We are delighted to welcome author Con Lehane to Omnimystery News today.
Con introduces librarian and reluctant sleuth Raymond Ambler in the first of a new series, Murder at the 42nd Street Library (Minotaur Books; April 2016 hardcover and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to catch up with him to talk more about the book.
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Omnimystery News: Introduce us to the cast of characters in Murder at the 42nd Street Library.
Photo provided courtesy of
Con Lehane; Photo credit
Paddy Lehane.
Con Lehane: Murder at the 42nd Street Library is pretty much a traditional mystery, though one with a few dark corners. The main character, Raymond Ambler, is not exactly a librarian, though I call him one. He's a curator who works in Special Collection at the main branch of the New York Public Library, located at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, hence the moniker, 42nd Street Library. I invented the library's crime fiction collection for the purposes of the story. Since I expect readers will come to know Ambler through the story, I'm not sure how to talk about him outside the story. His work is the centerpiece of his life, which includes an abiding interest in murder, mostly in what brings someone to murder someone and what brought the victim to the situation in life where he or she gets murdered. Ambler's a thoughtful sleuth. He asks questions. He ponders. He searches out answers often in what a murder victim might have left behind in a collection at the library. For reasons I won't divulge here, Ambler is most interested in murders that presage additional murders because, out of a sense of personal guilt, he feels an obligation to prevent murder if he can.
Other characters who play significant roles are his co-worker Adele Morgan and his friend homicide detective Mike Cosgrove. I'm interested in the lives the characters lead that are interrupted, so to speak, by the extraordinary occurrence — a murder — that interrupts those lives and ultimately changes them forever. Adele, for example, though she's essentially a happy person, is missing much in her life. Her mother's death (from natural causes) is one loss. Shortly after her mother's death, she ends an unsatisfactory romantic relationship. Most important for her is not having a child in her life. She's drawn to Raymond Ambler, a man much older than her, certainly as a friend, but possibly, for reasons she's not sure of, something more. Mike Cosgrove is an experienced, jaded, brooding, homicide investigator with the New York Police Department, who's seen to much of the dark and violent side of life to take much joy from the rest of what life has to offer. He's dogged, thorough, and honest in his investigations. But his family life is a mess.
OMN: How do you see these characters evolving over the course of a series?
CL: The short answer is I don't consciously set out to keep my recurring characters unchanged; nor do I set out to have them change or develop. I give them situations to work through, to live through. At the beginning of each story, I pick them up at a certain point in their lives. They grow (This is interesting. I swear I wrote "go" but it came out "grow" so I'm going to leave it this way.) through a series of events — some of them harrowing, I hope — and come out the other side. At the beginning of each new story — call it episode — I cull them up from wherever they've been waiting. I don't think much about what they've been doing in between stories; I focus on the situation I'm putting them in for the story I'm about to begin.
I'm sure characters change as I'm sure people change but I'm not sure how much a person changes in fiction or in life or how the change comes about. The kind of experience Saul had on the road to Damascus (blinding light, knocked from his horse, the Lord asking 'why do you persecute me?') I suspect is rare. But I think sometimes that's what's meant by a character growing and changing in fiction: The puny kid who finally has enough, beefs up, and takes on the bully; the severe-looking, drably dressed librarian who lets down her hair and takes off her glasses to emerge as a voluptuous sexpot (I use librarian here advisedly).
Those kinds of changes don't happen in my stories. I guess in most of my stories the recurring characters emerge sadder and wiser, often with deeply felt regrets. Sometimes, as in Murder at the 42nd Street Library, some of the characters grow closer together. Other characters make discoveries about someone that might drive them apart. All of the characters carry the weight of what happens — the loss of someone close to them, the discovery of failings in someone they trusted, regret for actions they took or didn't take. All of this must change them in some way. But in other ways, they're much the same as they always were.
In another way, I think my characters, the recurring ones, change as I do. Over the course of a book, from book-to-book, over a writing career — how I change must have an effect on how my characters think and act. One of my characters, bartender Brian McNulty, has been with me for more than a decade. I'd bet he's changed in ways I'm not aware of, as I've changed in ways I'm only vaguely aware of. So we change and they change in many way but not dramatically. One question a series writer needs to answer is whether or not his character ages. Some, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone for example hardly age at all. I don't see Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer aging, nor Sherlock Holmes. My characters don't age in real time. They've grown older but more slowly than I have. If I could reverse that, I would.
OMN: Did you have any trouble finding the right voice for these characters?
CL: The first time I wrote in the voice of a woman character was in Murder at the 42nd Street Library. She (Adele Morgan) is not the lead character but in my mind a central character whom I intend to be a recurring character. She becomes more important in the second book, and more important still, I hope, in future books. Her voice came easily to me. I was comfortable in her head. I didn't stop to ponder or analyze whether the voice was authentic. It felt authentic to me. So, finding the voice wasn't challenging. Whether the voice and the character are authentic only time, and readers, will tell. As Charlotte Bronte said, "I'm neither a man nor a woman but an author."
OMN: You mentioned that Murder at the 42nd Street Library is a traditional mystery. What does "traditional mystery" mean to you?
CL: The answer isn't as straightforward as one might think. I characterize — or categorize — my books as traditional mysteries. However, the books aren't cozy. They make the same break from the golden age mysteries as Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's books did. The writer I'm most influenced by is Ross Macdonald, whose detective, Lew Archer, is a private eye, and whose books are properly called hard-boiled. Macdonald, in my opinion, is a traditional mystery writer. A mystery is at the heart of his story and Lew Archer solves it. Macdonald's books are categorized as mysteries and as thrillers as often as they're characterized as hard-boiled (as in "Ross Macdonald must be ranked high amongst American thriller-writers." — Times Literary Supplement). To further complicate things, my first publisher was Rivages/Noir in France. Since that first book took place on the mean streets of Upper Manhattan, late at night, in the early 1980s — New York's underbelly, as one literary agent put it — for my first few years on the mystery conference circuit, I was categorized as a noir writer. All this being clear by now, I'm sure, what I hope I'm doing as a writer — and probably failing at — is what Eudora Welty Ross MacDonald was doing "… piecing together a most modern American tragedy, making literature out of the thriller form."
OMN: Tell us something about this book that isn't mentioned in the publisher's synopsis.
CL: The story is told through multiple points of view. In the course of the telling, the reader sees events unfolding from the point of view of, if I remember correctly, ten different characters. The reader is never far from Raymond Ambler's point of view. Others — his co-worker (and love interest?) Adele Morgan, and his friend, homicide detective Mike Cosgrove, have quite a bit to say. Some of the characters have only one or two appearances. I'm not sure why I did it this way. The story dictates how you tell it. The main reason for the different points-of-view was to get information to the reader that I didn't want Ambler to be privy to, or that he couldn't reasonably know. I think it worked well. Again, only time and the readers will tell.
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in your books?
CL: In almost all cases, I rely on my own life and people I've known when I begin a story. Before long, in the writing, this changes and the characters take on a life of their own and the situation they're involved in grows into something far different than the actual situation I began with. Although in some cases, especially backstory for a character, when I look back I no longer remember what someone might have told me once and what I made up to embellish what I'd been told.
For recurring characters like Raymond Ambler, Adele, Cosgrove, McNulty, they've established their own fictional identities as the persons they've become in the stories, so I don't need the real person I began with. Though sometimes, even now, when these fictional characters are well established, I'll look back at that real person for a mannerism or way of saying something. In a few cases, I continue to see the real person when I picture that character in the story throughout the whole story. In other cases, like McNulty, I know him as well, or better, than any real person. In the end, a writer has a deeper understanding of his characters than he or she ever would of another real person. As Flaubert said of Madam Bovary, each of my characters, "c'est moi."
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Over the years, Con Lehane has been a college professor, union organizer, labor journalist, and he's tended bar at two-dozen or so drinking establishments. These days, he teaches fiction writing and mystery writing at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland and its outpost at the Capitol Hill Center in Washington, D.C.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at ConLehane.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Murder at the 42nd Street Library by Con Lehane
A Raymond Ambler Mystery
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Librarian and reluctant sleuth Raymond Ambler and his partners in crime-solving track down a killer, shining a light on the dark deeds and secret relationships that are hidden behind the majestic marble façade of New York City's landmark 42nd Street Library.
In their search for the reasons behind the murder, Ambler and his crew uncover sinister, and profoundly disturbing, relationships among the scholars studying in the iconic library. Included among the players are a celebrated mystery writer who has donated his papers to the library's crime fiction collection; that writer's long-missing daughter, a prominent New York society woman with a hidden past, and more than one of Ambler's colleagues at the library. Shocking revelations lead inexorably to the traumatic events that follow―the reading room will never be the same.
— Murder at the 42nd Street Library by Con Lehane. Click here to take a Look Inside the book.
