Sara Gran got hooked on mysteries early, especially the work of Donald J. Sobel, creator of “Two-Minute Mysteries” and the “Encyclopedia Brown” series.
“Growing up, he meant so much to me,” says the novelist, short story writer and publisher during a December Zoom interview from her Marina del Rey home. “It’s difficult to put into words why these tiny little mysteries are so appealing and so impactful.
“But for me, they really stuck in my head,” says Gran, author of a series of books about Claire DeWitt, the “best detective in the world.”
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Gran’s new story collection, “Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall and Delight,” arrives in stores Feb. 11, and the book includes nods to those early influences with a one-minute mystery, a choose-your-own-adventure story and fun elements like a page you can cut out and fold into a tool for “psychospiritual divination.”
“There’s something exhilarating about the whole idea that there’s this tiny little thing and there’s a solution,” she says. “I think one reason why we like stories like that is because nothing in life is actually solved. You know, nothing in life is a two-minute mystery. It’s the however-old-you-live mystery, the 75-to-110-year mystery, you know? That’s what life is.”
For more than an hour, Gran discussed her work, her influences and her decision to become her own publisher along with a range of other topics. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Your new book “Little Mysteries” takes inspiration from Donald J. Sobel, the late author of “Two-Minute Mysteries” and “Encyclopedia Brown” series. What appealed to you about doing that?
I am a big believer — for everyone, but especially for writers — in going back to the things that influenced you when you were a kid. Sometimes that means, Oh, my God, I wish this hadn’t influenced me; I [bleeping] hate it as an adult.
Q. What’s an influence you wish you hadn’t experienced?
I’d never thought about it like that until I just said it right now, but I’m really glad that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about sitcoms, especially “Three’s Company,” which I’m obsessed with. I used to come home every day after school and watch “Three’s Company” reruns. I don’t regret having watched it; there’s so much that’s great about it.
But in all the sitcoms — even “M*A*S*H” and things that were more highbrow in the ‘70s and ‘80s — women are always this sort of blank slate who have no point of view. There’s one image from “Three’s Company” that I think about all the time that was very impactful and I’m glad I looked at it again. It’s not a good thing for a young woman to have in her head, which is Chrissy is always just like this vacant doll, and people will be talking about her body, her looks and her breasts, and she just doesn’t notice because she has no subjectivity whatsoever.
This lack of female subjectivity, you see it in all those shows, like in “M*A*S*H” with the Loretta Swit character. She had one mood, and it was, ‘Go [bleep] yourself,’ and it was like, of course, she did: You’re all constantly sexually harassing her.
I love “Three’s Company,” but I’m glad I went back and re-evaluated a lot of that and didn’t let it go.
Q. In these stories, you sometimes just throw in something bonkers — a tiger, say — as if it’s completely normal.
Speaking of mysteries I loved when I was a kid, one of them was the Nero Wolfe books by Rex Stout. My father obsessively loved them. He had the entire run of them and I started to really like them, too. And there’s one thing that’s so great about those books that I didn’t realize until I was an adult and went back and read “Fer-de-Lance,” which is the first one.
All the things that I thought would be explained when I read the first book? None of them were explained. Everyone just knows each other. There is no backstory … it’s this really brilliant writing move. Rex Stout is where I got that idea from, the idea that it’s this fully inhabited universe, and you’re just jumping in and it works.
It’s the opposite of what everyone tells you, especially in screenwriting. My God, they’d shoot you if you did that [in a screenplay], but it just creates a real universe for you and it’s much more fun way to write.
If you had to explain it, it wouldn’t be fun at all. It’d be a big [bleeping] drag.
Q. You’re working on a nonfiction book too, aren’t you?
I’m writing a book about writing now, and the second chapter is about how you will embarrass yourself, and you should embarrass yourself, because you should always be taking chances.
If you want to be good at something — whether it’s music, solving mysteries, writing books — you have to be willing to take chances, and that means [bleeping] up.
Q. Let’s talk about Claire DeWitt. As much as she’s a great detective, she can seem out of control.
This is something I hear from people a lot, but I see it differently. I see her as very in control. Not always. No one’s always in control. But I see her as someone living her life in a way that works for her to accomplish her goals.
It’s a life that almost no one else would want, but it achieves her goals. Her goal is to be the best detective in the world, and everything she does feeds that. There are some bad decisions, for sure, and there are some out-of-control moments, but most of what she’s doing is working towards that goal.
Q. Claire sometimes just bursts onto the page and we aren’t immediately sure when an event is happening in her life. Can you talk about how you play around with time that way?
That one I also stole from someone else. I feel like this will be a disappointing interview because everything you like about the books I’m like, “This is who I actually stole that from.” James Sallis has a detective series, which is called the Insect series because all the books are named after insects, like “The Long-Legged Fly.”
Another writer who does that really well is Andrew Vachss, but differently. He wrote this detective series for so long that he did what very few writers do: the characters age in real-time. So you really stayed with these people for like, 20 years, and saw them get older, and saw their kids grow up, and saw the city change around them. That was a big influence.
Both really impacted me and were part of why I wanted to write a series — to stay with this character over time and to have time be real.
Q. Claire is always referred to as “the best detective in the world,” and I wonder if you can even talk about what that term, and its repetition, means to you?
People often think it’s a joke when I say that. It’s not a joke at all. And people within the fictional universe think she’s joking. She’s not joking. She is the best detective in the world, absolutely, 100%. The cool thing — but also the hard challenge about writing this character who grows with me as I grow — is that being the best at anything is not important to me at this point.
So while it is absolutely 100% true — she’s the best even though no one believes her — she’s got to move on to more interesting self-definitions as a human being. And I also wanted to make a point about how she’s not as respected as she should be in that world.
I don’t like the idea of messages in books. I think they’re silly and don’t really work. But I think if there’s one thing I would like people to take away is that you don’t know where wisdom is. You don’t know where you’re going to get a good idea. Everyone is complicated, and the more someone has this façade of “I know the answers” probably the less they have and they’re probably covering up some bad [bleep].
Q. You have moments of sincere emotion, which is refreshing in detective fiction.
I think that’s one of the things that fiction can do so well, you know, convey emotion. And I think it’s maybe underrated a little bit as a part of the novel.
Q. Another character of yours, Cynthia Silverton, is the epitome of the can-do teen crimesolver. In her stories, she can whip up a bowl of punch for a party but also knows an awful lot about astral projection.
Yeah, it’s as if Chrissy came to life in “‘Three’s Company,” right? They’re inspired by Nancy Drew, but I was never a big Nancy Drew reader. There’s a whole universe of teen detectives and kid detectives so there’s no one inspiration, and I was never all that into them.
She’s a little bit like someone who’s realizing that she’s trapped in a story that can be a more interesting story.
Q. There’s a haunting story about Cynthia Silverton in the wilderness. Can you talk a little about that and its sense of existential dread?That is actually an excerpt from the book “Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway,” which was the last full Claire DeWitt novel. I had to get permission to reprint that, but I knew it would fit with the book. To me, that is a little bit like what the entire detective project of mine is all about in some ways. … It’s also sort of the natural conclusion of the detective story, like, the thing that you’re looking for is always going to be yourself.
Q. You are now a publisher, having started Dreamland Books in 2021. What has that experience been like?
It’s been great. This book was kind of the ultimate test, because I could not have [messed up] the printing process more, and it was incredibly stressful, and I felt totally sick so many days in a row about it. I’m still glad I did it, still glad I’m not working with a big publisher or any other publisher. So that was a good test for me.
Next year, I am publishing a bunch of reprints of my favorite public domain books, and I’m starting off with an Émile Zola and Leo Tolstoy double-edition and a Freud book publishing soon.
I like making my own mistakes … and I cannot even begin to say how many mistakes I’ve made, and I still absolutely love it, and I want to keep expanding it. No one else has figured out how to really make a living publishing books, but I am under the delusion that perhaps I will. Every childhood fantasy I had in my life led me here. I couldn’t be happier.
I needed a new challenge in life, and I decided to take this on, even when I made horrible mistakes, it’s just been such a dream come true. And also, I just want complete creative control over my writing. There are some things, like the next Claire DeWitt book, where I will absolutely need an editor’s help sorting it all out. It’s a big mess of a book, but I don’t need anyone to [bleeping] tell me what to do. I’m 53 years old. What the [bleep] is anyone gonna tell me that I don’t know about writing, you know? [laughs]
Sara Gran presents ‘Little Mysteries’ with Tod Goldberg
When: 7 p.m., Feb. 11
Where: Skylight Books, 1818 N Vermont Ave., Los Angeles
Information: https://www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-sara-gran-presents-little-mysteries