Dear Readers,
It is more than time to update this part of the web site, the place
where I feel I am connecting most directly to you—albeit in cyberspace.
With the publication of the seventeenth book in the series, The Body in the Gallery, I feel quite amazed at having written this many and am extremely pleased —as well as grateful—that people still want to read about Faith Fairchild’s inexplicable penchant for finding bodies. I remember when I was writing the third book, The Body in the Bouillon, asking my wonderful editor at St. Martin’s Press, Ruth Cavin, whether it wasn’t stretching credulity to have a heroine who kept stumbling over corpses. “It’s fiction, Katherine,” she replied. “You can do anything you want.” What freedom! I took her at her word and have ever since.
I don’t think you can be a writer without being a reader. I’ve always read voraciously, congenitally unable to fall asleep at night without having turned pages—nonfiction or fiction, especially mysteries. When I wrote my first mystery, The Body in the Belfry, I set out to write the kind of book I liked to read: suspenseful, with a good puzzle, an interesting sleuth, a strong sense of place, humor, and food. Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Dorothy L. Sayers, Virginia Rich, and non-mystery writers Nancy Mitford, and M.F.K. Fisher were all influences. One of the first decisions I had to make was whether to create an amateur or professional, male or female protagonist. Gradually Faith Sibley Fairchild took shape in my mind’s eye: a native New Yorker who leaves the Big Apple for the more bucolic orchards of a small town west of Boston. I wanted her to have that New York, bright lights/big city edge, and an outsider’s perspective. She gives up her glitzy catering business, Have Faith, as well as the three B’s— Bloomies, Barneys, and Balducci’s— to move to fictional Aleford, Massachusetts after marrying the Reverend Thomas Fairchild. Faith is the daughter and granddaughter of clergymen and had, with her younger sister, Hope, always sworn to avoid the fishbowl existence of parish life, but good old love gets in the way. Tom, finished performing his part of the nuptials for an old friend in Manhattan, had changed out of his robes when he and Faith, who was catering the reception, fell head over heels over the poached salmon with hollandaise. I thought that by making Faith a caterer and a clerical spouse I would have opportunities for plenty of food, humor, and a way for her to get a foot in the door. An amateur sleuth, even one as nosey as Faith, has to have a plausible reason for poking around.
“Poking around.” When I think back upon the series, I see Faith standing by a pond, its surface a mirror perhaps reflecting some white birches or catching the flight of a heron. Everything looks quite perfect and serene, but if she takes a long stick and pokes beneath the waters, who knows what secrets the murky depths might give up? The difference between what seems and what is has been a theme throughout all the books. It’s the tension between appearance and reality that taps into our greatest fears. We’ve all experienced the knife-in-the-back false friend. Particularly when we were kids. A murderer represents that duplicity to the nth degree. The mask comes off. My favorite example comes from one of the old Alfred Hitchcock TV shows. A young woman is on a bus late at night on her way home. Passenger after passenger departs until finally she’s left alone with a crazed homicidal-looking, drooling maniac and a man in a suit with a brief case. Sensing her fear, the businessman asks what her stop is and tells her not to worry, it’s his too and he’ll walk her to her door. She’s enormously relieved and they get off the bus together. The maniac follows, and at her door he rushes forward grabbing her violently. The businessman does nothing. She screams at him, “Help me! Why aren’t you helping me?” He replies, “Ah, you see, he’s with me.” Then the screen went dark. It still gives me a chill.
When I started the series, I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to encumber your sleuth with children. Faith is carrying baby Benjamin in a Snugli when she discovers the still warm corpse of a young parishioner in Aleford’s old belfry. In the latest book, young Benjamin is now in middle school and has become mixed up in some major cyberbullying. Over the years he’s acquired a sibling, Amy. Both of them, however, are still young enough to need Faith’s attention. I discovered in most series where kids did appear they were old enough to on their own, in boarding school, or conveniently at mom or dad’s—the parents divorced. There are good reasons to avoid progeny in mysteries. Faith has never been able to pursue a hot lead without thinking of what to do with her children. She has a great next-door neighbor in Pix Miller, but Faith can’t always impose on her. Much like the way things are for many people I know with children in real life. Or other things. Everyone juggles—just not dead bodies as well. The late Bill Deeck, a mystery fan and scholar, offered sage advice after reading the first book. He thought the family aspect worked—I’d felt that given who she and Tom were, they’d be parents—but Bill told me to keep the kids off stage and avoid cute.
The books, since the Body in the Cast, have included recipes, but they’re at the end. I didn’t want them to interrupt the flow of the narrative, the action—a badly bludgeoned body followed by a brownie recipe didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t put recipes in the first few books, because Virginia Rich had pioneered this and I thought it would be borrowing more than a cup of sugar from this late great writer. When readers began asking for them, I sent copies out. Ruth Cavin thought I should simply add them. Some readers love the recipes and have had great success with them. They are not complicated. Some readers aren’t interested at all, which is fine with me and another reason why they are at the end of the books. And yes, I do like to cook, but I don’t cook the way Faith does—certainly not every day, although I do for special occasions. I’m not a food snob and have been known to use prepared stock and bottled salad dressing. Like Faith, though, I do feel that feeding people is an essential form of communication. You can show someone you love him or her with a warm cookie or a warm word.
There is no question that the mystery genre is a very popular one—and has been since Wilkie Collins wrote The Moonstone. This may be due to the impulse to outwit the writer and guess whodunit before the denouement. There’s also the satisfaction that comes from knowing that the guilty will be punished. Loose ends are tied up. This is where playing fair with the reader comes in most powerfully. I cannot introduce a character—whom I like to refer to as “the evil twin from Australia”—at the end of the book as the murderer. I want you to be able to say, “All the clues were there. I should have guessed who it was.” The challenge for me is to keep you from guessing with a plausible, red herring strewn plot. My favorite answer to why crime fiction is so popular comes from a reply P.D. James gave to a reporter some years ago, “These novels are always popular in ages of great anxiety. It’s a very reassuring form. It affirms the hope that we live in a rational and beneficent universe.”
Faith has stumbled across bodies in belfries, bogs, vestibules, bookcases, the Big Apple, a basement, moonlight, kelp, snowdrifts, bouillon, ivy, fjords, casts, a lighthouse, bonfires, an attic, and now a gallery. To keep the series fresh for me to write and you to read, I’ve alternated the Aleford books with other locales: France, Norway, Vermont, Cambridge, MA, and an island in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine. For The Body in The Ivy, an homage to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, I created another Indian Island and deliberately did not specify where it is. The Body in the Big Apple is a prequel, set in Manhattan over the course of the 1989 holiday season. Faith is with another man (who appears again in The Body in the Attic many years later). She hasn’t met Tom yet. One of the joys of writing a series is the ability to work with a kind of ensemble troupe, bringing characters back, creating new ones, but the major players are fixed, although their parts can change. Readers tell me that Faith has grown, matured as the series has progressed. She’s less of a food and clothes snob. She’s lost a little—but not all!—of her big city edge. When people write to me about her, they write as if she were someone they knew, an actual person. She seems that way to me, but being able to convey it to others is the ultimate reward. Madeleine L’Engle, one of my favorite writers, who died last fall at age 88, described the writing process as taking dictation from her subconscious, her imagination. I love this notion and it explains the voice we hear as we write—and read.
The Body in the Gallery is an Aleford book. A downturn in the economy has taken a big bite out of Faith’s catering business, so when her friend, Patsy Avery, approaches her about taking over the café at Aleford’s Ganley Museum of Art—where Patsy is president of the board of trustees—Faith agrees. The hours are limited and she’s sure she can handle both jobs. What gets in the way is the real reason Patsy has enlisted her help. It’s not just the execrable coffee and possibly ptomaine-laden sandwiches provided by the prior supplier that has spurred Patsy’s request. It’s her discovery that the Romare Bearden collage that Patsy and her husband have given the Ganley as a permanent loan has been switched for a fake. Patsy is convinced it’s an inside job. While investigating the forgery, Faith makes an even more shocking discovery. Arriving early one morning to check that everything has been cleaned up from the opening reception of a major show—New England Rocks!—the night before, Faith finds the body of a young woman in a Damien Hirst type installation. It had held a lone goldfish and was intended to be a commentary on contemporary American tastes. Now it holds a “mermaid” and is a contemporary American tragedy. I have always wanted to write a John or Jane Doe mystery, one in which the identity of the victim is masked for a good part of the book. Finding out who it is becomes the key to everything else.
This book also has an ongoing subplot about cyberbullying. Cyberbullying has become an increasingly serious problem, especially among middle school kids. It is difficult to control, because it takes place in cyberspace not on the playground. Kids start vicious rumors about other kids and post them online where millions read them, instead of the few who would hear taunts in earlier days. Without face-to-face contact, kids often cross the line, saying and doing things they would never do otherwise. They’re invisible, as if they’d borrowed Harry Potter’s cloak. But Harry would never do what they do. They hack into MySpace profiles and change them, flood email and text phones with inappropriate messages, particularly ones that question someone’s sexuality. Many schools have adopted policies regarding cyberbullying and are holding workshops for students about the problem and what to do if victimized. This is too late for the teenager in Vermont who committed suicide after months of harassment. Instead of making Ben Fairchild a victim, I made him a perpetrator—pulled in by having to decide whether he would be a target or part of the popular group launching the missiles.
Gallery also draws on my experience teaching middle and high school, and a lifelong interest in art. My mother was a painter and I grew up in New Jersey, not far from New York City. At an early age, we were exposed to art in and out of museums—and artists. As with literature, my taste in art is catholic. I’m as devoted to Degas as Diebenkorn. It was great fun to create a museum and fill it. A writer’s freedom—harkening back to Ruth Cavin’s words quoted earlier—at its most exhilarating.
Essentially, though— as with all the books— The Body in the Gallery tells a suspenseful tale as Faith stirs up that pond desperately trying to get at the truth, stopping the killer before he or she can strike again—and again.
With best wishes,
Katherine Hall PageCopyright Katherine Hall Page and Proximity Internet Productions, © 2003