Voices of Poetry: Chatham
I had a lovely evening appearing with two very talented poets—Robert Carr and Neil Silberblatt—and also enjoying a lot of really fun music with Paul Kehoe, in an absolutely magical space in Chatham!
Inside the Author of The Honeymoon Homicides :
I’m so excited to share that Jeannette de Beauvoir, author of The Honeymoon Homicides visited with me recently. Here are some highlights from our conversation.
What inspired you to write your first book?
My very first book (written when I was fifteen, but not published—with a whole lot of changes—until just a few years ago!) was inspired by my obsession with medieval history. I lived in Angers, France, had read Maurice Druon’s Les Rois Maudits, and plunged myself into writing about the early 1300s with great gusto. (The book is now called Lethal Alliances. If you’re interested in that period, it’s a good read.)
The first book in the Provincetown mystery series has a very different origin story. It was 2016 and I was concerned about the way people seemed to be hating each other almost as a knee-jerk reaction, without getting to know any of the “hated” group. As Provincetown is a haven for odd, artistic, and/or queer people, it occurred to me that it would make the perfect background to chip away at the “othering” that was going on (and unfortunately still is). If we can have empathy for people who aren’t like us, if we can enter into each other’s lives, we’re a lot less likely to make negative assumptions about each other.
If you had to do it all over again, would you change anything in your latest book?
No; it’s still fresh enough that I’m pretty happy with it. The books I always want to change are older ones—writers are always (thank goodness!) evolving, getting better, but a published book stands still. So the current me wants to edit and rewrite all my books! I’m sure that in two years I’ll feel that way about The Honeymoon Homicides, as I’ll be a better writer then than I am now in 2024.
Who has impacted your life the most and in what way?
Two people, one I knew well, and one I never met. My mother taught me—mostly by example—to love words. All through my childhood, she was about reading, reading, reading… and writing; she wrote poetry and short stories and encouraged mine. I remember she always had a pile of mystery/suspense novels by her bed, and she introduced me to the wonderful Golden Age writers, people like Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey and Ngaio Marsh. She gave me entrée into magical fictional worlds and I will be forever grateful to her for that.
The other person is Mary Stewart, who wrote romantic suspense novels primarily in the 1950s and 1960s—come to think of it, my mother introduced her to me, too—and was a tremendous influence on my writing, especially when I was first finding my voice. She more than any other author shows how to bring readers into the lives and emotions of her characters, while filling in the background with descriptions that leap off the page.
You’ll notice I chose two people who have made me the writer I am today. For me, that can’t be separated from the person. Even when I’m not actively writing, I am a writer. It is, in a sense, what I was born for. And these two women made it possible.
What event in your life do you remember first when asked for a humorous story?
We find humor often in the unexpected, and sometimes well after the fact… when I was nine years old, we lived in Paris, in a fairytale house filled with antiques and old doors that didn’t always behave. My parents were out, and my younger sister had accidentally locked herself in her bedroom… and it being her, was not taking it well! So I went into my bedroom next door, opened the window, and crept along what I know now to have been essentially a gutter, got into her room, and opened her door.
A neighbor had seen me, horrified—for below us was an iron fence with wicked ornamental spikes on top of it—and spoke to my mother when she got home. The upshot was that I was in deep trouble. For me, the humor is in how incredibly unfair I found the whole episode to be: I saw myself completely as the hero in this story, having rescued my sister, and here I was being punished!
Life doesn’t always deliver what we think it will.
Gina Hott: My heart actually stopped in thinking about you on that ledge… and yet, yes, as a nine-year old, it’s a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem. O_O !! You have so many wonderful stories and quite a way of drawing us in. Thanks so much for stopping by Jeanette, it was an honor to chat with you and I can’t wait to talk again.