Caroline Lawrence
About Author
Caroline Lawrence was born in London, England. Her American parents returned to the United States shortly afterwards and she grew up in Bakersfield, California with her younger brother and sister. Her father taught English and drama in a local high school and her mother was an artist.
When she was twelve, Caroline's family moved to Stanford University in northern California so that her father could study Linguistics. Caroline inherited her father's love of words and her mother's love of art. She subsequently studied Classics at Berkeley, where she won a Marshall Scholarship to Cambridge. There, at Newnham College, she studied Classical Art and Archaeology.
After Cambridge, Caroline remained in England, and later took an MA in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College, London. She then taught Latin, French and art at a small London primary school. In 2000 she wrote 'The Thieves of Ostia', the first in a series of children's adventure stories set in Ancient Rome. The Roman Mysteries combine Caroline's love of art history, ancient languages and travel. Her other passions include cinema, jazz and London. Caroline has a son Simon, from a previous marriage, and she now lives by the river in London with her husband Richard, a graphic designer.
Author link
Interview
THE WESTERN MYSTERIES: THE CASE OF THE GOOD-LOOKING CORPSE
June 2012
Orion Children's Books
The Case of the Good-Looking Corpse is the latest Western mystery from Caroline Lawrence, set in Virginia City at the time of the gold rush. In this story PK Pinkerton takes on his first case, that of a servant girl named Martha who witnessed the murder of her mistress. The killer is now after her.
Author Caroline Lawrence talks about the latest PK Pinkerton mystery.
Q: PK Pinkerton, the main character, wants to be a private detective and to solve cases. What appeals to you about writing a detective story?
A: These books are set in the past, in a town in the US, and I feel a bit like a detective myself. I am trying to find out what it was like to live back then and I use clues to help me find out; it's a bit like going back to the scene of a crime.
Plus I love the detective genre - in a sense all of us are trying to figure out how to live in the world and that is what my main character, PK, is trying to do by using clues such as body language.
Q: Why set it in Virginia City?
Virginia City is based in Nevada, which was an independent territory with its own laws, such as if you could carry a hidden weapon, who could own the mines. It was the richest city in the 1830's because of the silver mines it was built on.
Normally we think of Westerns as stories about cowboys out on the open range, but this is a boom town with lots of money and industry. About 30,000 people lived there, so it provided a good mix of people from different backgrounds but was small enough to feel like a community.
Today it is still called Virginia City but it's like a living ghost town. It still looks like it did with the board walks and the old 'fire house' and saloons, and you can still carry a loaded gun and gamble.
Q: Wasn't the Civil War going on at the time?
A: Yes, the American Civil War lasted from 1861 to 1865 and one of the characters in the story has run away from the battlefield. People ran away to go and make money in the West, rather than staying to fight in the East.
I think they made the right decision because the Civil War was a terrific disaster that killed the cream of American youth, it was horrific. It shook up the US and spelled an end to the age of innocence there.
The famous writer Mark Twain fought for about a week or two and decided it wasn't for him, he and his brother moved West and got out of it.
Q: It sounds like it was a lawless time?
A: Yes, it was a wild place and you could kill with impunity. The marshal in the story was a real life character who was murdered six weeks after the book takes place.
There were lots of ways to die - you could get murdered, or disappear, or fall down an mine shaft, or get crushed by wagons with runaway horses. Then of course you'd get outbreaks of cholera or some other infectious diseases.
They still didn't know about antibiotics, so you could cut yourself with a nail and die of the infection it caused.
Q: Despite the background, the story is also funny - how did you introduce humour?
A: I imagine that PK is on the Aspergers spectrum. It is not a fun affliction. For PK, it means he has problems recognising people's faces and he is socially awkward and can be a bit blunt. He is a bit of an innocent and so I can show the world through his eyes, it gives a very dead pan humour which is in line with the writers of the time, like Mark Twain.
Q: Where did you go to research that era?
A: I watched a lot of Western films, although one of my best sources of research was the people who do the Civil War re-enactments. They still do those in Virginia City, which I've visited.
I also read a lot about what it was like to actually live in those times. I found out things like 10,000 women died during this period because their hooped skirts would catch on candles or stoves and would be set alight.
I also had a lot of primary sources, material written at the time, so I could set the book against real events and phases of the moon. I also use some real people - Sam Clemens wrote his first hoax article for the local newspaper, The Case of the Petrified Man. It was his first literary success - he would later be known as Mark Twain.
Q: If you could go back in time, would you choose to live in this era?
A: Nothing about the way of life appeals to me - you had to go to an outhouse to use the toilet and you'd probably end up with splinters, or break your neck getting there because there wasn't any lighting.
This was a pioneering era - they were crossing the continent in wagons and taking toddlers with them!
I'd love to have an invisible bubble that I could use to go and see what was going on, but I love my modern flat and going to the movies and so on - it makes you appreciate what we have today.
Q: Do you have any personal links from this era?
A: My great grandmother grew up in Nevada and we have newspaper editors and pioneer stock within our ancestors. It's great fun writing these books because I feel I am dipping into my roots in some way.
Q: You previously wrote the Roman Mysteries - are you a natural historian?
A: It's been ten years since the first Roman Mysteries book was published. I love finding out what life was really like in a particular era and I hope that it sparks a love of history in other people. I do get regular letters from people who have decided to study Classics at university because of reading the Roman Mysteries.
Q: You've also written a new strand of stories for the Roman Mysteries, the Roman Mystery Scrolls. Who are these aimed at?
A: Whenever I do school events, I ask librarians about where the gaps are in books for their readers and they always say that there aren't enough books for boys aged six to eight years, so I have written news stories with less blood and more poo!
The way into history is through the bodily functions - children love surprises and gore! I feature the same characters in each book, Threptus and his sidekick, Floridius, and the series has launched with The Sewer Demon. This came out of my research into why the Romans often had frescoes of the goddess Fortuna in public loos! With the original series I spent a year researching each book, so I have laid all the groundwork for the new series.
THE WESTERN MYSTERIES: THE CASE OF THE DEADLY DESPERADOS
June 2011
Orion Children's Books
In The Case of the Deadly Desperados, an autistic boy called PK Pinkerton sets off for Virginia City following the murder of his foster family. He carries his inheritance, proof of a stake to a rich silver mine, but the Desperados will do anything to have it for themselves.
While The Roman Mysteries were a big part of her life for a decade, Caroline Lawrence is happy to have moved on. She says, "I feel I left the series on a high and feel the characters are still going and I can pick them up at any time." She is now writing a series for younger readers that is a spin-off from Roman Mysteries, but she also wanted to do something different.
Lawrence explains, "I love the idea of a time machine that can take you back in time and back to a different world. I learned so much about Rome while I was travelling and meeting people to talk about its history for the Mysteries series."
Her family is based in California although she has lived in England for many years. "When I went back to visit them I thought, why not base a series here?
I love Western movies and TV series like Deadwood, it's terribly violent and profane but when I first saw it, I had that moment when I thought, that's what it would have been like, they've got it right. Since then, everything else Ive seen has been too clean."
Lawrence began to watch some of the old Western movies again and decided that her new series would be based on this era. "I'm a teacher at heart and wanted to teach readers about another world and another real time with real artefacts, food and music."
The first thing she needed to do was decide where it would be set. "The 'where' was very important. I thought of various places in California but decided on Virginia City, it was an amazing boom town on the side of a mountain that emerged ten years after the gold rush and it's still there, plus you have a number of writers like Mark Twain who were there, and there were a lot of real gun fights that made it into history."
Virginia today has a very different atmosphere but it still has the same very high altitude and amazing landscape, says Lawrence. "We were there a couple of weeks ago but it is quiet and peaceful these days. In 1862 it would have been packed with people night and day, with constant noise from the mines and music and fights spilling out of the saloons. As a writer you have to put those two together in your head and recreate it."
She adds, "There were 20,000 people in the city when PK was there and they were living so closely together, it would have been an amazing place to live in and quite draining after a while. It was also one of the most politically incorrect places there was smoking, drinking, gambling and huge racism. I want to talk about it in a way that is representative but not off-putting. I do that through PK being a kind of an innocent and we see things from his point of view."
As part of her research last year, 2010, Lawrence attended some of the Civil War re-enactments. She says, "You have all these actors and wives dressed up, re-enacting the historical events and they are my best sources of information. These women really know what it's like to get dust up a hooped dress and the men can tell me how to clean a seven shooter. I also consulted other experts and looked at a number of archives, such as textiles."
Her research uncovered details such as how many deaths there were each year from women cooking and catching their hooped skirts on fire. Academics were also useful, she says, and by looking at photographs, she discovered that there were in fact no swing doors in saloons in Virginia City because there were none in photographs of the city at the time.
The images used to illustrate the story were also taken from original sources that Lawrence sketched and then her husband completed the drawings in pen and ink, reflecting how meticulous she is in recreating this particular world.
Lawrence adds, "What struck me more and more was that in many ways this era was like our world today but in many ways it was so not like our world. All the men sucked, chewed and snuffed tobacco, it was everywhere, and rooms would have been filled with smoke and tobacco spittoons. Everybody smoked (except the women!)."
She has even found a 120 year old brass spittoon that she will take with her on school visits to show people. "Tobacco and spittoons are something we tend not to think about in Westerns, but they were part of life. If I went back to the 1st Century Roman world, I'm sure there'd be something I'd find that I'd not thought about being part of their life and then it would seem so obvious that it was."
Lawrence says she would find it hard to choose to live a Western life or Roman life, given a choice. "They both have so many similarities. Medical care was about the same for both communities because we didn't learn how to deal with infections until the end of the US Civil War," she says. "Both societies were trying to introduce law and order in an almost barbaric world. But I'm so fascinated by Mark Twain and what he would have been like as a man in his 20's, as a feisty bad boy and before he became venerable, that I'd probably choose that era."
Her professional choices for that era would extend to being a school marm, although the people who had the most political clout were, surprisingly, the spiritualists who claimed to be able to communicate with the dead. Lawrence explains, "They were so obviously fakes but they had a say and were respected. It was the beginning of the age of real photography and they discovered that if someone moves across the camera you get a 'ghostly' image, which helped their cause."
One of the author's challenges in PK Pinkerton is to give the Western genre a fresh spin and to show it is for the girls as much as the boys. She is, therefore, keeping PK Pinkerton's gender a secret - at the moment we don't know if he's a girl or a boy. "Everyone is so highly sexualised in children's literature today, Im going to go the other way," she says.
PK is also autistic. Lawrence says, "They'd not identified autism or aspergers' syndrome at that time, but I'm interested in autism psychology at the moment. There are also elements of post traumatic stress in his behaviour as hed blanked out the Indian massacre that killed his mother."
Lawrence plotted this story using Joseph Campbell's 'Hero's Journey' structure which goes back to Greek mythology. "I'm meticulous about plotting my work before I start to write and Campbell's structure uses a seven-point skeleton where the hero leaves his ordinary world, gets a call for adventure and has to travel to another world on a quest and has enemies and allies. He gets training and then has to go the Underworld to fight his biggest battle and, win or lose, he comes back up, still the same but having learned something, usually how to be a leader. It's a really fun structure to use. Rather than going home, PK goes on a quest in Virginia city and ends up under the city itself."
PK will stay in Virginia City for at least three more books and then will travel to San Francisco. In the second book, which is more of a detective story, PK discovers a killer _ and spittoons will be instrumental in helping him do so!
The P. K. Pinkerton Mysteries: The Case of the Deadly Desperados: Book 1
