Carole Nelson Douglas, interviewed by Nancy Pickard

Over the years, the NorCal East Bay chapter of Mystery Readers International has had many "At Homes"—intimate evenings with favorite mystery writers. We've hosted Anne Perry, Lawrence Block, Sue Grafton, Elizabeth George, Janet LaPierre, Sharan Newman, Laurie King, Rochelle Krich, Carolyn Hart, James Ellroy, Steven Saylor, Janet Evanovich, Eddie Muller, Taffy Cannon, and many others. These events are held in private homes, and they're similar to Literary Salons. Since so many of our cyber members and friends aren't able to attend these intimate evenings, I thought it would be fun to have a "visiting" author each month interviewed by another "visiting" author. This month we feature Carole Nelson Douglas, interviewed by Nancy Pickard. The author of 50 novels—mainstream, mystery, thriller, high fantasy, science fiction, and romance/women's fiction—Carole Nelson Douglas has been nominated for of won more than fifty writing awards. She was an award-winning journalist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press until moving to Texas in 1984 to write fiction full time. In fact, she "found" Midnight Louie in the classified ads in 1973 and wrote a feature article on the real-life alley cat long before she began writing novels or Louie returned as a feline supersleuth with his own newsletter, Midnight Louie's Scratching Post-Intelligencer. Carole the child loved the Sherlock Holmes stories, but the adult found something missing: strong women. That literary lack drives her multi-genre odyssey: "I began Amberleigh, my first published novel, in college because I was fed up with the wimpy heroines of then-popular Gothics," she says. "Since then, I've merrily reformed the fiction genres, reinventing women as realistic protagonists. Of course, creating true women means creating true men as partners and co-protagonists. I like writing popular and genre fiction because it's so influential; it forms attitudes that shape society." Many Douglas novels have received awards and appeared on various bestseller lists; her mystery short fiction appears in numerous anthologies, including eight of The Year's 25 Best Crime and Mystery Stories. Carole and her husband Sam Douglas reside in Texas with five cats. —Janet Rudolph

Nancy Pickard: Carole, when I think of your writing, I think of four things things in particular: imagination, freedom, intelligence, and humor. I'd like to take those one at a time.

You have, or so it seems to me, an unusually rich imagination. All sorts of people and creatures live there! Do you remember having a rich imaginary life when you were a child?

Carole Nelson Douglas: Yes; I had to entertain myself as an only child. My mother was a widowed fourth grade teacher when there was no support for single mothers and latch key kids. My elderly grandparents left their tiny North Dakota town during the school year to stay with me until the later grades. Grandpa, a spry old gent who doled out Life Savers, was a storyteller. Every day when I came home school he'd have a tall tale about what mischief my dolls had been into, and about farm dogs exotically named (to me) Sport, Watch, and Time. And he taught me to play a mean game of gin rummy.

Complain that you have "nothing to do" to a schoolteacher mother and she'll tell you to make parade floats out of shoe boxes. I drew, and created miniature scenic dioramas with moss and weeds. Nothing could stop me from constructing my own little worlds. I have a forefinger scar from the time the butcher knife missed when I was cutting cardboard to make a dollhouse. (That was an unauthorized use of a deadly weapon, but that cardboard was too tough for scissors.)

I played dress-up from the time I could walk and wrote and directed plays for the neighborhood kids. My mother would put a curtain over the archway into the dining room and make popcorn. When I didn't have enough "actors" for my cast, she told me to make one out of brown butcher paper. I did, and trotted it around like full-length ventriloquist's dummy. Schools then had many projects that involved writing and making things. We had regular guest teachers in art and "elocution" and played street games until dark. Then along came television...

NP: What I mean by "freedom" is that you seem to let yourself loose in your fiction, more so than most writers, in my opinion. Your imagination really flies, which it couldn't do if you didn't let it free. How does that happen? Does it come naturally, or did you have to work on letting it loose? (I ask this as a writer who did have to really work on loosening up her imagination.)

CND: Part of that comes from having eclectic tastes. My mother belonged to a book club so I read through those shelves. My favorite books at an early age were the typical Little Women and Nancy Drew mysteries, but also the plays of Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Three Musketeers, and The Last of the Mohicans (?!). So mystery, history, action/adventure, the fantastic, and women's issues were always there. At age nine or ten I fell in love with Through the Desert, an early 20th-century adventure tale of two European children on their own in Africa during the Mahdi uprising. I tapped out a letter on my aunt's big manual typewriter to a movie company that they should make a film of the book, and they should hurry, because I would be too old to play eight-year-Nell pretty soon... So I always aimed at the entertainment world, and thought "big."

Although I love writing genre fiction, no genre fully meets my expectations. So I put in
what's missing to me... significant male/female relationships in mystery and fantasy/science fiction... solid setting and history in historical romance... and realistic psychology in everything, although using slightly larger-than-life concepts and settings. I always crave a mystery and fantasy element or two. I love "world-building" and combining genres requires creativity big time.

I've always looked for the new approach, whether it's the lead to a newspaper article or anything else. In college I was taught by nuns who'd been sent to Oxford when it first opened up to women. My creative writing teacher baby-sat J.R.R. Tolkien's children. They were formidable women and scholars; when they handed out literature class theme topic lists, they'd been refined for years. Still, I always looked for a new worthy topic, which is how I came to write "Circle Symbolism in Moby Dick."

That's why I've never based my seven high fantasy novels on Norse or Celtic or Asian mythology, but invented my own worlds. Of course elements of myth creep in, but it's never pedantic. My first fantasy novel, Six of Swords, was a huge surprise bestseller. A friend who'd been studying with European philosophers in Mexico read it and raved about the Jungian archetypes. Huh? I said. So I got out my copy of Jung's book, Man and His Symbols, propped it on my stomach in bed one night and spent 20 minutes congratulating myself on all the Jungian animas etc. in my fantasy. Then I put the book away and never looked at it again. I was drawing on my own Jungian unconscious and that's what connects with readers.

I once encountered a psychologist who said she'd never seen such fantasizing in her career. Jiminy Cricket told Pinocchio to "Let your conscience be your guide." I tell aspiring writers to "Let your subconscious be your guide." Your internal editor can always consciously manipulate the writing after you've got it all down. I quash the opinions of other voices and find my own.

NP: Speaking of freedom, has the publishing world let you be free to write what you want to write? Or have you felt constrained by the market?

CND: No world has ever let me be as free a creator as I want and need to be: that includes later school, theater, journalism, and fiction-writing. In a senior English paper a note said one line "would never go over in grad school." I decided, well then, I won't go to grad school. I've encountered many aspiring fiction writers who are desperately trying to dump grad-schoolese. (I was accepted by Northwestern University's theater grad school that has produced many stars, but didn't have the money to do it. Sigh.) At the newspaper, I had trouble selling editors on stories that showed up on "60 Minutes" six months later. I wanted to do a profile on a local entertainer who was having his first New York-published book out. "He's had enough publicity," the editor said, tight lipped. (Newspaper writers can be jealous of fiction writers.) Guy's name was Garrison Keillor and it was his first Lake Wobegon book. The local press covered him so much in a tabloid way after he became a national figure he moved away from St. Paul in a snit. If he'd have gotten deserved local recognition early... he did come back finally.

I came up with this motto some time ago: A writer is a fighter. You fight all your life to write what you want the way you want to write it. That applies to any creative pursuit. My husband is an artist and we both worked for employers, for the most part, who didn't appreciate or understand what we did and either changed it or tried to make us change what was good. If you're original, you won't be commonplace.

In theater, I hated typecasting. I relished and learned from playing against type because it was the most challenging. That's why I was tickled when I ended up doing a Marilyn Monroe impersonation here and there after I wrote a short story about her in the form of a dramatic monologue. No director would have ever let me play MM. So there!

With novels, I can be the writer and director and actor. I backed into journalism from a Theater and English Lit degree, and while I loved it and did important work, my creativity was treated as freakish. They literally tried to "stump" me by assigning me to the write cutlines for the photographers' most abstract, artsy work. I always could. One boss who couldn't decide on a Travel section story headline for forty minutes decided that writing was my one flaw as an employee. By then I'd sold eight novels to New York. We had these private one-on-ones in the conference room and he's lucky he left that room alive. I'm pretty easy-going, but that cold shiver of fury up the back of your neck isn't good. I moved into copy and layout editing to save my sanity. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. A new regime said he and Keillor-has-had-enough-publicity should never have been in charge of a feature section, and they were removed. But I was long gone, writing full-time fiction, by then. Crazy, but I did it.

Many dismiss "cat mysteries" as silly, but the Midnight Louie series was developed in 1991 to address sexual responsibility in the age of AIDS and in the mystery genre. Women hard-boiled detectives were hot then, but I was concerned that so many were the lone-wolf, asocial, sleep-around male model. The books never addressed safe sex, either. Obviously, the cat element brings in the need for birth control there too. Louie is both a homage and a satire of the classic male PI, a groundbreaking American mystery invention that became a stultifying cliche of a mysogynist tough guy in its worst incarnations. My ex-priest radio shrink in the series, the character who most plays out these social concerns, is scarily popular with readers. One was on the phone with a friend she began to see was suicidal and thought "What would Matt do?" And she did that and it worked! Readers are far more aware than the critics of the series' underlying issues and content.

Both the Midnight Louie and Irene Adler series, my twentieth-plus novels, were roundly rejected by all the mystery editors. My then-fantasy house, Tor, bought them, having no trouble with the fantasy construct of a cat detective or a female Sherlockian spin-off. Tor's sf/fantasy foundation made it much more open to genre-bending and blending.

I do believe a writer must be aware of the market and use what's working to serve what you want to do, which is often what you feel needs addressing in the larger society, or at least that's what drives me. It's my Catholic education, which was deeply concerned with social justice, and my reporting during the civil rights and women's liberation movements.

NP: The humor always bubbling under your writing is part of what gives your work an incredible liveliness, I think. Can you feel that as you're writing? Do you ever laugh out loud? Do you get some delight from the outpouring of words on your pages, as we get from reading them?

CND: Too much of acting goes into my writing for me to write deeply dark novels. I had what one review called "a demonic shrink" in Probe and Counterprobe. I was careful to indicate his evil without graphic gore. I'm against porno-violence. Yet I felt like an actor playing Hitler writing that book, and it seriously darkened my mood for months. Humor is not taken seriously critically, and it should be. Humor gets us through. It's such a reward to have readers say your books helped them survive truly terrible periods in their lives, as the Louie readers do. The early Irene Adler books were often the only ones to accompany people to chemotherapy or a loved one's sick or death bed. I heard that so often from strangers. One email recently was from a man who was reading Femme Fatale aloud to his blind wife in the hospital. What a wonderful compliment, I thought, reading on. "She died at the end of chapter eighteen," he wrote. I was levelled. The later Adler novels are a bit darker. I rushed to check the chapter end to make sure it wasn't anything I wouldn't want a dying person to hear. Oddly, there was a gentle mention of mortality in the passage.

It's the humor that helps people heal. I try to evoke that even in books that have a darker side. As Irene pointed out to Nell in Chapel Noir, the first of my Jack the Ripper duology and my darkest novels, the masques of comedy and tragedy sit side by side in all their depictions.

Yes, I giggle now and then at some humorous line or scene, but it's at the character who brings out the humor, not at my writing. My acting experience makes them all separate from me in some way. I'm a person with multiple personalities. Early on, I had to introduce a new character in a strong witty way and was worried he wouldn't match my already developed characters. His first line came on the typewriter platen. "I didn't know you had that in you," I said. I was truly surprised he was up to the challenge, even if I'm the ventriloquist and he's supposedly the "dummy." That's the true magic and satisfaction of writing. It's always about so much more than just you.

NP: Your books sing with intelligence and breadth and width of knowledge. I'm assuming you have always been a voracious reader. What sorts of non-fiction reading do you do—or did you do—in order to feed your work?

CND: "My blushes, Watson!" Yes, voracious reading is the key and that's accessible to anyone. Your interesting question forced me to study my bookshelves. Ah... lots of occult books... books on women's roles then and now... biography, history, art and psychology, crime and detection, costume, vintage clothing and accessories. I'd say biography is key. I love finding new angles on overdone public personas. My new Delilah Street, Paranormal Investigator, urban fantasy series starting in October includes the only known surviving vampire in 2013 Las Vegas, Howard Hughes. In real life, he was an important factor in the founding of the city. I posited that he was losing power so he had himself made into a vampire to keep it. What canny corporate kingpin wouldn't if that were an option? Imagine the Donald Trump comb-over preserved for eternity... Unfortunately, it isn't suave Hollywood playboy/aviator HH who's the vampire. It's the long-haired, long-nailed scrawny HH who never left a hotel room. Vampires have been glamorized for too long; time for a new approach.

NP: If you could hand somebody who had never heard of you only one of your novels, which one would it be?

CND: Tough one, Nancy. I've had more than fifty published. With the first ten novels I wrote, I was in love with every next one, because I was moving through the genres and trying this and that for the first time.

I could pick my breakaway mid-eighties high fantasy bestseller, Six of Swords. That hit a nerve with readers and inspired some young ones to write. But I can't bear to look at it because I was punished for its spontaneous success by being dumped by the editor/imprint, and thereafter effectively crushed by the then male-dominated fantasy/sf field. (And some female editors helped to do it.) Even today, when women's urban fantasy is now bestselling, I've had to make my fantasy comeback with a small press. NY editors found Dancing with Werewolves had "too many ideas and social issues." The buzz outside New York, though, has been so far fabulous.

I could say my lightly sf thrillers, Probe and Counterprobe, which furnished elements for TV with "The X-Files," "John Doe," and most recently, "Kyle XY." ("Can they do that?" my readers write, noticing plot and character elements have been lifted whole. Yup.) It's the humanity the characters bring to the thriller table that make those favorites with me, Ed Gorman, and many of my readers.

Speaking of Ed, he's a prince and a mentor to other writers. After I'd been drummed out of sf/fantasy and inadvertantly moved into mystery with my first Adler novel, I wrote him a terse (and cautious; I'd been burned by male contempt) business-style subscription request for Mystery Scene magazine. "Carole Nelson Douglas!" he wrote back by hand, "author of Probe and Counterprobe, two favorites on my keeper shelf." It was like moving out of a nasty, dark basement onto a sun porch. He also solicited my first short story and I've now written a couple dozen. Ed has no biases and axes to grind. A lot of writers owe him a lot.

I can't say any particular Midnight Louie novel, because the whole series is a novel, and each book is just a chapter. Good Night, Mr. Holmes, which won some non-mainstream mystery awards and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year is a good candidate. Not realizing it at the time, with this book I was the first writer to spin off a female character from the Canon.

I am the sum of all my parts and none of my parts is the sum of me. So, what would be your pick?

NP: What do you find frustrating about the writing life?

CND: As you can tell from the above... never being certain to earn any credit, no matter what you accomplish. I ended up in journalism because I was incensed by a unfairly negative theater review in the local paper. I reviewed another play to see if I could write it in an hour on deadline, then was encouraged to offer it to the managing editor. He bought it for five dollars. I decided that was "easy" and then went after becoming a reporter.

As a journalist, I built up a reputation in the local arts and social services community as an accurate, fair, insightful, strong writer. (Not inside my daily newspaper's male hierarchy, of course, but some major community leaders respected my work, as did an array of passing-through noted artists, actors, and writers I interviewed over the years. It was their "celebrity" support that made me think I could make a living as writer on the national level. The late Renaisance man, Garson Kanin, took my first novel to his publisher in New York, bless him! That was such an honor. He was an absolute master of many arts.)

But in publishing you learn that, despite any number of well-received books, anybody
who sets themselves up as a critic can attack you as incompetent on Amazon or elsewhere and I've never had a tolerance for inexpert critics in anything. Even semi-pro critics have axes to grind. A lot of people are envious of writers. And editors are always under the kind of in-house and market pressures that make your resume meaningless, no matter how long and respectable.

NP: What do you like best about the actual writing? Not publishing, just writing.

CND: What I like best is what Joseph Campbell said when he was asked how to find "your bliss." "Whatever you do where you lose track of time," he answered. That still happens to me every day with writing. (Not that I don't have doubting Thomas times and rough passages.) It's also building characters that I can live with for a long time, who'll follow their own life paths even as they serve as a playground for what I've learned and am still trying to figure out about people and social institutions and life.

NP: Do you love to do anything else besides writing?

CND: I've taken dancing lessons as an adult, anything I could conveniently find: tap, flamenco, and even clogging. I'm not naturally talented at it, and it's good to try things you have to struggle with: it keeps you honest, and humble. I'd love to have time to learn to bead. I loving acting/reading and should really record some of my short stories. And I love saving homeless cats and dog. (Only one dog at a time, but multiple cats.)

NP: If you could describe an ideal writing life, what would it be?

CND: Living on a tropical island with an infinity pool outside the window against the vista of the sea beyond. I'm a water sign and a water lover. Other than that, I've pretty much got it. I work at home for myself, with my husband and cats and dog around. My husband, Sam Douglas, and I have always been creative partners. Art and writing differ enough that we can spur each other's ideas without conflict. His health issues have put us together 24/7 for a long time, so we're a cottage industry and he does all he can to help me. I even enjoy the necessary marketing and promotional aspects because I can use my underdeveloped design and art instincts in making flyers and mastering web and computer skills, though I can never do it fast enough.

When my New York Times bestseller list-bound fantasy series was killed in its cradle more than twenty years ago, I realized I couldn't put my self esteem in bestsellerdom because the business was too nutsy, even self-destructive, to trust. To take a "gift" of 400,000 unpromoted copies sold and throw it away... I decided if I could wrest a decent professional living from writing novels, that would be enough. Not that I lack ambition or don't think my books deserve bestsellerdom. But that's ultimately in the hands of other people and you can't allow your sense of value to rely on that. I believe passionately in everything I do, or I couldn't do it.

NP: How real is Louie to you? To your readers?

CND: Very. The readers adore Louie because they find him the embodiment of the essential feline character as well as an anthropomorphic version of an alley cat Sam Spade. He's as real as any human character among my many voices.

NP: I love Irene. What's to become of her?

CND: She decided to take a leave of absence in view of the drop-off in support of historical mysteries, and mystery itself, in the industry. I can't call her a victim of that trend because she'd never be a victim. I'm sure she's having adventures somewhere out of sight, and Nell will record them all.

NP: What five things are you working on now?

CND: 1. Two series, including three more contracted Midnight Louie books. Cat in a Red Hot Rage, set among the Red Hat ladies, is just out, and Cat in a Sapphire Slipper (it's a Nevada chicken ranch) comes out next August. There's an interior alphabet in the titles and it's time to start wrapping up ongoing backstory mysteries and character arcs. I've added a thriller thread that the readers should relish.

2. I'm now writing Brimstone Kiss, the second Delilah Street, PI, noir urban fantasy, that should appeal to mystery readers as well as fantasy and paranormal romance ones. Her name is a conscious bow to Perry Mason's girl Friday, Della Street. Only Delilah is nobody's girl Friday. Because of the fantasy/sf elements I've set up in the dark, Apocalyptic Vegas of 2013, I can import Raymond Burr's Perry Mason, Dashiell Hammett's Nick Charles, and the Invisible Man as secondary characters, so I'm having a lot of fun with that. Did you know that the answer to the mystery of how the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids is zombies? Of course you do, since you gave Dancing with Werewolves a wonderful quote, thank you very much!

3. I have a novel that combines a hip contemporary romantic comedy couple with a dark and chilling historical puzzle with links ongoing today. Editors couldn't fault the writing, characters, and historical background, but once again I've worked outside the box. I'm thinking of self-publishing it and letting the public decide. A trusted early reader loved it and a thriller editor told me if I got rid of all the "brilliant, erudite chit chat," I'd a crackerjack commercial thriller. He's probably right, but I wasn't writing a commercial thriller, woe is me. I was writing a fun and scary intellectual adventure novel for smart women, apparently not a desirable commercial demographic.

4. I'm looking for the right historical suspense stand-alone.

5. And I should be updating my website, setting up a multi blogs, animations, book trailers, movies, empires, and insane asylums for burnt-out authors. And writing my memoirs. Yes, tremble. You know who you are.

NP: Would you rather interview a werewolf or a vampire?

CND: Vampires have been frightfully overdone lately, but I'd have "interview the vampire," even though that's already been done too. It's that long, long life-span. Think of the historical times and personalities a really old vampire would have seen! Well worth a peck in the carotid artery.

On the other hand, some of the werewolves in Dancing with appear to be long-lived too, and they are my favorite four-footed and furry... Can't I genre-blend and do both?

Archived At Home Online Interviews:
Track 1:
Val McDermid, interviewed by Ian Rankin
Ian Rankin, interviewed by Peter Robinson
Peter Robinson, interviewed by Michael Connelly
Michael Connelly, interviewed by Laurie R. King
Laurie R. King, interviewed by Dana Stabenow
Dana Stabenow, interviewed by Jan Burke
Jan Burke, interviewed by T. Jefferson Parker
T. Jefferson Parker, interviewed by Harlan Coben
Harlan Coben, interviewed by Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman, interviewed by S.J. Rozan
S.J. Rozan, interviewed by Qiu Xiaolong
Qiu Xiaolong, interviewed by Cara Black
Cara Black, interviewed by Peter Lovesey
Peter Lovesey, interviewed by Anne Perry
Anne Perry, interviewed by Carole Nelson Douglas
Carole Nelson Douglas, interviewed by Nancy Pickard
Nancy Pickard, interviewed by Carolyn Hart

Track 2:
Ken Bruen, interviewed by Reed Farrel Coleman
Reed Farrel Coleman, interviewed by Megan Abbott
Megan Abbott, interviewed by Theresa Schwegel
Theresa Schwegel, interviewed by Michael Koryta
Michael Koryta, interviewed by Steve Hamilton

Search this site  

Mystery Readers Journal - Mystery Reading Groups - Mystery Periodicals
Mystery Bookstores - Macavity Awards - From the Editor - Members in the News
Rave Reviews - Janet A. Rudolph - Murder on the Menu - Home
Subscribe to MRJ

SEND E-MAIL TO MRI

All content on this site is © 1989-2008 by Janet A. Rudolph. All rights reserved.
Mystery Readers International® is a registered trademark.

Web site by interbridge

Return to top of page