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Carolyn Mulford

Carolyn Mulford

Carolyn Mulford
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Monthly Archives: May 2012

How Elizabeth Peters Found Amelia Peabody’s Voice

Carolyn Mulford Posted on May 6, 2012 by CarolynOctober 16, 2012

A group of mystery writers celebrated Elizabeth Peters by playing the major characters in her beloved Amelia Peabody series during a skit at the 2012 Malice Domestic Convention. Ms. Peters (Egyptologist Barbara Mertz, aka Barbara Michaels) played straight woman but occasionally demonstrated her distinctive wit.

Twenty years ago I interviewed her about how she created the strong-willed Victorian archaeologist and found her distinctive voice. A shortened version of the article follows. It appeared in the January 1992 issue of Writing Concepts.

Mastering the writing style of another era requires care, Mertz says. “When the heroine was speaking, I had to have a certain speech pattern, which was more formal and more melodramatic than the modern pattern.”

While remaining ever aware of being true to the period, she doesn’t check every word. “I was not pedantic enough to look up words in the OED to see if they were in use at that point. Every now and then I get caught, of course.”

She’s particularly conscious of idioms. “If I am in doubt about one, if it strikes oddly on my ear—and I think that comes from having read so much—I’ll either change it or try to verify it. There are an awful lot of slang words and expressions that were in use much earlier than we think.”  Novels of the period proved more useful in researching speech and daily life than books on social history. Her research and leisure reading merged as she sought Amelia’s voice.

The writer set out to create a traditional Victorian lady traveler and speak with her voice.  “I went through every travel book from that period, especially ones written by women, and novels.” She read, among other novelists, Charles Dickens, Rider Haggard, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

“I love doing a very pompous Victorian voice. That is the way these people wrote,” Mertz says. “I love caricaturing it. I think it comes out as being amusing because it is caricature, but Amelia means it very seriously, and most of the things she says, I mean to.”

Mertz strives to be as historically accurate as possible but avoids extraneous historical details. “It’s tempting when you find something that’s awfully interesting to just dump it in to entertain the reader and show how smart you are, but unless it’s usable in the plot, you shouldn’t have it in there.”

She expresses great respect for writing as a craft. She says, “I will never learn everything there is to know about this business. I will never write the book I really want to write, but every time I’m a littler closer and know a little bit more about why I’m doing things.”

 

Between the standing ovations that greeted Elizabeth Peters and bid her farewell at Malice, she revealed that she is now on chapter five of a new manuscript.

Posted in Mysteries, Mysterious Ways

Latest Postings


Earthquakes on My Mind

Carolyn Mulford Posted on December 16, 2020 by CarolynDecember 16, 2020

2020 has been a horrible year. I hope it doesn’t end like another bad year, 1811. That year, rains brought mud and flood to Upper Louisiana. The nightly appearance of the devil-tailed Great Comet prompted rumors of destruction. The brilliant Tecumseh campaigned for tribes on both sides of the Mississippi to unite to beat back the encroaching Americans. The adolescent United States crept closer to the War of 1812. Then a natural disaster struck the middle of the newly expanded United States. In early morning on December 16, a series of earthquakes, aftershocks, and tremors began, interrupting New Madrid’s French … Continue reading →

Posted in Thunder Beneath My Feet

Summer Before Air Conditioning

Carolyn Mulford Posted on July 19, 2019 by CarolynJuly 19, 2019

Air conditioning keeps me comfortable during the current heat wave, but I remember how we tried to cool off when nothing but the movie theater was air conditioned. July and August approximated hell when I was a kid. No day was so hot that we wouldn’t work in the fields and the garden. Only the persistent breeze made the heat and humidity bearable. The steamy days heated the house, making it equally miserable. When we got electricity, fans helped a little. During the day the coolest place to be was in the shade of a big elm. (Sadly Dutch elm … Continue reading →

Posted in The Feedsack Dress

Mixing Memories and Research

Carolyn Mulford Posted on July 16, 2019 by CarolynJuly 18, 2019

When I started writing The Feedsack Dress, my own memories of farm life and the ninth grade guided the plot, but I needed facts about life in 1949. I looked for them in the same places I would have if I were writing an article. At the library I wore out my eyes scrolling through microfilm copies of the Kirksville Daily Express and two great photo magazines, Life and Look. These answered such questions as the styles of dresses or skirts and blouses a fashionable ninth grader wore to school and how much they cost. Few girls wore jeans or … Continue reading →

Posted in The Feedsack Dress

About The Feedsack Dress Blog

Carolyn Mulford Posted on July 16, 2019 by CarolynJuly 18, 2019

When The Feedsack Dress came out in 2007, I started a blog on Typepad that focused on life during the late 1940s and early 1950s. I stopped posting there in 2012, but you can still link to The Feedsack Kids. I’m posting some new blogs and my favorite old ones here.

Continue reading →
Posted in The Feedsack Dress

Giveaway of New Show Me the Ashes Edition

Carolyn Mulford Posted on April 30, 2019 by CarolynApril 30, 2019

On May 7, Harlequin’s Worldwide Mystery will release a paperback edition of Show Me the Ashes, the fourth in my series featuring former CIA operative Phoenix Smith solving murders in rural Missouri. In this one Phoenix and friends, including Achilles, her Belgian Malinois, take on a cold case involving a coerced plea deal (far too common), a string of disturbing burglaries, and crippling bigotr The WM editors insisted on one editorial change from the original Five Star hardback and e-book editions: “Tramp” replaced “slut.” The covers of the paperback and hardback editions look nothing alike, which is also true of the covers … Continue reading →

Posted in Mysteries, News, Show Me Series

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