Author2Author: Chelsea Cain & Susan Kandel

I was so glad when, after I introduced Chelsea Cain and Susan Kandel to each other and arranged for each to receive a copy of the other’s novel, their reactions were so positive. Chelsea had this to say about Susan’s Not a Girl Detective, in which amateur sleuth Cece Caruso solves a murder intimately connected to the Nancy Drew ouevre: “I loved your book. You have a such a great voice, somehow light-hearted and wicked at the same time.” And Susan told Chelsea that her Nancy Drew parody, Confessions of a Teen Sleuth, “was a hoot. I read it in the offices of Dr. Weintraub, orthodontist extraordinaire, waiting for my eleven-year-old daughter to have her braces removed. Within the hour, I had a seventeen year old and her mom enthralled with my explanation that Bess wasn’t really fat, that Nancy’s mom was actually alive, and that Frank Hardy–well, I don’t really want to go there…”

Chelsea Cain: I suppose that we should start with the obvious: Nancy. I had such a great time re-reading ND books when I was researching for Confessions, and I was amazed at how I had merely to stack a few of the series on a table in a public place and streams of women would materialize all wanting to share memories of the titian-haired detective. (Okay, sometimes it was kind of annoying.) I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you read a few ND books as a kid? What role (if any) did those books play in your life as a reader/writer? What was your favorite ND book? And what was it like to revisit the books in preparation for Not a Girl Detective?

Susan Kandel: I never read a Nancy Drew book growing up. It feels good to get that off my chest. I came to Nancy Drew through my de-braced daughter. When she was in first grade, we used to sit in the park after school and I’d read her the books, one after another. By the time she was in second grade, Kyra, her little sister, Maud, who’d clamored to join us, and I were all really into the latent humor. We especially liked the names of the crooks. Our favorite was Benny “The Slippery One” Caputi. We somehow conflated him with Thomas O’Malley, Alley Cat, from The Aristocats, but that’s another story.

Nancy was always exempt from our jokes. She is the alpha girl every zeta girl wants to be: confident, unflappable, unstoppable, loyal, smart, good. She should make you want to puke, but she doesn’t because she makes no pretense of being human: she’s a phantasmatic suburban superheroine who can eat pudding twice daily and still turn a mean cartwheel when needed. It’s sci-fi for girls. What could be better? My personal favorite is Lilac Inn: it is the classic book, I think. My girls prefer The Double Jinx Mystery, which (sorry) goes for baroque.

Chelsea Cain: My favorite ND book was The Mystery of the Glowing Eye which opens with a helicopter flown by “remote control” crashing into Nancy’s backyard. In it is a note from Ned, who has apparently been kidnapped and Nancy has to spend the rest of the book tracking him down. It’s one of the yellow hardbacks from the 1970s, an era universally considered the low point of the series, but the interior illustrations of Nancy in bell bottoms are to die for. (Cece would approve.) Strangely, the whole remote-control helicopter crashing bit did not strike me as odd at all as a kid.

It is sci-fi for girls, isn’t it? Having written a parody of the books, I’ve been a little amazed at what, uh, passion some grown-up women still feel for the intrepid Ms. Drew. (The Chums in your book really rang true to me.) They are very defensive of her character. I’ve heard the phrase “that is never how Nancy’s life would have turned out,” so many times I’ve wanted to bludgeon strangers with a magnifying glass.

Have you met with any unusual reaction from the “Nancy Drew community” over Not a Girl Detective? And, not having read Nancy Drew as a kid (how does that even happen?), what is it about those books that made you want to incorporate them into the plot of your book? And on to the actual writing questions, can you talk a little bit about what it’s like writing a series? Maybe it’s the Nancy Drew reader in me, but I’ve always wanted to do that. It seems both really fun and really challenging to revisit a character over time and through different narratives arcs.

Susan Kandel: I’m glad you brought up the fan community around Nancy Drew, because I find that to be one of the most interesting aspects of this whole undertaking. I based my Chums on the Nancy Drew Sleuths, who have a website, a listserv, a magazine, and annual meetings (where they do things like make pilgrimages to Edward Stratemeyer’s gravesite in New Jersey, have scavenger hunts, dress up balls, etc.). I was galvanized when I attended their convention in 2003, because I’d never really encountered fandom on this scale, by which I’m talking total obsession, total and unswerving loyalty to their Queen, and absolute command over an insane amount of information surrounding the many editions of the books. I’d also expected exclusively middle-aged librarians, but there’s quite a range–and men, too! I did get a pretty nasty review on Amazon recently from someone who felt I showed disrespect toward Nancy, but on the whole, I’ve gotten a warm reception from the Sleuths, who invited me back this summer to read from my book, and who seem to be grateful to anything and anyone who keeps Nancy’s name in the media. There was much brouhaha, for example, on the listserv when one of the accessories for one of the American Girl dolls was a teeny-tiny Nancy Drew book for the doll’s teeny-tiny nightstand.

As far as writing a series goes, I am not nearly as organized as the Stratemeyer Syndicate. When I was doing research at the New York Public Library in their archive, I saw these incredible “bibles” where the Syndicate kept track of all the details around all the characters–tastes in food, hobbies (well, you name a hobby, and it’s Nancy’s), amount spent on winter wardrobe, city of birth, height and weight, of course, favorite perfume. I try to be consistent, but this is one of the hardest aspects: making sure that something that’s a throwaway line in book 1 doesn’t come back to haunt you in book 3. Then there’s the question of aging: Nancy never ages, of course; I’ve been aging Cece a few months with each book. This was my editor’s idea. If the series is a success and I write many of these books, do I want to be dealing with a saggy 60-year-old squeezed into sexy, vintage clothing? It’s a conundrum. In the end, I decided that since my books were hardly realistic, I didn’t have to feel too bad about fudging here and there. The really nice thing about a series like mine, though, is that you get to spend time with a character that is some version, however twisted, of yourself, and you get to totally control her destiny–make her boyfriends say what you want them to, make strange men fall at her feet, make her immune to death. Talk about sci-fi.

So I never did find out what Nancy Drew meant to you. Were you one of those kid devotees? Did you read Trixie Belden, and the Dana Girls, too? And what about parody? It seems like a real balancing act. You can’t go too far or you wind up being Mad Magazine. I thought you did an amazing job. It can imagine it took a lot of self-control. Is this a genre you can imagine exploring again?

Chelsea Cain: I was a huge Nancy Drew fan as a kid. We are talking unwavering, cult-like devotion. I read them under my desk at school and I distinctly remember looking up during a third grade math class and having absolutely no idea what the stuff on the board was (it turned out to be long division). Naturally I went right back to reading. I also read Trixie Belden, the Three Investigators, the Hardy Boys (only in dire straits, mind you, when Nancy was unavailable), and all manner of other sleuth adventures. I tried the Dana Girls because they were also by “Carolyn Keene,” but they never took. In middle school I graduated to Chandler and Hammett. I think I just really liked the notion of reading a series. I liked the idea of being able to plow through a book and then immediately pick up another one. I even wrote a college admission essay on Nancy Drew. I believe the topic was “write about a person who inspired you.” Sorry, Marie Curie.

Imagine my shock when I went back and reread the books as an adult and discovered that they were (forgive me, Sleuths) bad. The early ones are much better than the later ones, but I was amazed at how much better the boys’ books were. Christopher Cool: TEEN Agent, for instance, has way more zip (and adjectives) than Nancy.

The parody thing is tricky. I had the idea for like two years before I started writing. I mean, I started writing about six times during that period but each attempt was miserable and didn’t make it past half a page. The trick was to figure out how to tell the story. Present tense or past? Was it going to be from an elderly Nancy’s point of view? How would it be divided? A straight memoir narrative just didn’t work. Then I stumbled on the idea of having each chapter be a different period of Nancy’s life and a discreet adventure sort of following the arc of a Nancy Drew book, and that seemed to help things fall into place. I sat down and started writing and found the tone (essential in parody) and it all came together. The next breakthrough was to accept the fact that if Nancy Drew had existed that all those sleuths in her general universe must have existed too. Once I could bring in “guest stars” it helped keep things interesting. The big fear, of course, is the SNL rule of comedy, which is funny sketches don’t always make funny movies, and I was worried that I could get a vaguely amusing chapter out of the idea, and then nine chapters of chuckle-less tedium. Bringing in other characters allowed me to keep things fresh and to keep me interested. I don’t think I could do another parody though. I know the Nancy Drew universe so well and have such a child’s passion for it, that I enjoyed mucking around in River Heights for a while. I think parodying something else would be hard. And I don’t like to do things that are hard.

I loved what you did with the mystery in Not a Girl Detective. Your reveals were so perfect. I think I might have actually said “Ah!” a couple of times. Do you have any advice to a struggling thriller writer on how to pace the reveal of information? I assume that you plot everything out on note cards or something else similarly responsible?

Susan Kandel: In a previous life, I was working on a dissertation on contemporary art, and racked up the note cards like nobody’s business. I think I must have written at least 5,000. I was the model of a responsible academic. But I never did finish that dissertation. Flash forward to my novels: no note cards, barely an outline, whole new philosophy of irresponsibility. Contrary to what you’ve been finding with the thriller, I didn’t know who did it with the first book until I was writing the second to last chapter.

You obviously have to be aware of pacing (and I have years of All my Children to thank for that), and peppering the text with clues at regular intervals, but I find planning every detail in advance not only makes the story feel stale, it shuts down all sorts of avenues that open up in the process of writing. My m.o. involves plotting out two-three scenes at a time, and then seeing where I am by the end of that chunk and going from there. I do a lot of research first, and that material is what inspires me in spinning the plot.

You have a fantastic sense of humor. I loved the description of an aging Ned in his Members Only jacket and mullet. And you know your way around an adjective: I particularly enjoyed Nancy’s later in life “bottle-titian” hair. Which other writers do you find particularly funny or inspiring?

Chelsea Cain: I find you inspiring. I’m going to print out your description of your writing process and paste it on the wall behind my computer. I’m a real high brow/low brow reader: I love Henry James and I love Us Weekly. Some favorite funny types include Hunter S. Thompson, David Sedaris and Dorothy Parker. (When I was a freshman in college I auditioned for a play and I decided to memorize a Dorothy Parker first person essay as my monologue. We were supposed to limit our monologue to three minutes–mine was 14. I remember looking out at the director at about minute six and seeing him look at his watch. I still had eight minutes to go. He looked at his watch four more times. Talk about brutal. Even great material like Parker’s suffers mightily at the hands of an awkward pony-tailed co-ed.)

Reading for inspiration is tricky. I try to read stuff that is very different than what I’m writing because otherwise I find I start channeling some other author’s voice. Really anything that is excellent inspires me. I love reading a book and thinking: my God, this is a book by a writer. I’m finally reading Saturday, and it’s just so, so writerly. Every word feels carefully considered. That inspires me. Also, poetry, which sounds dorky and it’s funny because I don’t write poetry at all. Okay. There was that one poem after Kurt Cobain died. But I was just processing.

How challenging was it to find Cece’s voice in I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason and Not a Girl Detective? It’s so spot-on terrific. I think you really have a knack for writing in past tense, yet making her voice sound utterly in-the-moment. How do you do that?

Susan Kandel: It’s interesting how easy it’s been to channel Cece. I don’t know what that means. She is a Catholic from Asbury Park who competed in beauty pageants and got knocked-up at 17; I’m a JAP from Los Angeles who competed in spelling bees. Go figure. But hers is somehow the voice in my head. And luckily, it’s a more entertaining voice than my real-life one. My best friend of 30+ years, when she finished my first book, looked up and said, “I had no idea whatsoever that you were funny.” It’s a little sad.

As for parody, well, I am so impressed with what you accomplished, that you were able to sustain it. I think you’re right, it’s all about tone. And despite what you may have heard from some rabid fans, I think you were very respectful, while hitting all the targets with dead-on accuracy. You inspire me to write a parody of All My Children, which is the only universe I think I know well enough to riff on.

What are your other obsessions? (Not to get too personal…) I mean, are you or were you a fan of anything else that you could see feeding into future work, if not directly in the form of another parody? I tried to work a lot of my personal obsessions into Cece’s world: All My Children, being one; eating; fashion; reading; gardening–well, that last one was a bit of a problem. I made Cece a gardener in my first book, because I’d just planted my first vegetable garden. Unfortunately, by the end of that summer, I realized that I was more of a killer of plants than a nurturer, but since it’d gone in the book, I’m having to sustain it throughout the series.

Chelsea Cain: A few months ago I was looking at the books I had written (a memoir about growing up in the counter culture, the Nancy Drew parody, a humor book about how to be a hippie, and a humor book about superheroes) and I thought, gee, that’s kind of totally random. Then it struck me–all my books are about my childhood. How utterly typical is that? Willa Cather had that line about how writers gather most of their material by the age of fifteen. I think I had mine pretty much nailed by age ten. As for my grown-up obsessions, I’m a sucker for any fringe social element with its own language and tedious, absolutely specific knowledge base. From skateboarders to Star Trek nerds to punk rockers. I really admire people who have big passions, especially for the stuff that might not be exactly socially acceptable.

Right now I’m trying to write a thriller. It’s been interesting because I think it’s the next step in my dubious, self-taught, 1-2-3 approach to fiction writing. The parody was a good start because it came with its own de facto structure that I just had to sort of fill in. A thriller has a similar sense of inevitable narrative. A bad thing happens. There’s a protagonist. An antagonist. There’s some peril. Maybe a big show-down. Resolution. Easy, right? Naturally I got about 100 pages in and was like, uh oh, I better take a minute and figure some of this stuff out. My advice to anyone reading this: Decide who did it before you start writing. Trust me.

21 August 2005 | author2author |