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.

(more…)

21 August 2005 | author2author |

As Predicted, Here’s Robert Anton Wilson

Not in the New York Times, as I had hoped, but this interview in Santa Cruz’s alternative weekly, Metroactive, is a good look at the twilight years of “the most ripped-off artist of our time,” who blazed the trail for everything from The Da Vinci Code to What the Bleep Do We Know? His email correspondents include LSD inventor Albert Hoffman: “”He’s a fan of my books, and I’m a fan of his drugs.”

I picked that link up from a site which also gave me a pointer towards Wilson’s answers to 23 more questions; the same article reports that the old trickster’s got at least one more book left in him, as Email to the Universe is…well, it’s probably a bit optimistic to say that it’ll be showing up in your local bookstore, unless there’s some really hip people running it or it also sells magickal paraphenalia on the side.

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: if you really want a novel to blow your mind and make you question two millennia worth of received history, pick up Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati. It’s been nearly twenty years since I first discovered a copy in my public library, and I’m still waking up with the shivers some nights.

21 August 2005 | interviews, uncategorized |