An Uninvited Quest is my favorite book in the series because the characters and themes mesh so well. The characters have become my friends and thematically the novel examines issues of faith and justice, both personal and social. These are core issues in any consideration of the human condition, and they seemed like a natural for a Charlotte mystery.
The concept for the story came about after dinner with good friends, when I was challenged to add a gay couple to the denizens of downtown Elm Grove, and to create a plot that dealt with hate crimes against the LGBTQ community. It didn’t take long to come up with the characters, while the nature of the crime went through several metamorphoses, as is usually the case when I start a new book.
The passing of real-life time played a large role in the development of this story. I had planned to take a year off after the publication of An Uncharted Corpse, a year which turned into two when we made a big change in our living arrangements—honestly, when I planned the year off, I had no idea that we would end up moving house! But by the time I resumed a regular writing schedule, quite a few things had also changed in the world at large: Donald Trump became president, and a lot of people became angry and fed up by the implication that his callous brand of sexism and racism was given legitimacy. The resulting Women’s March, along with the MeToo movement and other events, propelled discussion, debates, and activism.
Despite the uptick in hate speech and crimes and threats to civil rights, many bright and hopeful things have come about during this unsettled and even disturbing time. Several women and an openly gay man became serious contenders for the presidency, and more women, many of color, are now members of Congress. Young women, in particular, are increasingly unafraid to speak out against sexism, discrimination, repression, harassment and assault. Little girls are encouraged to put more value in character and fitness than in beauty. We are actually witnessing, I think, a cultural shift—and it was important to reflect that in my work in progress.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that my original draft for AUQ felt dated by the time I started writing the second draft. So I changed the story a little, moved it up to three years after the last book instead of the usual several months. This meant that Charlotte would now be in her fifties, Donovan crowding sixty, and, best of all, Ellis would be twenty—and not taking any guff! Catherine, Jimmy, and especially Helene also aged. In the course of describing Catherine’s silvery cropped hair in the first chapter, she is likened to Joan of Arc. A few chapters into the second draft later, Joan of Arc popped up again in another context, and this time I sat up and paid attention to what my creative mind was trying to tell me.
Part of showing, not telling, is to create structures to carry the theme. It isn’t a spoiler to say that Joan of Arc, who is depicted in the stained glass window on the cover of the book, provides both symbol and theme. She was a teen-aged girl who received a divine mission to lead the French army against the English during the Hundred Years’ War. It would be incredibly hard to do that these days (as Greta Thunberg has learned with her climate change efforts), but imagine trying to do this in the 15th century! Yet she was for real, a girl in armor who convinced the desperate Dauphin to allow her to lead an army of men against the siege of Orleans, where they won. She continued to win and make steady progress against the English in the course of a year or so, enabling the Dauphin to be crowned Charles VII.
Before Joan of Arc was captured, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake by the English and their collaborators, the Burgundians, she was accused of “cross-dressing,” which was considered evil and was punishable by death. It took some doing to convince the clergy that it was simply a tactic utilized by her fellow soldiers to disguise her for her own protection, not a declaration of gender identity. Later, the armor she wore protected her during battles, and by that time it was more important to protect her as God’s symbol of France than to worry about propriety.
The takeaway: Joan of Arc’s gender, youth, and determination to do whatever it took to achieve her quest were qualities that made her revered on one hand, butfeared and misunderstood on the other.
It was a fear explored by George Bernard Shaw in Saint Joan. For him, the tragedy of her story was not just in the fact that she was a kid burned at the stake, but that the men who decided her fate truly thought they were in the right, doing the right thing. They truly believed they were good men with the best of intentions for their sovereign and their country, yet they committed a heinous act that would be denounced in the future by both church and state when those institutions changed with the times.
Even though most of this background information was not directly applicable toAUQ, the whole idea of a Joan of Arc was enough to further develop the story, the various characters, and the motivation behind the various crimes: a quest, a misunderstood gender identity, and a world—yes, even our modern one—where these things were still, on some level, alien concepts.
That is, to me, the kind of world in which the LGBTQ community still finds itself all too often, and this helped me to frame the context of hate crimes in a community like Elm Grove. How, I asked myself, could the crimes become epidemic? What if—
But that’s all I’ll say for now. You’ll have to read the book to discover the questions and their often-elusive answers.