To me it sounds like a fairy tale . . . in 1999 a San Francisco author’s debut mystery novel Murder in the Marais, set in Paris of all places, leaps to the head of the pack and gains an Anthony Award nomination. Since then, Cara, you’ve basically written a book a year, with Murder in Belleville and Murder in the Sentier pleasing both critics and fans. Tell me, was there a writing history before Murder in the Marais?

Not really. I had written a bit when I was younger, I kept a journal but then I stopped. When my son went into preschool I started taking writing classes, a UC Berkeley extension. That led to me getting into a writing group, and it went from there.

You don’t have the appearance of a hardboiled murder mystery writer. What was your impetus to write mystery novels rather than, say, literary fiction? Do you have a fascination with the darker side, with good versus evil?

I like the fact that when you read a mystery novel, there is some sense of resolution. It’s not always black-and-white ‘good guy catches bad guy,’ but justice is served in some way. A novel is more of a novel when murder happens. I really like that, I like exploring in a crime novel how someone can deal with obstacles and find resolution.

Where did firebrand Aimee Leduc spring from? How much of you is in her?

That’s a good question. I went to French schools when I was young. I learnt French. But I’m not French, I’m American. I can’t even tie my scarf the way Frenchwomen do, I believe it’s genetic. So from the outset I knew I could never write as a Frenchwoman. But I could write as a knowledgeable outsider who has a lot of knowledge of French ways, and I think a lot of Francophiles, who love France, feel outside of Paris when they’re there. So I set out to explore Paris from that perspective. Half-French half-American Aimee is rather an outsider, I call her neither fish nor fowl.

Was Aimee a deliberate creation, did you consciously decide I’m going to put this sort of character into this kind of background? Or was she a voice that just appeared?

I got to know Aimee as the books came along. You know [chuckles], at first she was a British Nanny living with a French family. But that didn’t lend itself to solving crimes. Then I chanced upon a Paris detective agency run by a woman had inherited it from her father and her grandfather. She was so fascinating, very nice and bourgeois in appearance, wearing pearls, yet steeped in a history of crimes. So I sort of used that background But I wanted Aimee to be modern, to be using a computer, which is why she’s a computer security consultant. Yet she’s always being pulled back into the criminal world she inherited with the agency.

Have you enjoyed exploring the complexities of her psychology since then?

Oh, yes. I’ve enjoyed making lots of things happen to her. In Murder in the Sentier it became much more of a personal story, with Aimee looking for her mother. And there’s always the hanging problem of her father and how he was killed in that explosion and how there’s never enough information for the reader . . .

When are we going to find out about her father?

Down the road. Way down, a couple of arrondissements later.

Paris . . . who wouldn’t love to set a novel in that most atmospheric city? How do you manage to penetrate it so richly? Do you visit often?

As much as I can, but it’s never enough. I was there this year for a signing at Brentano’s in Paris, and then spent three weeks in the countryside with my family. For me, I can never get enough work done when I’m with my son and husband, but I’m hoping to go back in November. I have a friend I can stay with in Montmarte. I sleep on her couch and go out and get lost. It’s usually when I take the wrong bus or miss my stop that I find really incredible things. With this new book I took two detectives from the Bastille district out to dinner, the wine started flowing . . .

What is that has drawn you to the blue collar, rather than upper class, districts?

I feel more at home on the other bank, I don’t feel I’m intellectual enough for the Left Bank. I want to write about people that you sit next to on the Metro, the real salt of the earth people. That’s what France is about, it’s not all those wonderful-looking people, the intellectuals, all that glitz. I started writing Murder in the Marais because my friend’s mother was a young Jewish girl during the occupation. I actually based a lot of the story on her living in this apartment alone after her parents were taken. Once I heard that I simply had to start researching. What was it to live in the Marais, which was a Jewish ghetto at that time? How would you live if you had no ration card, who would you depend on, and so on? That was a lot more interesting than thinking of the intellectuals sitting in restaurants on the Left Bank.
Sorry to interrupt, but let me show you the cover for my next book Murder in the Bastille. I just downloaded it from the computer.

What’s interesting about that district?

It wasn’t something I chose, I felt it sort of chose me. A San Francisco friend is French and I’ve stayed with her family in France. Her father was going for a routine cataract operation at the famous Quinze Vingts hospital in the Bastille. He was awake while it was being done and he heard the woman surgeon say ‘Oh, I botched this.’ He lost his sight and had many operations trying to fix it. I found that fascinating, how it happened in this old building in the Bastille that the Three Musketeers had stayed in. A lot of blind people live in this area, there’s a house for independent blind people, there’s the traffic signal that chirps – like they do in Australia – and this whole little area, right off the Bastille, is for blind people. So I started going there. My friend, the one I stay with, works in a little old atelier right there, and she sees blind people all day. The new Opera Bastille is there, she hears these people practising arias. It’s also the basis of the old furniture-making district. All this I had never known, and the book sort of came to me . . .

One new thing in Murder in the Bastille – part of it is written from the point of view of Rene [Aimee’s business partner, a hacker dwarf]. Readers kept saying ‘why don’t you give Rene more page time’ and I thought that’s true, he’s an interesting character. Writing in his voice was a real challenge. I hope it worked, I certainly felt good after I did it.

The copious research you obviously do, even the library research, you obviously really enjoy it.

I do. That’s the best part.

When did the word ‘series’ crop up? From the beginning?

No.

Murder in the Marais was just a once-off?

Yes. But then there was: ‘Well, what happens next?’ And also, in my mind, she has to walk the dog, she has to pay the rent, she has a life . . . these characters don’t die at the end of a book. What’s Morbier [a Surete policeman and old family friend] going to do – is he edging towards retirement? What about the love interest? Then the publishers said they wanted another one and I was like, yeah. Now I can’t see the series ending, which doesn’t mean I won’t write a stand-alone.

Your plots always explore something fresh, either in the past, such as the Nazi era or ’60s terrorism, or the present, such as the plight of refugees. What comes first with a book: the plot idea, something about Aimee, or the locale?

Locale. I have to be fascinated by the part of Paris I’ve chosen. The story has to derive from what’s organic to the district. If I set it in the Bastille, it has to be about the Bastille, it has to come from the Bastille. I explore the history, what situations would work in a novel, what problems someone living in that area could face, what crimes might arise, and of course how would Aimee get involved.

Have you found any surprising themes, perhaps subconscious, recurring in the series as it has unfolded?

Aimee has a real chip on her shoulder, she’s battling demons in her past. She feels that there are wrongs to be righted, especially in the old boy networks of the police and the bureaucracy. I feel she’s always behind, which bothers her. She surprises me with how unconventional she is. She’ll take life on her own terms.

What can fans look forward to after Murder in the Bastille?

I can’t tell you, no. But there are twenty arrondissements and I’ve only done four, so I have sixteen to go.

So it’s like Sue Grafton and the alphabet, but 20 rather than 26. Can you recommend any recent crime fiction books?

I’m reading Stonekiller by J. Robert Janes.
I hadn’t thought about it, but he covers the same territory as you, in a completely different era.

I’m a fan of his. I think he’s incredibly unique, very much under-valued. I also like books set in England. When I started reading P.D. James quite a long time ago, that really expanded my horizons. I read so many different authors. I’m also reading George Pelecanos at the moment. •

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