A hardboiled mystery set in the American Southwest, “The Arizona Triangle” is the debut novel by Sydney Graves, which is a not-too-hidden pen name for the writer Kate Christensen. The author’s previous novels include “The Great Man” and “Welcome Home, Stranger.” Here, as Graves, she takes the Book Pages Q&A.
Q. Please tell readers about your new book, “The Arizona Triangle.”
It’s an arranged marriage of my two favorite strains of noir: grisly Scandinavian and hardboiled Southwestern, the love child of Henning Mankell and Sue Grafton. I love Grafton’s snappy writing and kickass female detective, Kinsey Millhone, as much as I love Mankell’s pitch-black world of twisted, gruesome murder.
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Hey, I was born in California and grew up in Arizona, and I’m part Norwegian … so this combination is basically my nature-nurture fingerprint. That’s why “The Arizona Triangle” is both hardboiled and pitch dark – snappy and twisted.
Q. You’re using a pseudonym for this book. Can you talk about that?
It’s fun. That’s really the reason. In other words, I’m not hiding behind Sydney Graves because I’m such a hifalutin literary writer I can’t be associated with genre. I don’t actually believe in the literary-genre split. The engine of a good detective novel is the same engine that drives a good literary novel: There’s a mystery at the heart of all good stories that keeps the reader turning pages. I love having the same initials as Sue Grafton and Sara Gran, two of my favorite detective novelists.
Also, I plan on making this a series —”The Arizona Triangle” is the pilot, establishing mood, setting, backstory. I want all the Jo Bailen books to be published under their own name so readers know what they’re getting. I love the cloak-and-dagger aspect of a different literary persona.
Q. Is there a book or books you always recommend to other readers?
Since I’m answering these questions as Sydney Graves, I am going to stick to my favorite classic detective series. In addition to Sue Grafton, Henning Mankell, and Sara Gran, I am an enormous fan of the books of Dick Francis, Jo Nesbo, Janet Evanovich, and Dorothy L. Sayers.
I can’t understate the lifelong, escapist pleasure of following an interesting crime solver through a series, immersing oneself in a seamy underworld, riding shotgun on stakeouts, investigations, and tails.
Q. What are you reading now?
I’m currently inhaling the inventive, thrilling, moving “Shutter” by Ramona Emerson—next up on my TBR pile is her second book, “Exposure,” along with J.A. Jance’s “Desert Heat”—it’s insane that I haven’t read her yet, but hooray, a great new crime writer to discover—and “We Are All the Same in the Dark” by Julia Heaberlin.
Q. How do you decide what to read next?
It’s like deciding what to eat next: visceral craving. When I was little, I ordered books from Scholastic and pulled them from library shelves with exactly the same instinctive hunger for variety and exciting language and interesting characters and equal parts humor and darkness. These days, I like to go from rereading a favorite classic like “The House of Mirth” or “The Great Gatsby” to a new book by a brilliant contemporary writer like Jessica Anthony or Alan Hollinghurst to a detective thrill ride by Peter Swanson or Louisa Luna to a real-life adventure story like “A Voyage for Madmen” by Peter Nichols or “Tracks” by Robyn Davidson … and then there are memoirs. And so on, and so on, till I die. Or so I hope.
Q. Do you have a favorite character or quote from a book?
One of the great pleasures of reading novels is the way their residue stays on my mind’s skin like actual memories. There are a few fictional characters who are as beloved and real to me as friends. The two most vividly palpable of these, and therefore my favorites, might be the beautiful, vulnerable heroine of “The House of Mirth,” Lily Bart, along with the hapless, drunk Jim Dixon of Kingsley Amis’s hilarious novel, “Lucky Jim,” two extremely different protagonists.
What makes them both memorable is the tension between their circumstances and their characters, their innate inability to stomach hypocrisy or artifice. They’re both too genuine to even play the games their circumstances demand them to excel at. Lily’s future depends on achieving the safety and financial security of marriage; Jim’s future depends on his achieving a semblance of earnest respectability in his academic teaching position. Neither of them succeeds, Lily tragically, Jim comically. They can’t fake it. All they can do it stay true to themselves, each in his or her own memorable, inimitable way. And this is why I love them so much—this is why they stay with me.
Q. What’s a memorable book experience – good or bad – you’re willing to share?
When I was 13, as an Anglophile bookworm and aspiring writer in Phoenix, Arizona, I read W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage.” It blew my pubescent little mind that a book could be so dark, so mordant, so atmospheric, so enthrallingly true. It drove me almost crazy how much I wanted to do that, myself. I always knew I wanted to be a novelist, but that book told me what kind of books I wanted to write.
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Q. What’s something about your book that no one knows?
“The Arizona Triangle” is not my first crime novel. In 1975, when I was 13, around the same time I was reading “Of Human Bondage,” I wrote my first novel, “Life Can’t Be a Penguin.” (Penguins were my favorite animal and maybe still are; I was making the point, I think, that things aren’t black and white.) It was a thriller about a girl named Claudia and her little brother. After their junior-high band teacher, Mr. Aragones, murders his girlfriend, Claudia and her brother stow away in his car as he drives out into the desert to an abandoned house … exciting stuff. I still have it somewhere in a box.
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