Guide

Lidia Gualdoni - Where did you get the idea of Mary Russel, your main fictional character?

Laurie R. King - I wanted to explore the idea of what a female Sherlock Holmes would look like–how she would be similar to the original, and how she would be different. And because two similar objects are more interesting placed near each other, I chose to make her his contemporary, rather than create her as a person who lives, say, San Francisco in 1980.

- Do you think Sherlock Holmes needed a female “assistant” to be complete?

I hope not, because Russell doesn’t assist him all that much. She challenges him, argues with him, gets the better of him, but only occasionally does she actually help with something he’s asked her to do. However, yes, I think that at a time in his life when Holmes (according to Arthur Conan Doyle) Holmes has retired from Baker Street and is making another sort of life for himself, I think that an apprentice like Russell is precisely what he needs, to stretch his abilities and broaden his horizon. England as a whole changed hugely with the beginning of the Great War, and I believe Holmes would have done no less. Russell’s presence helps him grow.

- Sherlock Holmes is one of the characters who have the highest number of “posthumous adventures” - posthumous with regard to Arthur Conan Doyle… How do you explain it?

Any person who sits down to write a crime story does so with Sherlock Holmes somewhere in the background. Some of us merely choose to bring him to the fore, and confront the beginnings of the detective archetype.

- In Italy we had “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice” published last year, and now “The Game”. That doesn’t follows the right order of your book: don’t you think we can lose something in Mary Russel “evolution”?

Are you asking me if I think my Italian publisher should bring out all the books in the middle? Yes, of course! But it’s a problem, when a series stretches over thirteen years, to decide whether to bring them out in sequence and thus always lag behind, or to make the more recent books available and fill in the missing adventures as time permits. In fact, The Game was a good one to jump onto, because it’s appealing in so many ways–an exotic adventure that is not dependent on the previous novels for an understanding of the characters. And with luck, it will do well enough to encourage them to issue the others!

- How could you be able to describe these exotic and unknown places, like India in the 1924? Have you ever been there or this is the result of your searching? And how did you mix fictional elements with history and, in this case, with literature?

I have spent time in India, and my husband grew up there in the Twenties, so I used his memories for some of the details. But this was one of those periods with a richness of material for the researcher–it seems like every Englishman posted to India wrote a memoir, and every English visitor sent letters home that were later collected.
When I research a time and place, I always begin with contemporary guide books. My India guide was originally owned by a soldier stationed in northern India in 1919 (who put his name and location in the front.) I also have early Baedeker’s guides to Palestine, England, and other countries, and find them full of personality and the telling details of life and travel.
I am fortunate enough to live near a university with a good research library, so I can do such things as reading the issues of the London Times (on microfilm–my poor eyes!) and getting interlibrary loans of such books as Baden-Powell’s 1924 guide to the sport of pig-sticking. The main problem with research, for an ex-academic like myself, is stopping, and getting on with the writing. having spent much of the last year researching Anarchism and radical politics in Twenties England, I’m currently reading books on bees and beekeeping, for the next Russell and Holmes adventure in Sussex.
There’s nothing like a varied life, I say.

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