I’m delighted to host Cara Black, about whom the New York Times Book Review has said, “If the cobblestones of the old Marais district of Paris could only talk, they might tell a tale as haunting as the one Cara Black spins…” Books in her bestselling Aimée Leduc mystery series have included San Francisco Chronicle bestsellers, Washington Post best books of the years, and Indie Next picks, and she’s been nominated for the Anthony Award. Read below about how she got started writing, inspired by a friend’s story. And then read her books if you haven’t already! – Meg
I never thought I’d write a book, or a book set in Paris, much less a mystery series set there. My only qualifications stem from being a library kid – we went every week – and thinking one day I wanted to write but not ready for the hard work of doing it. I think all writers are readers. Now nine books later, I still can’t say I had a master plan but the series with Aimee Leduc has just evolved.
My driving force to write, the story I grew passionate about, was the story which simmered for ten long years and became my first book, Murder in the Marais, I’d heard a story in Paris, in 1984, from my friend. We were standing on the cobblestones in front of an old apartment building in the Marais and she pointed to the window. ‘My mother lived there during the Occupation. She had to hide, she wore a yellow star.’
She told me her mother had been 14 years old in 1943 and came home from school one day to find her family gone. No word, no note. Not knowing what else to do she asked the concierge for help and lived in the apartment, went to school, hoping her family would return. The concierge kept her presence from the police, furnished her with ration coupons and she waited.
In 1944 at Liberation, she searched for her family at the train stations, at the Hotel Lutetia on the Left Bank where the Red Cross had a terminus center for returning deportees and the hundreds of thousands of displaced people. She searched every day, like so many people, did only to discover by chance that a woman had seen her sister get off the train at Auschwitz. That’s all she ever learned. And it touched something in me. I never forgot my friends’s words or wondering how it would feel for a fourteen year old to suffer such loss.
Ten years later, when I returned to Paris in 1994, the story came back to me in full force. It was now fifty years after the war and I wanted to explore the issues of the past, the collaboration era during the war, the grey area of how people survived, perhaps like my friend’s mother did. Find the old stories I sensed lingering in a generation that was leaving us and how war still touched every generation.
Many people didn’t want to discuss the past or the painful memories. So I learned from shuttered looks, the pointed changes in conversation, to discover an era I would find in historical accounts, memoirs and by research with those willing to talk to me.
And along the way I was figuring out how I could make the story current, bear on the present day Paris of the 1990’s and the remnants of anti-Semitism in the government. I liked mysteries, the format and resolution and along the way figured the detective novel was a great framework to hinge the story. I knew I couldn’t write as a French woman, I can’t even tie my scarf the right way but I grew up in a Francophile family; my father loved good food and wine, I’d attended a Catholic school with French nuns who taught us archaic French and I’d lived in Europe when I was younger. So Aimée developed into having an American mother and French father.
I interviewed three female detectives in Paris who ran their own detective agency and took qualities from each. It was important to me that Aimée be a young, contemporary woman like the Parisian women I know, have a strong fashion sense and be fierce in her pursuit of justice. The justice that eludes people sometimes in daily life. And that she know much more about computers than I do.
By that time I’d taken UC Berkeley extension writing classes and gotten into a writing group. Now I was doing the hard work. Murder in the Marais took three and a half years to write.
To my amazement I sold the book without an agent and the publisher asked for the next book. I had the next book, didn’t I? Of course I said yes, got to work and sent Aimée this time to investigate a murder in Belleville, a vibrant immigrant quartier that I’d been staying in.
I like to think that Paris is a character in my books. This sense of place, that unique part of Paris that speaks to me drives the story. Paris is really a collection of villages, twenty arrondissements or districts that each have a flavor. I always try to think why crime would occur here in this quartier of Paris, what crime would happen here, who lives here, what is the distinct taste of this quartier of Paris and then the story comes. – Cara Black
