A Conversation with Mystery Authors Mary Reed and Eric Mayer

We are delighted to welcome authors Mary Reed and Eric Mayer to Omnimystery News today.

Mary and Eric's new John, the Lord Chamberlain historical mystery is Murder in Megara (Poisoned Pen Press; October 2015 hardcover, trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time with them talking about the book and the series as a whole.

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Omnimystery News: Murder in Megara is the 11th book in your series. How has John changed over the course of time?

Eric Mayer: We have kept John, our protagonist, relatively unchanged, although his situation has evolved because of what happens to him and his friends and family during the stories. Partly this is due to our decision, from the outset, to make each book readable without reference to preceding books. New readers might be perplexed to find a different John in different books. And at any rate I think readers want to read about the same character from book to book. The protagonist is what attracts us to series. I certainly never wanted John D. MacDonald's loquacious, easy going Travis McGee to abandon his houseboat, stop taking his retirement in installments, and become a grim, tight-lipped, anger-driven avenger. Besides, John has survived at the imperial court because he has a strong character. Such men are not easily changed, although they are open to incremental shifts, as evidenced particularly in Murder in Megara where John returns home.

OMN: Sharing the responsibilities of writing a novel must make for an interesting process. Tell us a little more about it.

Mary Reed: Our writing process is of necessity convoluted. One of us writes a chapter and then hands it over to the other for amendment if needed and polishing it up a bit. We long since agreed that if one of us is particularly emphatic a certain scene or event be retained, or not as the case may be, the other agrees. There is, as we have said before, no room for ego in joint writing. Where we do part is whether or not to outline plots. Eric finds it easier to base the action on one, whereas I am more of a seat of the trews writer, but given our publisher likes an outline before we start the process of writing a book, I am outnumbered and oblige, even if I do mutter a bit about it.

OMN: How true are you to the settings in the series?

Eric: Most of our books are set in a place that is real but no longer exists. What is left of John the Lord Chamberlain's Constantinople lies beneath fifteen hundred years worth of rubble and ruins, several stories deep. There remains of the Byzantine emperors' Great Palace only a few mosaics. Churches, famous in their time, have vanished so thoroughly that archeologists argue over where in the city they were located. Ever shifting academic opinion has caused the renowned Palace of Lausos to leap back and forth across Constantinople's main thoroughfare more than once. So Mary and I have a lot of freedom. We adhere strictly to the geography. Like Rome, the new capital of the empire boasted seven hills, and John often finds himself trudging down a steep incline to a harbor. Sometimes we avail ourselves of Victorian historians' detailed but almost certainly fanciful reconstructions of lost buildings. Their guesses were probably better than ours, but there is nothing to stop us from imagining for ourselves what the inside of the emperor's private chambers looked like. The few people allowed entrance have been dead for centuries. And since the architecture of the city has vanished with barely a trace we can erect a mansion or a church or a shop where plot demands, without any historian's building permission. As a character, Constantinople takes second billing only to John. On the cusp of the medieval and classical worlds, the city is complex and contradictory. The setting sun silhouettes a forest of rooftop crosses while shadows creep out into forums across classical statues of Greek philosophers and pagan deities. In many ways Constantinople resembles Rome, after which it was modelled, but it is also far different from the classical capital depicted in the majority of Roman mysteries. The landscape of pagan Rome was never dominated by the Church of the Holy Wisdom.

OMN: Complete this sentence for us: "I am a mystery author and thus I am also …".

Mary: I am a mystery author and thus I am also to be found at one time or another researching such disparate topics as automatons, Roman medicine, Shropshire dialect, the Home Front in World War Two, survivors of hanging, early artificial limbs, laws relating to oral wills, and steamer cars, all of which, not to mention other arcane information, was needed for our novels.

OMN: What prompted you to depart from using numbers in your titles?

Eric: Right from the beginning we called our first book One for Sorrow. Somehow, even in correspondence with our editor, the title was informally shortened to Onefer. When she suggested we continue to name the books after the rhyme from which we'd plucked One for Sorrow, the second book became Two for Joy and so forth. Except that there are variations of the rhyme, and after a while we were forced to extend the rhyme, so we didn't always know what the title would be while we were writing. But our working titles always followed the same pattern; Onefer, Twofer, Threefer … Even our most recent book we referred to as Elevenfer, though we decided at last to give up on our poetic efforts and call it Murder in Megara.

OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?

Mary: As a constant reader I was always being instructed in a kindly way to remove my nose from the current read and go out and play. I read the usual books children read, including girls' boarding school adventures, a setting about as far from an urban childhood as possible. Later on, science fiction and fantasy, mostly the latter. My favourites from the early days are Louisa Alcott's March family books, because I identified strongly with Jo March and declared more than once as an adult I would write in an attic. This did not transpire, although I have written in a basement. However, it was reading Agatha Christie's novels in my early teens that sparked interest in the genre, and from there I went on to the usual suspects and in particular Golden Age novels. Thus I am a great fan of locked room and other impossible mysteries. I also discovered M. R. James (he roolz!) and supernatural fiction of the traditional type. Originally I thought I would try writing the latter but somehow wound up in the field next door.

Eric: Oddly, for a mystery writer, I grew up reading mostly science fiction and fantasy, starting with the Tom Swift Junior series as soon as I graduated from picture books. I also read popular science books, biographies, and during high school went through a Steinbeck phase. About the only mysteries I read were Sherlock Holmes. Although my science fiction reading faded away while I was in college, my subsequent sporadic and desultory professional writing efforts focused on the genre I had stopped reading. It was only after Mary and I married that I turned my hand to writing mysteries as a co-author. Although it was Mary who influenced me to write mysteries, my childhood reading affects my approach to them. I'm quite happy, for instance, to write largely intellectual puzzle mysteries in the Golden Age style rather than books where the mystery takes a back seat to character, psychology, and soap opera. (Not that these elements are missing entirely from our books!) Science fiction, after all — at least the classic variety of my youth — is largely intellectual, a literature of ideas. In addition I love writing about sixth century Byzantium, a place as exotic as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars. As with much science fiction, the "alien" setting serves as a major character. The way we present our setting is probably influenced by Robert Heinlein, who plunked his reader down in the middle of the future and lets them figure it out for themselves as they followed the characters who took their world for granted. Our books do not contain long history lectures.

OMN: When selecting a book to read for pleasure today, what do you look for?

Mary: I read widely and constantly return to mystery fiction, with side trips down the supernatural road leading into the dark woods. Most recently I have re-read a couple of Edgar Wallace thrillers and Boyd Cable's non fiction book about factories producing armaments in the First World War. History (particularly the first fifty years of the 1900s) is one of my main interests, most notably the civilian experience in wartime and so touching upon such topics as rationing, intelligence work, propaganda, resistance movements, evacuation, and so on.

OMN: What's next for you?

Mary: This month sees publication of Murder In Megara, aka as Elevenfer, in which Lord Chamberlain John, now exiled to his estate in Greece, has hardly set foot in the place when he is accused of murder. Then in January 2016 The Guardian Stones appears, a story of dark doings in a Shropshire village during the Second World War. It's a new type of fiction for us and so we hope to have written an interesting story.

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The husband and wife team of Eric Mayer and Mary Reed published several short stories about John, Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian, in mystery anthologies and in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine prior to the first full length novel, One for Sorrow, which was published in 1999. The American Library Association's Booklist Magazine named the Lord Chamberlain novels one of its four Best Little Known Series.

For more information about the authors, please visit their website, or follow them on Twitter — MaryMayWrite and GroggyTales. They also write a joint blog at Eric Reed Mysteries.

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Murder in Megara by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer

A John, the Lord Chamberlain Mystery

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

John, former Lord Chamberlain to Emperor Justinian, has been exiled from Constantinople to a rustic estate John has long-owned in Greece, not far from where he grew up. But exile proves no escape from mystery and mayhem.

The residents of nearby Megara make it plain John and his family are unwelcome intruders. His overseer proves corrupt. What of the other staff―and his neighbors? Before long, John finds himself accused of blasphemy and murder.

Now a powerless outsider, he's on his own, investigating and annoyingly hampered by the ruthless and antagonistic City Defender who serves Megara as both law enforcer and judge. Plus there's that corrupt estate overseer, a shady pig farmer, a servant's unwelcome suitor, a wealthy merchant who spends part of his time as a cave-dwelling hermit, and the criminals and cutthroats populating such a seedy port as Megara. Complicating matters further are two childhood friends whose lives have taken very different paths, plus the stepfather John hated.

John realizes that in Megara, the solution to murder does not lie in the dark alleys where previous investigations have taken him, but in a far more dangerous place―his own past. Can he find his way out of the labyrinth of lies and danger into which he has been thrust before disaster strikes and exile turns into execution?

— Murder in Megara by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer