Watson, I may say, is quite taken with Carole. After reading her shorter fiction, as well as what I understand are called her three “cosy” Berkley Books mystery novels, Who Killed Blanche Dubois?, Who Killed Dorian Gray?, and Who Killed Mona Lisa?, the good doctor permitted her access to his notebooks; as a result she has given us two new Sherlock Holmes novels, The Star of India and The Haunting of Torre Abbey, as well as quite a few shorter Holmesian adventures.
It is rather an open secret, however, that for the past several years, she has taken to writing much darker mysteries, the “Silent” series y clept, under the pen name of C E Lawrence: Silent Screams, Silent Victim, and the most recent, Silent Kills. All of them feature a deeply troubled New York City forensic profiler named Lee Campbell, and in each he must track down truly frightening serial killers.
Below is a transcript of our conversation about her new persona. For convenience, my questions are prefaced by H for Hudson, whereas Carole’s replies are designated CE.
* * * *
H: What does the C. E. stand for, may I ask?
CE: Carole Elizabeth. Lawrence is a family name.
H: What prompted you to begin a series of books about serial killers?
CE: I’ve always been interested in hidden behavior, in people’s dark sides, perhaps in part because in my family no one was supposed to have a dark side; these things were never talked about, so that made me even more curious about it. Also, I think most writers have a natural interest in psychology, in human behavior, and what can be more intriguing to a writer than extreme behavior? And it seems to me that serial killers are about as extreme as it gets.
H: Is that why you write chapters from the killer’s perspective?
CE: Yes. I think it would be very challenging but almost impossible to write a book in which the killer is the protagonist. It was done in American Psycho, of course, but not entirely successfully, I think. So I knew the killer couldn’t be the hero, but I wanted to explore his mind in some way, so I came up with idea of having very short chapters from his point of view. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but I wanted to try to get inside the murderer, in Chesterton’s famous phrase.
H: Why create a protagonist who suffers from depression? Weren’t you afraid that might turn some readers away?
CE: I was actually given advice early on that I should stay away from having a damaged hero, that readers would want a kind of super-hero detective, but in reality I believe that damaged heroes are the only interesting kind (a lot of so-called super-heroes are damaged, after all: Superman is an orphan and an alien on a strange planet, and Batman is a weirdo with a bat fetish). Also, we’re all damaged by the time we reach adulthood, some more than others, of course, but I feel that suffering and loss are two of life’s constants, and that depression is a very real and understandable reaction to the shock of living, what Shakespeare so memorably called life’s slings and arrows. And I think a lot more people suffer or have suffered from various degrees of depression than we probably realize. And, of course, when I wrote the book I had recently been through my own bout of clinical depression.
H: What kind of research did you do for this book?
CE: I have a huge library of forensic books of all kinds, from Dead Men Do Tell Tales by Michael Baden to Forensics of Fingerprints Analysis. I spent a lot of nights reading and taking notes and, of course, there are some wonderful shows on television, especially Forensic Files, which I watch religiously. You can get all kinds of plot ideas from those shows, which are about real crimes and real people. I’ve been studying forensic psychology for some time through books, and I also took a graduate course at John Jay College for Criminal Justice, taught by Dr. Lewis Schlesinger. He was kind enough to let me audit the class, which was excellent, and also gave me his very informative and scholarly textbook, Sexual Homicide, which was one of the textbooks for that class. Interestingly, most of the students were women and I found it interesting that they often sat there calmly eating their lunch as we passed around horrific crime scene photographs. The men in the class seemed more disturbed by it than the women did. The research I did for this book was nowhere near as challenging as the research I did for my physics play Strings (for about a year I read physics books nonstop. It was really fun, but after a while, my head was spinning with quarks and muons and neutrinos)!
H: What was the most difficult thing about writing this book?
CE: Plot. Plot, plot, plot . . . did I mention plotting? Or, as Robert McKee would say, story. It was for this book and every other book I’ve ever written. I think any writer who claims that plots come easily to him/her is either a liar or a fool. It’s a bitch and a struggle and that saying about characters writing their own stories is pure nonsense. Oh, you can get away with that in a short story, sure, where you have only one event and one through line. But in a novel, where there are plots and subplots and multiple characters and 400 plus pages to fill with twists and surprises, you bloody well better put your plotting hat on and keep it on until your forehead bleeds, or you’re not doing your job. You have to keep coming up with ways to thicken the plot and twist it and turn the story and make it unexpected without making it feel contrived . . . that is never pretty and it’s never, ever easy. You know the genre of movie where the hero has cornered the villain in a warehouse, and there are all these barrels around and the bad guy picks one up and throws it at the hero, and he ducks, and the villain throws another one and he jumps over it, and so on? Well, you have to keep throwing barrels at your hero. And then you have to find new ways for him to jump out of the way. Your arms get really tired, and your brain starts to hurt, and you really want to stop, but you have to keep throwing those barrels. You have to make choices that seem original and surprising and yet entirely in keeping with the logic of the story. I care a lot about writing style, and graceful prose, but all the pretty writing in the world won’t hide a soft spot in your story.
H: Did you have any “Aha!” moments while working on this particular plot?
CE: Funny you should ask. I did, as a matter of fact. I had two such moments. The first one was after my agent had received a few rejections of the book, and I was getting a sense that though people liked the characters, they weren’t sucked in enough by the story. I didn’t know how to make it work, but I wasn’t ready to give up. At the time I was a summer resident of Byrdcliffe Arts Colony at the time, which is a lovely, idyllic spread of cabins in the woods on a mountainside overlooking Woodstock, New York. They have a kick ass library system in Ulster and Dutchess County, and so I took out The DaVinci Code on tape from the Woodstock Library. I had no television, no cable, no VCR, only my tinny little radio and my books on tape. It was, in many ways, the perfect life. I would listen to The DaVinci Code while I worked out every night in my cabin. I’m not sure the exact moment it hit me, but it gradually became clear to me there was a powerful lesson to be learned from that book: one thing Dan Brown does so well in it is to keep the pressure up at all times. There is a constant sense of danger and peril to the protagonist, from the first page to the end. I realized that’s what was missing from my book, and that there were flaccid scenes and chapters where people sat around comfortably talking philosophy or psychology or whatever. So I took out my cutting knife and whole chapters flew out the window. And I added a stabbing, a shooting, a car chase, a hanging, a beating, and in general just ratcheted up the tension more. And then we sold the book.
H: You said you had two such moments. What was the other one?
CE: That was a real classic “Aha!” moment. It was that same summer at Byrdcliffe, and I had just started out on a jog from my cabin on a beautiful evening in mid-July. I was jogging down Byrdcliffe Road when it hit me all of a sudden: I realized what the book needed was a major twist at the end, and I knew at that moment what the twist had to be. I had been working on this book for two years now, and I hadn’t seen it until that very moment. I remember the exact
