Capturing the Small Picture

Though the official release date for Her Deadly Mischief is September 1, Amazon now lists the book in stock. To mark that milestone, I want to delve back into how I came up with some of the ideas for this one.

Not too long ago, I tried to write a thriller. I've always loved Jurassic Park and basically anything from Michael Crichton's pen. Ditto Stephen King. I'm a writer, thought I, I'm going to try something different. Something BIG. Thirty thousand words into the manuscript, which involved a new generation desktop collider in Oak Ridge, Tennessee contacting a parallel universe, I realized that my particular writing talent is more on the "people level." Thrillers typically involve huge, save-the-world stakes and characters with more testosterone than backstory. My line is quieter, more personal, smaller.

I went back to Tito and the traditional mystery that encompasses family and social drama.

Like the other installments in the series, Her Deadly Mischief, advances Tito in both his personal life and his musical profession. I wondered what he would feel like in mid-career, how things would be going at home now that he had settled in with his wife, Liya, and taken on her son, Titolino, as his own. I decided that Tito must be feeling a bit jaded onstage. His roles have grown repetitive, and he's presented with few vocal challenges. Venetian audiences are more entranced with the spectacular stage sets and effects of real explosions and cloud machines than the music--when they stop socializing and politicking to pay attention to the performance at all.

At Tito's new home in the Cannaregio, Liya is growing restless. Her family lives in the Hebrew ghetto a stone's throw away, but she hasn't been welcome there since she took a Christian as a lover and refused to give up her out-of-wedlock child. I thought a plotline that would allow Liya to take the investigation into the ghetto would create some sparks with her extended family. Hence, the murder victim, Zulietta Giardino, a beautiful courtesan who was born Mina Grazziano, daughter of the ghetto's tax assessor.

I'd also become curious about other, random things. That's how I develop as a writer. Something catches my fancy and I want to find out everything about it. One thing leads to another. An example: Dwarf acrobats often entertained at the Venetian carnival and in the homes of noblemen. The artists of the era captured them on canvas--I remember standing in front of a Tiepolo painting for a long time at the Museum of the 18th Century at the Ca' Rezzonico. To me, the dwarfs seemed like the very opposite of Tito in physical terms--castrati were taller than average men--but they had several things in common. Both groups lived the life of a vagabond performer, entertaining by virtue of their unusual appearance and capabilities. I decided a dwarf had a place in my latest book, and the character of Pamarino was born.




Another thing on my mind was the movement of peoples to the New World. I wondered how many Venetians had migrated and what would lead them to leave their sophisticated homeland for such a raw, savage land. I've already talked about Murano glass in another posting, but not about the glass makers who peopled the early American colonies. There were Italian glass blowers in Jamestown as early as the first decades of the 1600's. They were drawn by the need for drinking vessels, the fine beach sand to make the glass, and the abundant wood to fire their kilns. I decided I'd have to include a glass maker who had his heart set on relocating, in this case to Charleston.

There's more in Her Deadly Mischief, of course. I managed to work in a lot of things I care about and want to explore. Take a look for yourself.

Murano Glass and Murder

Right off the north side of Venice, clearly visible across the lagoon, is the island of Murano. Smaller than its nearby cousin, Murano mirrors Venice as a cluster of islets connected by bridges. It even boasts its own S-shaped Grand Canal. But Murano is famous for one thing that Venice lacks--the art of turning blobs of molten glass into fanciful and delicate objects.


Murano's fate as a center of the glass industry was sealed when the city fathers decided the kiln fires were too much of a threat to the main island and moved the glass masters and their workers to the smaller island. By the time Tito came along in the 1730's this was long-established practice. Also established were the strict regulations governing the glass furnaces. Because the Venetian masters had devised techniques that no others could master, they were considered national treasures. Artisans who left Venice to found glass or mirror factories elsewhere were dogged by secret agents of the Doge. If they refused to return, they could easily find themselves with a dagger in the ribs or a garrote around their necks. If any family members stayed behind in Venice, they could be tossed into prison and used as inducement to force the glass masters back home.


I hadn't thought much about involving Tito in glass blowing--it seemed so far away from his profession of singing. My editor at Poisoned Pen Press, Barbara Peters, was the one who raised the possibility for Her Deadly Mischief, the fifth Tito Amato Mystery due out in September. I tucked that in the back of my mind, and, on my 2007 research trip to Venice, my husband and I made sure to spend a couple of days on Murano. The main tourist season had passed, so we had the place practically to ourselves. In between the wonderful meals, we were amazed at the blazing, violent process that produced work of such fragility and entranced by the historic glassware on display at the Museo Vetrario.




The similarities of Tito's ephemeral, crystalline voice and the delicate glass that he could have shattered with a well-placed top note started a train of thought. I saw a small, fragile woman destroyed by violence sprawled on the floor of the theater. She'd been pushed from the highest tier of boxes, I was certain, but how to involve a glass maker? Like all writers, I'm constantly asking "What if?" In this case, what if a wealthy glass maker rented a box at the theater? Would they come all the way over from Murano to go to the opera? A bit of research told me they could and did. The most skillful artisans were granted unprecedented privilege, more like a nobility of glass than common workmen. They were actually allowed to marry into the ancient Venetian aristocracy whose names were inscribed in the Golden Book. Hmm...

Her Deadly Mischief takes place all over Venice--Tito's new home in the Cannaregio district, the Jewish ghetto that houses Liya's family, the theater, even the Basilica San Marco. But the parts set on Murano are particularly special to me, because I'll always remember the wonderful days we spent strolling the quiet pavements and wandering in and out of the glass factories. In the end, I'm glad I was pushed to figure out a way to get Tito over to Murano.

Atto Melani Update

Looks like I'm not the only one fascinated by 17th-century castrato singer and spy Atto Melani. Some may remember my blogging and speaking about Atto's career as inspiration for Tito's adventures in Cruel Music, the third Baroque Mystery. Atto's story isn't an exact fit with Tito's--while Atto eagerly used his musical gifts to gain access that allowed him to report on court and state intrigue, Tito was forced into the role of spy--but it did give me ideas.

Cruel Music begins when Venetian politicians bent on having one of their countrymen elected Pope imprison Tito's sailor brother on trumped up smuggling charges. To save Alessandro, Tito reluctantly travels to Rome and becomes the resident singer in the villa of Cardinal Fabiani, the man who holds the next papal election in his hands. As Tito struggles to master the nuances and intrigues of Roman politics, murder ensues, of course!


Much of my research for Cruel Music was provided by a PhD thesis: Un Atto D'ingegno: A Castrato in the Seventeenth Century by musicologist Roger Freitas. Now Freitas has published a book based on his earlier work. Titled Portrait of a Castrato, the volume appears to cover much of the same territory as the thesis. It includes Atto's birth in Pistoia to a comfortably placed family which gave up three of its sons to be castrated for the sake of their lovely voices, a consideration of the social environment in which such a thing could occur, and an account of Atto's subsequent musical and political careers. I haven't bought the book--it's pricey--but based on Freitas' beautifully researched and written thesis, I recommend it to anyone interested in the castrati.

Another book that includes Atto as a character has also come to my attention: Imprimatur, a historical novel by husband and wife team Rita Monaldi and Francesco Sorti. Set in 1683 Rome during an outbreak of the plague, the plot delves into the possibility that Pope Innocent XI secretly financed the Protestant conquest of England that put William of Orange on the throne and led to the final downfall of James the II and the Catholic Stuarts. That sparks my curiosity as to how Atto could have been involved--by that time he had become an abate, a church official, and was apparently steeped in papal politics--but again, I haven't been able to obtain the book.

My usually well stocked library doesn't have it, and though it received international interest, a mass market version in English doesn't seem to be available. Why? Well, the Vatican has been accused of trying to suppress the novel. How true all of it is, I wouldn't want to hazard a guess. I'm just glad the Vatican didn't take an interest in the papal shenanigans that Tito encountered in Cruel Music.

If any of my readers have read either Portrait of a Castrato or Imprimatur, let me know what you think.

Amadeus

During the past couple of years, I've been working my way through my local hard-to-find video store's stock of films set in the 18th century. I've now reached the last three available--the big three, I call them--the ones with settings so vivid and stories so true to the time that I might have stepped into a time machine as I watch. First, I'll discuss Amadeus (1984, directed by Milos Forman).

There's no need for an in-depth critique. You don't need me to tell you that Amadeus is a great film. After all, it won numerous awards, including Academy Awards and Golden Globes, and has made the American Film Institute list of 100 best films. For those who need a reminder, the film chronicles the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as seen through the eyes of a jealous, mediocre composer, Antonio Salieri. Mozart is played by a laughing, goofy Tom Hulce, and Salieri by the multi-layered F. Murray Abraham. Salieri seems to love his rival as much as he hates him--though not so much to keep him from murdering the upstart so inexplicably bestowed with such talent by God.


Just a few general comments before I mention the particulars in the film that inspired my writing about Tito Amato's world. First, I think Peter Shaffer's concept is brilliant. Author of both the original play and the film's screenplay, Shaffer uses Salieri's reminiscence to explore flawed genius, overarching ambition, and the vagaries of fate. He reminds us that life is seldom fair and throws down a gauntlet: How far would you go to level the playing field? It doesn't bother me a bit that the details of the plot are unfounded, that we have no evidence that Salieri actually murdered Mozart. Given the personalities of the two men, it could have well happened. In Shaffer's hands, the fiction seems more real than historical fact.


The other issue that is often mentioned is Hulce's portrayal of Mozart. Yes, we know the real man had a serious case of potty mouth. We have that from his letters--his entire family was similarly affected. We also have contemporary accounts that put him in an uncomfortable light--discomfiting for us, I mean. We don't like to see the composer of such beautiful, uplifting music described as callow, selfish, silly or petty. Mozart was all those things at times, but really, I think Hulce's silliness is just off the scale. That's the one thing that bothers me about this otherwise excellently crafted movie.

Beyond pure enjoyment, I've watched Amadeus many times in an effort to better understand Tito's environment. From the pressure on both Mozart and Salieri to please their royal sponsors, I learned how utterly dependent on patronage the 18th-century musicians were. Tito is luckier than most because Venice's theaters were public rather than court institutions, but even Tito, his director Torani, and the several composers who craft his operas have to be expert boot-lickers. The film's scenes featuring the public performances of The Magic Flute were also very instuctive and probably more like Tito's opera house than the performances within the court's confines. It's hard to imagine how raucous public theaters were then. Tito has to duck rotten tomatoes and endure the audience singing along with him.

The Amadeus character that translates most closely to a character in the Tito Amato mysteries is soprano Katerina Cavalieri as played by Christine Ebersole. Cavalieri was a real person, "a greedy songbird" and mistress of Salieri. She inspired Adelina Belluna, the prima donna who is murdered in Interrupted Aria. There's also a lot of impresario Emanuel Schikaneder (Actor Simon Callow) in Maestro Torani, Tito's artistic director, older of course.

And then, the whole issue of a mysterious, intimidating masked villain figured heavily in The Painted Veil. I don't know if I would ever have come up with that particular plot device if I hadn't had it drummed into my brain by Amadeus.

What are the other two films that perfectly recreate the 18th century for me? I'll get to them soon, I promise. Until then I'll keep mum except for this clue--the next one was also directed by Milos Forman.

She's Got Me Covered

Don't judge a book by its cover, the old saying goes. But that's just what the publisher wants you to do. A book's cover should beam out from book shop display table or shelf, luring the potential reader to stop and flip through its pages. "Pick me up and buy me," it should scream.

Fans of the delightful British TV comedy As Time Goes By will recognize the phrase. Middle-aged Lionel had written a dull account of his life as a coffee planter in Kenya, which his young tyro of a publisher illustrated with a big game hunter and busty babe on the cover. Well, nobody would buy it if they realized what it was really about, went the thinking.

Being the proud "mama" of five published novels, I would much rather my covers give the reader a hint of what's actually inside. Poisoned Pen Press has accomplished that goal with elegance and artistry. One reason my covers work is that I'm given the opportunity for a great deal of input. As soon as Interrupted Aria, the first book in the Tito Amato/Baroque Mystery series was in the publishing queue, the production manager put me in touch with artist J.J. Smith-Moore.

I'd envisioned a cover with a lush, old-master painting type of look, rather like the front of one of my all-time favorite reads, The Devil in Music by Kate Ross.

But J.J. was an illustrator who excelled at drawing. She suggested a design incorporating a macabre pen-and-ink drawing in the style of Edward Gorey. Intrigued, I sent her a number of photos, paintings and images that I'd used to help me describe Tito's travels around Venice. I also provided a synopsis of the story, and that's where J.J. got her main inspiration.


In Interrupted Aria, several people die from falling or being pushed from great heights. J.J. drew a man in 18th-century dress falling headfirst, and to work in Venice's fascination with masquerade, she topped the drawing with a horizontal strip depicting a masked woman. I was pleased--she had managed to catch the theme of the book in just a few simple artistic touches. There was only one suggestion I made--I liked the idea of the man's shoe flying off to give more of a sense of movement. J.J agreed and made that change for the final design.

For the next Tito book, J.J. went right to one of my images, and it's an outstanding one. The murderer disguises himself in the costume of the old medieval plague doctor. This is probably the most commented on of the four jacket design she's done for my series. I don't know if it screams, "Pick me up and buy me," but when I'm at book signings, it's the book people reach for first. Everyone seems to recognize the figure.
But my very favorite has to be the cover drawing for Tito's latest adventure, Her Deadly Mischief, set for a September 2009 release. Why? J.J. was unavailable, but the entire production team, including me, felt it was important for the cover to fit in with the rest of the series so that Tito's fans would recognize it right away. After several attempts to recreate J.J.'s style failed, I had a brainstorm.

My daughter had just graduated from a master's program where she concentrated on scenic design. She's also an accomplished theatrical painter. I'd seen her work splashed across numerous stages and knew she could turn her talents to portraying everything from Renaissance Italy in Romeo and Juliet to Dicken's London in Oliver to the 1940's in Pump Boys and Dinettes.

Could she draw small, just for once? Sure. Her initial renderings of scene designs were in the range of a book jacket. We had fun pouring over portraits of women in elaborate jewelry, one of the major plot points in the novel, and choosing the right look. And then she came up with just the right air of menace with a man's hands fastening a necklace. Or is he using it to strangle the lady?

Once Nan Beams at Poisoned Pen Press had worked the drawing into a finished design, I couldn't be more pleased with the result. Here's the finished product, with drawing by Megan Myers McKinney. This one will always be special.

The Four Horses of Venice

Mary Reed sent me an intriguing email the other day. Besides facing life as eunuchs, her and Eric Mayer's sleuth John the Lord Chamberlain and my Tito Amato have one other thing in common. The sculptural grouping of the four horses pictured above formed part of the daily landscape of both men. Since about nine centuries and almost 900 miles separate the two detectives, how can this be? Sit back and read the tale of these wandering horses.

Their origin is one of history's mysteries. Based on information from Roman historian Pliny the Elder, the four gilded bronze horses are often attributed to Lysippus, a Greek sculptor of the fourth century B.C.E. Their location in Greece isn't known, but according to this story, an admiring Emperor Nero eventually brought them to Rome. Recent scientific analysis casts doubt on this theory, however. Investigation of the metal and its gilding shows evidence of Roman, not Greek, manufacture.

We do know that the four horses adorned the Hippodrome in Constantinople in time for John to view them during the reign of Justinian. Construction on the Hippodrome began around 203 A.D., but it was the emperor Constantine the Great who enlarged the Hippodrome and made it the city's main venue for athletic competitions, games, and chariot races. For hundreds of years, the horses stood atop the central arch of the stables where the live horses who pulled the chariots were housed. An artist's rendition of what the chariot gates might have looked like is below.


Years pass, and war raged between Christian and Muslims lands. During the fourth crusade in 1204, Venetians under orders from Doge Enrico Dandolo sacked Constaninople. The Hippodrome was destroyed, and the horses ripped from their mountings. They were transported back to Venice, stored at the Arsenale and eventually placed above the main entrance to the Basilica San Marco. They were still there in Tito's time, the mid-18th century. He crossed the piazza almost everyday and would have seen them looking down on the carnival antics that had taken over the great square.

Not for long, though. In 1797, Karma visited Venice in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte. The city that owed many of her magnificent treasures to medieval pillage, was in turn looted by the French general. The horses were crated up and sent to Paris where they found a temporary home on top of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. You can still see a sculpture consisting of horses, chariot and several figures on the monument, but these are not the four horses of Venice. France was forced to return the looted horses by the Congress of Vienna which attempted to impose order on post-Napoleonic Europe. Apparently, nobody gave a thought to pushing them back one additional looting and returning them to Constantinople.

Besides John and Tito, I wondered if there might be another fictional detective who viewed the horses during their French sojourn, 1806-1815. A quick glance through the enormously helpful timeline of mystery series at the Crime Thru Time website came up with only one prospect: Inspector LeBlanc as penned by Bernard St. James. I haven't read these, but as the series is set in early 19th-century Paris, who knows?

If we knew more about the horses' early wanderings across the ancient world, we might be able to come up with a few more sleuths connected to these bronze beasts. Gordianus the Finder? Marcus Didius Falco? Thanks, Mary, for coming up with an observation that let me take a break for some silly, but fun, research.

Vicki Delany

Welcome guest blogger Vicki Delany, one of my favorite authors from the talented Poisoned Pen Press Posse. I haven't had time to read Gold Diggers, Vicki's latest mystery from Rendezvous Crime, but I'm looking forward to it.

The Pleasure of the Historical Novel

I was on a canoeing trip in Ontario's Algonquin Park several years ago with about six other people. It was night and we were relaxing after dinner, enjoying the firelight and the darkness and the sounds of the waves lapping on the shore and the trees moving in the wind. We were reflecting on the hard day of canoeing and portaging we'd had. I mentioned how ironic it was that we were paying good money, and using our valuable vacation time, to do what our ancestors would have considered nothing but hardship. They'd have thought we'd all gone mad!

My initial thought was of the Voyageurs, the legendary French Canadian fur traders who opened up the interior of Canada to Europeans. I also mentioned the Chilkoot trail and the path to the Klondike Gold Rush. Several people on the trip were from Europe and interested in the story, so I told them a bit about it. And as we talked, I thought... what a great setting for a book.

Gold Digger: A Klondike Mystery was published in April by the Canadian publisher Rendezvous Crime. It's the first in a new series featuring Fiona MacGillivray, a dance hall owner with a somewhat nimble-fingered past, her twelve year old son Angus, and Constable Richard Sterling of the North-West Mounted Police.


I am primarily a writer of contemporary police procedurals. Specifically the Smith and Winters series from Poisoned Pen Press, and at first I was a bit unsure about how to go about writing a historical. Would I be able to find out enough about the period to create a realistic background? Instead, I found that once I started doing the research, I might well never stop long enough to actually write the book. The Klondike Gold Rush lasted from 1896 to '99, although its heyday was really only one year, 1898 to '99. But that year created enough stories and legends to fill hundreds of books. And photographs--the pictures are incredible. I'll guarantee you've seen some of them (Think Alaska license plates!)

One of the reasons the Klondike Gold Rush is so well known is that it was the only one of the gold rushes to leave such a rich photographic record. the age of photography was just beginning, and the camera was becoming portable enough to be transported out of a confined studio and stiffly posed portraits to come into the streets (and to the gold fields) and capture scenes and people unaware.

It has been called the Last Great Gold Rush. Once the twentieth century began, industrialization and corporations largely pushed out free-wheeling independent prospectors and gold-seekers.

The Klondike gold Rush really did stand at the beginning of the modern world. The nineteenth century was coming to an end, the twentieth beginning. With so much hope and promise. In Gold Digger, the landlady Mrs. Mann, says to Angus, when he wishes they had a telephone: Many wonderful changes you'll see in your lifetime, dear.

The tragedy of the twentieth century is that all the changes weren't exactly wonderful. Angus is 12 in 1898--in 1914 he'll be 28, just the right age to enlist in World War I. One of the pleasures of reading historical novels is that we, the reader, know things that the characters do not. Such as where their world is heading.

But that's all for the future, and for now I'm just having fun being with Fiona and Angus and Richard in Dawson for the Last Great Gold Rush.

*****

Vicki Delany's newest book is Gold Digger: A Klondike Mystery, the first in a new series from Rendezvous Crime. She is also the author of the Constable Molly Smith series, most recently Valley of the Lost, from Poisoned Pen Press. Visit Vicki at www.vickidelany.com and http://typem4murder.blogspot.com

*****

Thanks a bunch, Vicki. The gold rush era is new historical territory for me. Sounds interesting. I'll add one more link. The Gold Digger page at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1894917804