Interviewing mystery writer and scientist Leah Devlin…
[Readers of this blog might recall that I reviewed Leah Devlin’s excellent mystery Ægir’s Curse last Wednesday. Without further ado, you can now meet this multi-talented woman.]
About Leah:
Steve: Leah, could you start by telling the readers something about yourself?
Leah: I’m American of Swedish and Irish descent. I’m a mystery and thriller writer and marine biologist, the latter giving authenticity to the scientific background of the “Woods Hole Mysteries,” comprised of The Bottom Dwellers (2015) and Ægir’s Curse (2015), and The Bends (coming this summer). I love boats and the sea too, and that relates to the series, the “Chesapeake Tugboat Murders” consisting of Vital Spark (under contract), Spider (under contract), and The Death of a Chrome Diva (in progress), all with Penmore Press.
Steve: That scientific background probably took a few years to acquire, right?
Leah: The literary part too. I have BAs in English Literature, Biology, and Environmental Science (American University, Washington DC), and an MS and PhD in Biology (University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI).
Steve: I now understand where all those scientific and technological details come from in Ægir’s Curse. This mix between creating science and creating stories isn’t completely unknown to me, but let’s hear how you got started writing those mysteries.
Leah on Writing:
Steve: Why, how, and when did you start writing?
Leah: I vividly remember the house of my childhood being full of books from the town library, in a time before bookstore super chains, when one wandered through the stacks and left with a dog-eared stack of books. My writing career was delayed until my early forties, because I was employed as a biologist at a university where, for decades, I wrote research papers on the neuroscience of marine organisms. During my time at a marine laboratory on Cape Cod [Woods Hole], I got the idea to write my first novel. My children were older and more independent and I’d earned tenure at my university, so the pressure was off and I had more mental space to create stories. I have a lot of restless energy and am always game to try new things. After writing my first “practice novel”—bad as it was—there was no turning back.
Steve: Most authors start as readers—or should. Did you publish the first book you wrote?
Leah: No, thankfully. The summer after 9/11, I decided to write a thriller about a terrorist plot off the waters of Woods Hole, a seaside village on Cape Cod. In it, terrorists were going to launch aerosolized, aerodynamic pathogen molecules, stolen from the lab of a Woods Hole bioengineer named Lindsey Nolan, and blow the pathogens toward population centers on the cape using the power of an offshore wind-farm. Sounds ludicrous … yes. Sounds absurd … yes. Sounds dreadful …yes. And yes, I wrote it, and yes, The Windfarm of Death was destined only for the e-trashcan. [Steve: The Boston Marathon seemed ridiculous too.]
But the writing of the ne’er-to-be-published-turkey was instructive at a number of levels. I decided upon the scenic Woods Hole for the location of future novels. The character, Lindsey Nolan had potential as the main protagonist, as she was a jumbled-up mix of genius, dysfunction, and kinetic energy. I was also sure that I wanted to write mystery-thrillers, and I’d proved to myself that I had the staying power to write a full-length novel, albeit a ridiculous one.
Steve: What is your biggest problem with the writing process? How do you tackle it?
Leah: I had the most challenges with my first serious novel, The Bottom Dwellers, which I wrote in fits and starts over a five-year period due to changes in my job situation. It was written initially in the first-person from the POV of Lindsey Nolan, but in doing that, I couldn’t flesh out the other characters. I then rewrote the entire novel from the POV of an omniscient narrator, but that didn’t feel right either. The characters still seemed superficial.
When I started to rewrite each scene from the POV of the major characters, the story immediately gelled. Now all of my stories, both in the Woods Hole Mysteries and Chesapeake Tugboat Murders, are written from the POV of the dominant character in that particular scene. This gives the reader a clear sense of what motivates that character and defines their personalities. I can climb into the character’s head very effectively using that strategy.
Steve: Do you feel writing is something you need to do or want to do?
Leah: At the beginning, I never consciously wanted to be a novelist. I always loved to read and read prolifically, and as I just mentioned, I wrote my first novel as somewhat of a lark. It started as a what-the-hell-let’s-give-it-try, but then I discovered that I had some requisite qualities to be a novelist: stories in my head, a love of working in solitude, and a compulsion to write. These resulted in the three stories in the Woods Hole Mysteries: The Bottom Dwellers, Ægir’s Curse, and The Bends.
Writing fundamentally changed the wiring in my brain. Now it’s more like ‘if I don’t write today, I’ll go crazy.’ It’s part of my daily rhythm. Characters and plots swirling in my head enliven my brain. Writing a mystery is like figuring out a puzzle. It’s how I entertain and challenge myself. When I recently finished Spider, the second story in the Chesapeake Tugboat Murders I didn’t write for about two weeks, during which time I went stir crazy. For two weeks, I spent lots of restless, empty time at the gym, which got boring very quickly. I couldn’t bear not to write and so I got right to work on The Death of a Chrome Diva, my current project. So, in summary, writing started as a something I wanted to do; now it’s something I need to do.
Steve: Have your personal experiences (or situations) influenced you creatively? If so, how?
Leah: I don’t believe that any writer writes in a vacuum. Writers are attuned to their personal situations: their physical world, internal world, and social dynamics. Personal experiences are a huge and integral part of my writing. I’m profoundly impacted by the places I’ve traveled to, so Norway, Scotland, the Chesapeake, and Cape Cod appear frequently in my stories. My characters include scientists, engineers, artists and various types of academics because I work at a university and am surrounded by professors 24/7. Writing about what you know gives the story authenticity. I could never write about coal miners, stockbrokers or Navy SEALs because I know nothing about those walks of life.
Steve: How much of your creative ability do you think is innate and how much is learned?
Leah: This is such an interesting topic! I teach a course in advanced neuroscience to undergraduate pre-medical students, so I’m always updating this course so that it’s timely and relevant. Though I’m not an expert in the neural basis of ‘creativity’ by any stretch, I am aware that some investigators have conducted brain-imaging studies when a subject is producing something original. In the field of neuroscience, the term creativity is used interchangeably with originality.
I like the implication of the term originality; one hopes their novels are original. But I’d be guessing at best on the inborn (innate) elements underlying the neuronal wiring in my brain that might underlay creativity or originality. The nurture (learned) part of the question is easier to answer. My passion to write has to do with an artistic mother who encouraged reading, and an engineer father who took me to the National Geographic lectures for years during my youth and on camping trips to mountains and beaches.
I love travel and the outdoors. I was blessed with excellent teachers in high school, college, and in grad school. Encouraging parents and talented teachers fall into the realm of nurture. I come from a line of stern Swedes with high expectations for work ethic and self-discipline, more examples of learned behaviors/environmental factors. I have a high energy level and good health, which both is inherited and environmental. The fire-in-the-belly to write is one of those enigmatic intangibles that’s difficult to categorize either as innate or learned.
Steve: What is the last book you read? What are you reading now?
Leah: People are always recommending, and giving me books to read, but, honestly, I haven’t read a novel in a long time because I’ve been so busy writing my own. I read scholarly works frequently as part of the research process, but I don’t like to read other’s novels for fear that elements of their characters, plots, and language will slip subconsciously into my stories. I’ve been leafing through James Michener’s Chesapeake to get an overall sense of the history of the bay for writing the stories in the Chesapeake Tugboat Murders series. Shortly I’ll begin reading parts of Shelby Foote’s history of the Civil War to write the Gettysburg scenes in The Death of a Chrome Diva.
Now I remember … the last two novels I read were written by Penmore writers. One was a work of historical fiction called The Chosen Man by J. G. Harlond, about the 1637 Tulip Mania … a great read. The second was by James Boschert, Force 12 in German Bight, a wild action-filled story about drug dealers commandeering a barge in the North Sea during a storm … this story would make a sensational action film.
Steve: Whose writing inspires you the most and why?
Leah: I’m in awe of writers who have beautiful writing styles and express an aspect of the human condition in a completely unique way. Works such as The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje), Lady Matador’s Hotel (Cristina Garcia) and The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) spring to mind. I love outdoor stories and those set in exotic places that I probably never see in this lifetime.
Steve: Do you have a favorite genre?
Leah: I enjoy general fiction, historical fiction, and mystery-thrillers.
Steve: How do you find your plots?
Leah: By paying attention to this fascinating, crazy, comic and tragic world … there’s a story at every turn. Here’s an example. Last summer I was driving my boat along a Chesapeake river, when I spotted an abandoned cottage dangling off the edge of a cliff. That gave me the idea for the opening scene in Spider where a cottage tumbles off a cliff, exposing a mass grave underneath it. At that same, I was whacking spiders (phew…thankfully not poisonous ones) off my boat with a broom, so I decided to write a mystery about a kook who conducts sick experiments with poisonous spiders, then buries the bodies in a mass grave under a cliff-side cottage. So a lot of my stories come from connecting two incongruous ideas, in this case, cliff-side cottages and spiders.
Steve: Are your characters based on real people?
Leah: No, they’re all fictional. My characters aren’t derived from people from my life, though I envision them physically in my mind’s eye to look like notable people. The giant, ex-football player detective, Will Wilkins in the Chesapeake Tugboat Murder I envision like Ron Gronkowski of the New England Patriots, and I image his raven-haired girlfriend, Alex Allaway, as a rugged, outdoorsy version of Audrey Hepburn or Rooney Mara. I envision the blonde Lindsey Nolan as a mid-thirties Helen Hunt, Robin Wright, or Diane Lane, in T-shirt, jeans, and a tool belt slung around her hips. Lindsey’s a nerd who’s magnetic to men.
Steve: How do you name your characters?
Leah: The naming of characters is tremendous fun. First of all, I teach nearly two hundred students a semester, so I’m always exposed to interesting names. I’m basically lazy where names go, choosing names that don’t take much time to type, hence Sara, Nina, Alex, Will and Jay. After typing the name Lindsey a million times in the Woods Hole Mysteries, I decided to go with shorter names. I had a ton of fun with the novel, Spider, because I decided to be Dickensish with the names, choosing those that reflected aspects of the characters’ personalities, so the college administrators are Deans Blodgen, Hinkie, and Wines. Their dim-witted toady of a business manager is Hank Stupens.
Steve: Which comes first, plot or characters?
Leah: I have a vague story line in mind and just start writing. Characters tend to react and evolve as the story progresses. I’m not one to have the story neatly laid out scene by scene. I love the spontaneity of just starting to write and seeing where the characters take me. I put the story in the hands of my characters and let them dictate the direction of the story by their actions. I’m merely their personal secretary, their typist, if you will.
Steve: Any comments about writing dialog?
Leah: In high school and college I toyed with the idea of becoming a playwright, so I read tons of playwrights (O’Neill, Shaw, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shakespeare, etc.) and earned most of my English credits in theatre courses, so I’m quite comfortable writing dialogue, in fact it’s a lot of fun. What’s more difficult is writing credible dialects. I’ve only lived on the east coast of the United States and traveled mostly to the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, so in global terms, I’m pretty limited in the dialects I can write convincingly. However, being around college students has given me an ear for how Millennial and Generation Xers speak, which helped in creating the art students in The Bends and the two millennial cops in the Chesapeake Tugboat Murder series. A character’s language tells volumes about socioeconomic status and background, and helps define the character. I read and reread my dialogues ad nauseam to insure that the conversation rings true.
Steve: Do you do fact-finding for (AKA research) your books? If so, how?
Leah: Research and history are passions of mine. Thorough research is essential for creating an authentic world for the reader. Research is ongoing all the way through the story-writing process. I have adult children therefore empty bedrooms in my house, so I’ve converted my son’s room into my home office, where I write with stacks of histories next to me and my iPad handy for quick fact-checking.
Most of my stories have a historical subplot, some menace from the past, that sets the story in motion and upsets the lives of the modern characters. In Ægir’s Curse, it was a Viking ship carrying a medieval plague to Vinland (Cape Cod in the story) that when brought to surface threatens the seaside village of Woods Hole. In the upcoming The Bends, the murderous activities of a dead teenage prostitute cause the police to investigate a troubled art student.
In the Chesapeake Tugboat Murder series, a missing 1680s pirate treasure haunts the villagers of the fictional village of River Glen. In the opening scene of Vital Spark, the marine biologist protagonist, Alex Allaway, finds her grandfather murdered, a piece of Spanish gold clenched in his fist. In Spider, the same missing treasure lures a ruthless treasure hunter and descendent of a sadistic pirate captain to River Glen. In The Death of a Chrome Diva, it’s the activities of two Civil Wars spies that provoke a murder in Gettysburg over a century later.
To create these historical backstories, I’ve studied Vikings in North America, pirates in the Chesapeake, lives of Chesapeake watermen, art colleges, and currently, the Battle of Gettysburg.
The Writing Business:
Steve: Do you self-publish or traditionally publish?
Leah: My publisher is Penmore Publisher located in Tucson, Arizona. I wrote query letters to agents for years without a single bite. Finally, I found Penmore (sans agent), which is a wonderful group to work with.
Steve: What are your most effective marketing techniques?
Leah: My website, Facebook (Leah Devlin Mystery-Thrillers), Amazon, and Instagram, and I hope word of mouth.
Steve: Do you release trade paperbacks or ebooks?
Leah: Penmore Press releases my books in both paperback and ebook formats.
Personal questions:
Steve: What is your favorite place to eat out?
Leah: I’m addicted to Indian food [Steve: me too]. Truly. I have curry withdrawal if I don’t eat at the Palace of Asia every few weeks. I’m their most loyal customer. They always seat me at my favorite table … where else, closest to the buffet. The waiters bring me my favorite Indian tea without me even asking. I’m spoiled rotten; I’m the first to admit it. I attribute my curry-craving gene (there’s a gene for everything else…why not curry?) to my Irish grandfather who spent his childhood at the Khyber Pass in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan with his father who was a British army officer. Grandfather told me amazing stories of shaking scorpions out of his shoes in the morning, and hunting with cheetahs. I don’t know if any of it’s true, but it fired up one little girl’s imagination. He’s to blame for my passion for exotic stories, places, and spices. [Steve: Sounds like he led a very interesting life.]
Steve: What is your favorite drink?
Leah: I have a killer recipe for jalapeño margaritas. Curry and jalapenos…the more my taste buds sizzle, the better I like the food or drink. [Steve: I’ve had to cut down on my vindaloos.]
Steve: What other interests do you have besides writing?
Leah: I adore motorcycles. When I was a teenager, after I wore down my parents with relentless pleading and whimpering, I went to a YMCA minibike camp. My girlfriend and I were the only girls in the group (which was awesome for a thirteen year old), and we learned to ride up and down the hills at an old farm in Maryland. I remember it like yesterday, the smell of dry grass and gasoline and dust all over our faces and clothes at the end of the day. It was heaven! Since then, I’ve owned a series of mopeds and motorcycles. I currently own a really sweet Yamaha and ride with a women’s motorcycle club. These women are extraordinarily experienced riders, and have crisscrossed the country countless times. The book that I’m currently working on, The Death of a Chrome Diva focuses on a women’s bike club at a motorcycle convention in Gettysburg. If I get another motorcycle, it’s going to be a sexy café racer, maybe a Royal Enfield (a mid-life crisis bike perhaps).
I’m also fanatical about boats, so I spend a lot of time on my boat exploring the Delmarva area. Boats and many types of watercraft are featured in my novels: Viking ships, Jessie McCabe’s Mermaid, Lindsey Nolan’s Just for Today, Alex Allaway’s old tugboat The Vital Spark. In the mystery, Vital Spark, the plot culminates with a deadly sea battle between two rival pirate families. In it, a tugboat, Jet Skis, and speedboats are buzzing around the bay while bullets fly (this is America, after all).
Steve: What was the last movie you went to see?
Leah: The Jungle Book. Spoiler alert … the ending in this new version is much more satisfying than the old animated version because Mowgli the Man Cub stays in the jungle with the black panther, Bagheera, and the bear, Baloo, instead of returning to the man village. The last scene shows the three companions, boy, panther and bear, dozing up in the tree branches, a perfect ending after surviving mudslides, water buffalo stampedes, man-eating tigers, and strangling pythons. [Steve: I liked the recent version better than the cartoon version too. I reviewed the movie a few weeks ago.]
Steve: What would I find in your refrigerator right now?
Leah: Countless kinds of hot sauce and salsa. [Steve: Me too, but no tabasco.]
Steve: If you could trade places with someone for a week, famous or not, living or dead, real or fictional, with whom would it be?
Leah: Definitely Captain Nemo or Jacques Cousteau so I could live on or in the sea all the time. I enjoy all terrains, deserts, mountains, glaciers, and the like, but the ocean thrills me like nothing else. I’ve never been down in a submersible or submarine like Captain Nemo’s Nautilus but it’s on my bucket list. In the upcoming The Bends in the Woods Hole Mysteries, the Nobel laureate-engineers, Lindsey Nolan and Sara Kauni, have started up a small dive technology company that builds experimental submersibles, which has catastrophic consequences for one of them. But I’ll say no more.
Steve: What is your favorite (song) and why? Piece of music?
Leah: My taste in music is very eclectic. I love blues and jazz, rock, reggae, and Latin music. It’s impossible for me to single out one piece of music because there’s so much brilliant music.
Steve: Thank you, Leah, for being so candid. Now I think I’ll go nuke that ready-made tika masala I have in the micro for lunch. For all the readers out there, let me repeat your website URL. I wish you many successes with your books.
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In libris libertas….
