Signs
in the Blood:
a rollicking good read—but not quite cozy
by barbara hooley
There
are three things you best ought prepare yourself for in Vicki Lane’s
Signs in the Blood, a mystery set in Western North
Carolina: plenty of colorful dialect, plenty of colorful mountain folk,
and an ending that is not quite cozy.
Signs
in the Blood, published in 2005 by Bantam Dell, is the first
in a series starring sleuth Elizabeth Goodweather, a goat cheese and
grapefruit-eating liberal who reads the New Yorker, makes herb wreaths,
lives in the high hills of Marshall County, and is fascinated by her
old-ways neighbors.
In
Signs in the Blood, we are introduced to an array of colorful folks,
some old-timers following the old mountain ways, some new neighbors
bringing in their own brand of mountain dogma. When neighbor Cletus
disappears while hunting ginseng and is found mysteriously drowned,
Elizabeth comes to the aid of her neighbor Miss Birdie who wants answers
about her son’s death. That’s Miss Birdie Gentry, an eighty-year-old
mountain woman who with her middle-aged son, Cletus, (some might call
him “simple”) still scratches out a living off the land.
Then there’s snake-handling-preacherman Harice Tyler who has bedroom
eyes, a sensual smile, and willingness to help Elizabeth “get
hit with the Holiness gun” and tongues-speaking Aunt Belvy Guthrie,
prophetess in the Holiness Church of Jesus Love Anointed with Signs
Following. Blue-eyed John the Baptizer is a traveling evangelist and
outsider artist who preaches and paints from a revival tent behind the
BP gas station and drives a prepare-to-meet-thy-God Bible-text covered
old Ford. Among the new agers and newcomers is Elizabeth’s strong-willed,
dreadlocked artist daughter Laurel who spends part time painting and
part time tending bar at a trendy Asheville nightspot. There’s
Polaris, the white silk-clad guru and charismatic leader of the Starshine
Community whose riveting turquoise eyes, flowing white hair and enthralling
voice welcomes budding star children (mostly pretty young pregnant women),
on “the first step of the long journey to (their) primogenesis.”
And we have Adam’s Sons in the Wilderness, a right-wing militia
group, who practice military maneuvers with weekend warrior wannabes,
drive humvees, and complain about the “mud races” being
allowed in restaurants where white men wanna eat.
As
Elizabeth tramps around the hills and hollers, besieged by these characters
and trying to solve the mystery of Cletus’ drowning, we also learn
about Little Sylvie and other backwoods mountain folk in a subplot that
holds a second mystery and murder from a long past era.
After
reading this rollicking mystery, I still had a few questions I wanted
answered. So on a recent spring-like afternoon I met Vicki Lane to ask
her a few questions about Signs in the Blood and her writing process.
Sitting in her dining room overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains, the
setting for her Elizabeth Goodweather mysteries, Ms. Lane told me she’d
come to writing mysteries fairly recently after determining to defy
the challenge of a writing instructor. It was a six-week course that
taught the basic nuts and bolts of writing, including character and
setting, making the very first sentence count, and the necessity of
enlisting a good agent. At the end of the course she asked her teacher,
“‘What is my greatest strength and what is my greatest weakness?’
He looked at me and said, ‘You don’t have the passion it
takes to write.’ That was all. He didn’t say I had any strengths.”
So she met with a writers group, churned out about a chapter a week,
and finished her first mystery a year and a half later.
That
wasn’t, however, the mystery she first got published. Instead
what happened was that she sent a ton of query letters to agents, “ten
to fifteen at a time, in batches.” She wanted a woman agent in
or near New York City who handles mysteries. Getting back that self
addressed stamped letter she says was painful, “I wouldn’t
advise anyone to try it unless they were prepared to suffer.”
Eventually she found an agent interested in representing her. But when
her agent started showing her book to various editors, they all agreed
that it was set in the wrong place. That book, not yet published, was
set on the coast of North Carolina, rather than in Elizabeth’s
Appalachian mountain home. She was told that the first in the series
must be set in the place that readers will come back to over and over
again “so that readers fall in love with the place as well as
the character.” So she took another year and wrote a second mystery,
this one Signs in the Blood. Still there were more obstacles before
the book finally made its way to bookstores. She got a phone call one
day from her agent who said she’d found an editor interested in
publishing the book. In a phone conversation, the editor told her she
really liked the book, but thought it needed a subplot, “Can you
do a subplot?” “’Oh yes!’ I could taste it,
I wanted it so badly.” said Ms. Lane. So she wrote the Little
Sylvie subplot based on a story she had been told that supposedly happened
here in the region. That was another three months of writing.
Asked
about her work process, Ms. Lane, said, “I am not one of those
really disciplined people who gets up and writes three hours every day.
I just try to do it when I can.” “How do you begin?”
I wanted to know. “My editor wants what she calls the arch of
the book,” she explained. “Basically it’s just about
two pages of what’s going to happen. This is before I start writing
the book and (my editor) approves it. Sometimes I center the arch. I’ve
usually written the first couple of chapters and the closing violent
scenes with some of the important scenes so my editor will see where
I am going. Then I just start back at the beginning and start going
chapter by chapter.”
As I said, Signs in the Blood is plumb chock[I think has to be one or
the other] full of Appalachian dialect, so I asked her how that had
come about. “Well, I’ve spent time with enough old timers
and I know how they talk,” replied Ms. Lane. “When I start
writing Little Sylvie, I just hear her voice. I know how she would say
it. Every once in awhile I’ll hit something and ask myself, ‘Now
is that something I really heard or is that something I read in Patrick
O’Brian?’ A while ago I came up with ‘drunk as Davy’s
sow’ and I thought, ‘Now have I heard that or not?’
So I called Sheila Adams who grew up in Sodom Laurel and she told me
all the things she had heard like ‘drunk as an owl.’ But
as I said, I have a lot of local friends and I just listen when they
talk.”
I
asked Ms. Lane why she chose mysteries as a genre and if she ever felt
she was limited in what she could say in a mystery. “Write what
you know and also what you read,” is what she was advised in that
one and only writing class. She says she left class feeling she didn’t
know anything. “I had lived on a farm for twenty-five years and
I didn’t even know how people acted in offices and out in the
world.” Actually, she first contemplated writing romances. But
as she had never read them, she went to a library sale and picked up
some off the five for a dollar table. At home, she started reading them,
but quickly decided they were so awful she couldn’t bring herself
to write one. She says she reads a lot of different kinds of things,
but does indeed read many mysteries. “So I went to mysteries.”
“I think you can say anything you want to in a mystery,”
claims Ms. Lane. “I talked a lot about religion in Signs in the
Blood and I think I made points that some people might disagree with.”
In my book coming out in June, the main character talks a lot about
what is art. My third book talks about all the new people moving in.
How even the new people are getting horrified by the newest new people.”
“So you never feel at all constrained by the genre?” I queried.
“Absolutely not! Well, it depends,” she went on. “If
you are writing a ‘cozy,’ which is a mystery with no excessive
violence—Agatha Christie is considered a cozy—there isn’t
excessive violence or sex or gore or bad language. Some are very cozy
and very funny. Some people think my book is a cozy because it has food
and quilts in it. But as you know, there is some violence and some bad
language, not much sex.” Recently Ms. Lane was interviewed for
a ‘cozy’ web page and was described by the librarian putting
together the page as “not quite cozy.” I would have to agree.
This
brought me to my questions about the ending of Signs in the Blood. I
wanted to know why Ms. Lane chose to cajole the reader with funny characters,
light hearted fare and hilarious dialect and then suddenly bring the
boom down at the end. “I wanted shock value. I didn’t want
a cozy ending,” Ms. Lane insisted. “I wanted to make the
reader feel bad for awhile, to have the emotions moved. It would have
been too easy to have everything come out ok in the end. People get
fooled and all of a sudden something horrible happens.”
What
I found most intriguing about Signs in the Blood was not the language
or the crazy characters or even trying to figure out who done it, though
all of that was entertaining and kept me reading past midnight, but
that it seems to be exploring evil in ways that people are blind-sided
by. So I asked Ms. Lane about that. She replied, “Well, in my
mind I was exploring the danger that comes with blind faith. Trusting
in your militia leader or your religion that tells you to do something
that is actually going to be harmful to people. And that to me is evil,
when one believes blindly.” But Ms. Lane also added later, “Religion
is a tricky thing and I think it can be really dangerous. But you don’t
know. I can say faith is dangerous and all of a sudden someone’s
life is saved. I wanted to say that too. I wanted to say that Elizabeth
in all her certainty that faith is a bad thing is suddenly blind-sided
by the fact that faith saved Miss Birdie’s life.”
Asked
what she most wants her readers to take away, Ms. Lane replied, “A
sense of how really wonderful this place is, the mountains, the people,
the flora and fauna. To me the book is a vehicle for writing down the
stories I’ve heard. I just have fun with it.”
“Sometimes
these characters get going and take over. But I am delighted when people
say this sounds like a wonderful place, though I really don’t
want them to move here. It’s a double-edged sword. Also, I think
I am recording a time. We moved here when people were still milking
cows and plowing with mules and I am trying to record a way of life
that is not going to be here in ten or fifteen years. And the speech
patterns are going too. So I’m trying to put that down. Really
before I even got the idea of writing, I would write down funny things
I heard people say, musical things. When we first moved here during
the Watergate trials, we asked a neighbor what he thought of Nixon and
he said, ‘I wouldn’t trust that man in my meat house with
a muzzle.’ I thought it was total poetry.”
Such
dialect will make you smile, the characters will have you splitting
your sides, but the ending, be warned by the preacher man and prepare
for the devil, ‘cuz it ain’t quite cozy.
Barbara
Hooley
is a fiber artist, teacher and freelance writer. She lives in Asheville,
NC.
[ [email protected]
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