For successful writer Carola Dunn, writing mysteries is more complicated, as it requires more reasoning and less emotion. She speaks about her novels and her popular character, Honourable Daisy Dalrymple.
Writing novels are a tricky business. You
need to know the reader’s pulse without losing sight of what you want to write.
Carola Dunn, a known name for her historical romances & regency novels,
knows how to write such good novels. Her crime novels featuring the Honourable
Daisy Dalrymple are interesting cases solved by the charming Miss Daisy. Her loving
bourgeois husband Detective Chief Inspector Alec Fletcher at Scotland Yard is
reduced to helping his gifted wife, while she also handles a career as a
writer. With upto 22 Daisy Dalrymple series till date and the Cornish Mystery
Series, she is surging ahead to pen more entertaining books for her fans.
Many writers plan to become writers or at
least are in the process of becoming one, despite being in another profession.
For Carola, it was entirely an accidental foray into writing. “While my son was
small, we moved a lot and I had lots of part-time & temporary jobs. Then we
settled down and my husband thought I ought to get a ‘proper’ job. He had said
for years that I ought to write a book because I read so much. So, I decided I
might as well give it a try. I didn’t expect to complete it, but once it was
written I thought I might as well try to sell it. And I was lucky enough to
find an editor who loved it.” The good start eggs her to write until date.
Carola happens to be American who grew up
in UK. Carola feels English in American and American in England. “Almost all my
books are set in England, so most of the time I live in America physically but
in England in my head. I have to look up many idioms before I use them in my
writing to be sure they are British, not American. Call me a hybrid. However,
the two cultures are much more similar these days than they were when I was
growing up.”
Regency novels are what connect to Carola
as a writer. Indian readers still are on a back foot with this genre. Carola
states that Regency happens to be a period in history (1811-1820), after King
George III went mad only to have his son take over as Prince Regent. “It’s the
time when Jane Austen’s novels were published. In the 1930s, Georgette Heyer,
another English author, wrote the first of over 30 romances set in the period.
With memorable characters, excellent historical detail, and very varied plots,
she set the tone for the genre.”
A layman might think it quite strange to
jump genres from romance to mystery. Carola reveals, “Looking back, I’m amazed
at how many of my Regencies had elements of mystery. The very first, Toblethorpe Manor, has a heroine with
amnesia. No one knows who she is and that mystery drives the story. The Miser’s Sister has a kidnapping and
an attempted-murder/suicide. Several have spies or smugglers, and many have
villains of one sort or another who have to be thwarted.”
With different genres, one assumes a writer
takes different writing process for each. Carola states, “The goal of a romance
is to introduce the hero & heroine to each other, have them fall in love,
overcome obstacles, and end up living happily ever after. It is a straightforward
process. The goal of a mystery is to present a crime, give readers plenty of
clues to enable them to solve it, and give them plenty of red herrings to lead
them astray; and then to have your sleuth(s) reach the solution logically
and/or intuitively, in a satisfying way.”
This, she says, makes writing mysteries more
complicated, as it has more reasoning and less emotion. “That doesn’t mean
there’s no reasoning in a romance or no emotion in a mystery, but the balance
is quite different.”
All this talk leads to her popular &
fascinating character – The Honourable Daisy Dalrymple. She is a career woman in
the 1920s and a woman detective to boot that. Carola reveals that her first
choice was the setting, time (1920s) & Place (England). For her main
character, she wanted it to be female. “I made her the daughter of a lord so
that she would be able to question anyone from a duke to a street-sweeper. However,
I killed off her father in the flu epidemic of 1918-19 and her brother in the
First World War, so that she would have to work for a living. Then I made her a
journalist so that she would be able to go places and ask questions. She’s
interested in people and usually likes those she meets, which makes it
reasonable that they’ll tell her things they wouldn't tell the police. She met
Alec Fletcher of Scotland Yard in the first book, Death at Wentwater Court, and they married at the beginning of the ninth
book, To Davy Jones Below. Both their
mothers were bitterly opposed to the marriage because of the difference in
class. Daisy’s stepdaughter, Belinda, loves her dearly. Though each book is a
separate story, the characters develop over the series, as my readers & I get
to know them better and see how they behave in various circumstances.”
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| Carola Dunn |
Writing a period detective novel is not an
easy cup of tea, as the writer must have the knack of keeping that period alive
in every way. Carola has had her share of reading done of mysteries written in
the 20s & early 30s. That allowed her to feel the period and understand the
people. “The rest is research, which has become much easier since the amount of
information available on the internet has increased by leaps and bound.”
A writer loves his/her character like his/her
child. It is the same for Carola. If asked about Daisy, she admits that she
likes Daisy as a person. “I hear from many readers who think of her as a
friend. They don’t even care that much about the mystery aspect, it just gives
an excuse to spend time with Daisy and her family & friends! I try to make
the mysteries all different from each other. They tend to be light-hearted but
also deal with the emotions that lead to murder and those stirred up by the
murder. Some of them also deal with serious social issues, particularly those
caused by WWI.”
Considering the amount of mysteries she has
written, the fan following must be strong & interesting. “I’ve written 22
books in the series, so clearly I have enough readers to make my publishers
happy. I hear from a lot of them. The letters/emails I like best are those that
say the Daisy books have helped them through times of trouble or illness by
distracting them from their woes. That’s a great compliment,” Carola reveals. Since
her books are her children, she does not like to keep any favourites.
Fans eagerly await the next book to come
from Carola’s writing stable. She reveals that she has just finished a fourth
Cornish mystery – series set in Cornwall around 1970. “It’ll be out next autumn.
In the New Year, I’ll be starting on another Daisy book. In the meantime, the
second Daisy book, The Winter Garden
Mystery, will be reissued (March, I think) and the most recent, Superfluous Women, will come out in
paperback,” Carola ends.
Creativity (and a thumping good at that)
never stops coming to its admirers. One is assured that Carola Dunn never keeps
her pen down and allows fans like us to be delighted with more books.
All of Carola Dunn books, mystery
and Regency, are available as e-books. Readers can visit her on Facebook and on
her website – www.CarolaDunn.weebly.com.
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