I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t around tales of high adventure.īeing trained as an actress was extremely useful to me as a novelist, and on a macroscopic level they’re exceedingly similar while on the microscopic level they’re as different as creatively possible. I’m very lucky I grew up in that environment. My parents were big into reading to us, big into storytelling. Tumnus from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, that sort of thing. It’s impossible to come to writing without owning a deep admiration for some story or other, and I was bullying my little brother into staged plays I’d written when we were quite young-dressing him in khakis and gluing cotton balls to his chest and declaring him Mr. Well, as is the case universally, I came to reading before anything else. Do you find them to be similar jobs? How do they differ? You started out as an actress, right? There are obvious similarities in the work-you’re dealing with words and portraying characters, many of them fictional. Nancy Klingener: I guess I’ll start out by asking how you came to writing, generally, and writing crime fiction specifically. Along the way they rank love over crime, adventure over mystery, and we learn a few secrets of Faye’s forthcoming novel, the third and-spoiler alert-final installment of the Timothy Wilde series. In it, Faye and Klingener discuss the parallels between acting and writing, the joys and sufferings of historical research, and the appeal of characters both fictional and real. This interview with KWLS board member Nancy Klingener took place over email during the past few months. In The Gods of Gotham and its sequel Seven for a Secret, Faye tracks the development of the New York City Police Department in the 1840s through the eyes of bartender-turned-lawman Timothy Wilde. John H Watson is a tribute to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s archetypal detective hero, Sherlock Holmes, and follows his attempt to solve the real-life killings of Jack the Ripper. Her debut novel Dust and Shadow: an Account of the Ripper Killings by Dr. Lyndsay Faye is the author of three inventive, intriguing, and carefully researched novels that interweave fiction, the historical record, and popular culture.

Dust and Shadow by Lyndsay Faye