Whence What with Whom?

I usually know the title of a novel before I start writing it, and Arsenic with Austen was no exception. I’m always a fan of alliteration, so pairing a death-related word with the name of the classic author du jour (du roman?) was a no-brainer. And since we’re playing off initial letters, why not go alphabetical? Especially since Austen starts with A.

The inimitable Jane Austen is the first alphabetically and also the first in my personal catalog of greats. She was not only a pioneer as a female author, but she was the first writer of either gender to perfect the novel form as we know it today. Her wit and incisive characterizations are as on-point today as they were 200 years ago.

The Brontës were an obvious choice for B. Honestly, although I played off it to some extent in Bloodstains with Brontë, Wuthering Heights annoys me to no end. Its structure is all over the place, its protagonists are mad, bad, and socially unacceptable, and there’s no redemption in it for anyone. But Jane Eyre, which I also used, is one of the greatest novels in the English language. It’s the first time we get an intimate, unvarnished look into a female mind whose goal is not first romance and marriage but independence and self-respect. Romance and marriage come as a reward for long suffering.

Whom could I pick for C but the queen of crime, Agatha Christie? She gave me so much to work with that writing Cyanide with Christie was great fun from beginning to end. If you want an amusing parlor game, go through it and count the Christie tropes—beginning with a bunch of strangers trapped in an isolated country house by bad weather.

Dostoevsky was my first choice for D, but my initial (American) publisher didn’t think he was cozy enough. I started on a Dickens-themed novel, but halfway in my American publisher dropped the series, and it was picked up by a British house who had no problem with tormented Russian authors. So I switched gears and wrote about the great Fyodor Mikhailovich instead. As a proto-psychologist extraordinaire and the author of two of the first great murder mysteries, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, he provided plenty of material. And I got to put my degree in Russian literature to some use after all these years.

The pandemic hit as I was beginning work on what would have been Execution with Eliot. But I was so stressed out in 2020 that I couldn’t bear to be immersed in George Eliot’s rather grim and depressing novels. So I jumped forward in the alphabet to Fatality with Forster. I love E. M. Forster for his sly wit, his wonderful characters, and his quiet rebellion against the rigid and stifling social structures of his time. I had visited Oxfordshire in 2019, and it made the perfect setting both for Forster and for Luke & Emily’s disappointingly (to them) but unsurprisingly (to us) not corpse-free honeymoon.

I skipped G for the simple reason that I couldn’t think of an appropriate author who was well known enough for a book to work. So it was on to H.

Victor Hugo’s masterpiece, Les Misérables, proved to be fertile ground for a murder mystery with its larger-than-life characters and dramatic plot. In addition, the novel is among the most powerful explorations of forgiveness and redemption ever written—and forgiveness and redemption are among my favorite themes. Next to Cyanide with Christie, Hanging with Hugo probably makes the most explicit use of the source author’s material of all the books in the series.

What do all these authors have in common? Perhaps only two things: They are outstanding craftspeople with the English (or Russian or French) language. And they know human nature deeply and believe it to be redeemable.