Type M 4 Murder is thrilled to welcome historical mystery author Karen Odden, who writes wonderfully evocative novels set in 1870s London, including the smelly Thames and the costermongers, medical puzzles and odd facts about poison, anything Scotland Yard, the true weird stories that surround musicians and visual artists, and good old-fashioned romantic plots.
On Time and Place by Karen Odden
Every year some girlfriends and I hike the Grand Canyon south rim trails, sixteen miles down Kaibab and up Bright Angel, all in one day.
I still remember the first time I did it, how struck I was not only by the beauty of my adopted state (I was raised in upstate New York) but also at how over the course of the 5,000 feet of elevation change from top to bottom, the color of dirt on my boots changed from yellow to brown to red and back to brown. I was literally walking through time, telescoping thousands of years into minutes, and as I turned at the one-mile marker and gazed up toward the rim, I felt surprised, stirred, humbled, and curious. And in that moment, I swear something in my brain sparked and spun in a new direction.
For me, the Canyon collapses time and place—or perhaps, more precisely, it renders time as a material place. I think the sheer enormity of the rocks overhead pressed two truths into my bones: first, that I should start paying attention to those wondrous moments when time collapses and takes a physical shape, and second, that sometimes, when I’m trying to absorb the essence of a site, there is no substitute for getting my feet on the ground, even if it’s decades or centuries later. Like some other writers who have blogged on this site, I write historical fiction and feel it is important to get as close as I can, physically, to the specific time and space of our settings—in my case, 1870s London. I do this partly for authenticity’s sake, but also because being in a place that evokes a particular time lights the creative spark in my brain better than anything else. And I am lucky because there are still bits of Victorian London in today’s city.
One of these bits is Wilton’s Music Hall, which is the last remaining Victorian music hall in London, occupying its original space on Graces Alley in Whitechapel. Most people know that borough as the site of the Jack the Ripper murders in the 1880s. Now the neighborhood is all gentrified and prettied up, but Wilton’s retains some of its Victorian grittiness and charm. I had been playing around with the idea of a novel about a young woman pianist who takes a position in a London music hall as a male entertainer because—yes—men were paid more. (Shocking, I know.) On a trip to London with my husband, I decided I would find Wilton’s.
I entered the twin painted doors and found myself in an irregularly shaped bar area with raw wooden planks. Peering around and sniffing the lingering smell of hops, I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going and my shoe caught on a nail head. Recovering, I proceeded through that room and went down the wooden stairs into a space created by three basements patched together. Again, I had the sensation of descending through time. The concrete floors were uneven; the smell was musty; and the plaster was drawing away from the brick in parts.
All was quiet, and I stood still in the murky light, with the faint clamminess and the tang of rust in the air, and let it all work upon me. At last, I moved slowly along the passageway, pausing to inspect a stone carved with an inscription about the original owner, John Wilton; to read a framed newspaper article about a performer who leapt from the stage to attack his heckler—accidentally killing him; to study a framed piece of sheet music from the 1850s. Then I climbed the stairs and peered through the back door of the hall itself. To my surprise, it was elegantly painted in a pale greenish-blue, with chandeliers and spiraling gilt pillars.
(If you’ve watched the movie
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows with Robert Downey, Jr. you’ve seen this room. It’s where Holmes takes Watson for a bachelor party that devolves into a chase scene with Holmes being pursued by a raging Cossack.) The stage was raised off the wooden floor, and suddenly I could see my heroine Nell at a piano in an alcove at stage right. In that moment, Nell’s world became real. And when I returned to my computer to write, naturally I had to plot out my novel. But often, at first, I would just put Nell in the music hall and back away, so I might observe how that time and place would work upon her.
I’m not one for fiddling with a formula that feels right, so for my next book, I again wanted a world that I’d actually walked through and laid my hands on. In
A Trace of Deceit (forthcoming, December 2019), my heroine’s world is the (real) Slade Art School and (a fictional) London auction house.
I was drawn to that setting because I worked at Christie’s auction house in New York in the 1990s. For two years, I was their media buyer for all forty-some departments—American Silver, European Furniture, Latin American Paintings, Jewelry, Antique Books, Rugs, and so on. In order to purchase advertising space in magazines and newspapers effectively, I had to read many beautifully illustrated art publications. (Hand to forehead, dramatic sigh.) Under the guise of doing my work, I devoured stories of thefts, absurd wealth, death, sabotage, forgery, corruption, and embezzlement. I found myself enjoying the art but thrilling to the stories behind the pieces—and the passion or anguish or desire on the part of the artist, the subject, or the purchaser.
Upon reflection, I believe part of the attraction of art for me is the way a piece collapses time, or creates layers of it. The time of a painting, for example, invokes both the artist’s present and the viewer’s present; sometimes it calls up the present of the subject of the painting, which can be different from the artist’s. Often when I gaze at a painting, that feeling I had at the Canyon returns, and ideas begin to spark in my brain.
And now I’ll leave you with a question. We all have places that serve as a locus for feelings, sometimes both wonderful and unpleasant. To what extent do we love these places because they materialize and collapse our pasts for us? And do you have a place that makes time material for you?
Note: for more on why the 1870s are my absolutely favorite Victorian decade, see my blog “Why the 1870s?” at
www.karenodden.com.
