior is a librarian, so she’s observant, good at finding information, and very comfortable following a question until she gets an answer. Meg Drake is confident in her own skin, socially, and getting in people’s heads. Those are useful investigative skills without turning them into someone who mysteriously knows how to perform an autopsy or interrogate a suspect.

I also didn’t want Inspector Garrett to be incompetent simply so Eden or Meg could look clever. He’s very good at his job. Eden can sometimes see things he can’t because people speak differently to her, or because she approaches the problem from another direction. Ideally, they all have something the others lack.

Jodi: Why did you decide to set your first book in London? Have you lived in London?

Darcy: I’ve never lived in London, although I certainly wish I had.

I chose it partly because so much of the fiction I love is rooted there, but also because 1920s London gives you this wonderful collision of old and new. You have ancient institutions, rigid social structures, and houses that have been standing for centuries, alongside women entering new professions, changing attitudes after the Great War, new technology, new freedoms, and people trying to figure out what the world is supposed to look like now.

When I was researching this book and its sequel, I made several research trips to London. I spent time in libraries looking through newspapers on microfilm, visited house museums, walked neighborhoods, and generally tried to understand how people actually moved through and inhabited the city.

Jodi: From the “Book 1” in the title, I’m guessing that more adventures are in store for Eden Brior. Can you give us a sneak peek at what comes next?

Darcy: Absolutely. The second book is called The Treasure of Mayfair. Eden, Inspector Garrett, and Simon Cross all return. Meg just a little, though she’ll be back in later books.

This time, a Bright Young Thing, a reporter from Mayfair, is murdered during a treasure hunt in the country with some friends, and Garrett is called in to consult. The victim and suspects are friends of Simon Cross, and he has a reason to pull Eden in. The mystery becomes tangled up in family history, money, old grudges, and the War.

I’m having great fun with this murderer, actually. The Harlot of St. Cecelia’s is very character-driven, but the villain is pretty apparent for some readers. I think the puzzle itself is a lot more devious this time. I’m hoping readers will have a harder time guessing who did it.

Jodi: I love that your next book is getting trickier! Plus the treasure hunt aspect sounds so full of possibilities. You live with a daughter, two cats and one dog. That’s a lot of distractions. Of your four housemates, who would you say interrupts your writing the most?

Darcy: My dog Merial interrupts me most often, but my daughter interrupts me most substantially.

Shel is seventeen and will be going off to college fairly soon. It’s just the two of us, so if she comes in and wants to spend time with me, the writing gets put away. There will always be another chapter to write. There won’t always be another evening when she wanders in and wants to talk.

The cats, on the other hand, mostly enable me. They think sitting beside a person who has been motionless at a computer for several hours is a most excellent arrangement. No notes.

Jodi: Yes, my cats usually enjoy sharing an abode with a silent writer. But I occasionally have outbursts of frustration and they definitely DO NOT like that. Is there any other type of writing you like to do?

Darcy: I do, although I keep the genres under separate pen names because they are very different. I write YA dystopian science fiction under one other pen name and under a third, I write spicy Greek mythology retellings.  

The separation is partly practical. I would hate for someone who enjoyed a fairly traditional 1920s murder mystery to innocently wander into one of the smutty mythology books and need therapy.

They’re very different kinds of stories, although I suspect there are things I return to in all of them: complicated characters, questions about power and identity, and people discovering that the story they have been telling themselves may not be entirely true.

Jodi: I'm always fascinated by authors that stretch into several genres. As an author, I'm sure you enjoy the change of pace. Is there an author that you would love to meet? Or who is one mystery author you think everyone should read, in addition to you, of course?

Darcy: Ngaio Marsh is probably my favorite Golden Age mystery writer, so I would happily recommend her to anyone who hasn’t read her.

But I also read a great deal around the mystery genre rather than strictly inside it, particularly when I’m writing these books. I read history, biographies, memoirs, newspapers, and fiction actually written during the 1920s. Sometimes the most useful book for understanding a mystery setting isn’t a mystery at all.

If I could meet a writer from the period, I’d have a dangerously long list.

Jodi: What do you do when you aren’t writing?

Darcy: I love museums, and I love to travel. In fact, that’s probably where most of my money goes.

I’m also a huge reader, although oddly enough I try not to read fiction while I’m actively drafting. I discovered years ago that I’m a little too susceptible to another writer’s rhythm and voice. There was an unfortunate incident involving P. G. Wodehouse that shall remain unremarked upon. (Which required some serious rewriting.) So when I’m writing, I tend to read history, biography, research material, newspapers, and other things adjacent to the book instead.

Jodi: One final thought, Darcy Graves—what a great name for the author of murder mysteries. Pen name or did fate just know that one day you would be writing murder mysteries?

Darcy: It is a pen name! Believe it or not, the murder connection was completely accidental!

I chose Darcy Graves a very long time ago, partly because I liked the idea that someday I might sit on a bookstore shelf somewhere between Elizabeth George and Martha Grimes, both of whom I loved.

But “Graves” was primarily a nod to Robert Graves, who wrote I, Claudius and the extraordinary First World War memoir Goodbye to All That. That memoir eventually became one of the books that really helped me understand and develop Simon Cross, a First World War veteran in this series.

Only later did it occur to me that “Darcy Graves” is an almost absurdly awesome name for someone writing murder mysteries. Sometimes you just get lucky.

Jodi: And folks, that is how you create a great pen name and a great origin story.

More About Darcy Graves

Darcy Graves grew up in Boston and holds an MA in English history and a BS in copywriting. A marketing content writer for over thirty years, she brings to her work a deep love of the golden age of detective fiction — particularly Agatha Christie and P.D. James — and the whimsy of P.G. Wodehouse.

Darcy lives in the Berkshires with her daughter, two ragdoll cats, and a very naughty terrier named Merial. The Harlot of St. Cecelia's is her first novel.

Catch Up With Darcy Graves

Website: DarcyGravesAuthor.com

Instagram - @darcygravesauthor

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