Sujata Massey

What does it take to bring an idea into book form--and then to take one book into a series?

My first mystery came out in 1997, and it turned into a series that lasted for eleven books. Then I went on to throw myself into a second series that I'm still writing. Doing a series is not only a writing choice; it's also a commitment to community, both real and fictional.

On the outset, the idea of a series is simple: a sequence of novels with the same protagonist. Yet there are some great permutations. The books could be spearheaded by a succession of linked protagonists, such as the women lawyers in Lisa Scottoline’s Philadelphia series, or the various detectives we meet in Tana French’s police procedurals set in Dublin. In romance series like Bridgerton, a family of brothers and sisters take turns getting romantic fulfillment. 

Series are popular because of readers’ deep desires to stay connected with characters they care about. Some critics say the business of writing a series is to essentially replicate the same reading experience for the readers each time--albeit with a novel plot and new supporting characters. 

 

For me, the ‘why’ of a book series is greater than a career formula. It's truly comforting to me to write novels that revisit the same houses and restaurants with characters that became my friends. I have so many thoughts about what makes series writing wonderful. Therefore, I’m going to make this a two-part blog post. Imagine we are having a cup of tea together and talking writing. You see--you are already a character in my series. 

 

How it All Started

 

Picture me at age 27, entering the 1990s as a young bride who had left what seemed like the greatest job ever at a daily newspaper. I didn’t want to stop writing—but I had a massive geographic move from Baltimore to Yokohama-area Japan, and my writing job opportunities were limited. So why not try writing fiction? The only other writing job I'd heard about was correspondence secretary for the Officers Wives Club!

 

 

I sat in my chilly house with gloved hands in front of a brand new PC, feeling liberated and optimistic. I had no illusions of writing a publishable book. The goal was experiencing what it felt like to write long fiction. I told myself writing time in Japan would be a step in a long climb. Yet that first book I dreamed up became the ‘first in series’ of the Rei Shimura books. I really didn’t know what I was doing; but somehow, it worked. 

 

That first protagonist I created, Rei Shimura, was a Japanese-American English teacher living in modern Tokyo. The position of being a foreign language teacher in Japan is a culturally iconic one that has lots of room for adventure. I myself worked part-time as an English teacher in Japan, not earning much money but gaining so much in terms of cultural connection, whether I was working with high schoolers, military service members or elderly people. Important memo: the more you know about the job your protagonist does, the more interesting and realistic your character will be. 

 

Yet for a teacher-character to continue being innocently drawn into suspicious deaths, year after year, doesn't feel true to life. I hadn’t thought about this fact when I started, because I expected I was writing a standalone novel. Now I had to twirl creativity and logic at the start of each new book to find a plausible reason for Rei’s abilities and involvement to surpass the Japanese police. 

 

As the series progressed, I became quite annoyed with the recurring problem. Ultimately, I had a spy agency recruit Rei, so she is forthrightly directed into covert investigation—and she has a prickly relationship with her agency supervisor, too. And what a hot relationship that would violate every HR guideline, but of course, this was a magical, fictional world! 

 

In the Rei Shimura series lifespan, the books went through three publishers: HarperCollins, followed by Severn House, and then myself. Perhaps it was because I wanted flexibility in the future that I never have outrightly declared the series is over.  I feel terrible disappointing people who have invested years and money in the series. Not only are they buying books for themselves, they ae gifting them to others and advocating for the books’ presence in the library system. Dear readers have not only written to me personally, they have nominated me for speaking gigs and awards—unexpected privileges and joys.

 

I actually was trying to wind things up, yet I still loved the series. Breakups are hard for writers and their characters. Ten books sounded like a complete number of Rei books, but I felt compelled toward writing just one more book.

 

The last series book, The Kizuna Coast, had Rei investigate a disappearance in the aftermath of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Once the mystery resolved, we see Rei boarding a train from Tohoku toward Tokyo. Feelings are upbeat, and I hint that she might be entering a new stage in life. And I think that's the positive feeling that helps a series end, whether or not it's planned out.

 

After The Kizuna Coast, I took a deep breath. I wanted a break from the treadmill of a book a year. Self-publishing worked, but it was a lot of extra jobs for someone who wasn't a trained web designer, marketer or publicist. A traditional publisher was interested, but I didn’t want a multi-book contract. I became a free agent and decided to pause. 

 

My Palate-Cleanser Book

I had a nagging sense that it was time to write about India, the place that was so central to my family history. I’d been spending more time in India as an adult than in childhood. In quite interesting ways, I was getting to spend time and learn from the families of my father, my stepmother, and my stepfather. An idea drifted my way, probably because I wasn’t pushing hard to think something up. And what also was clear is I wanted to take a break from mystery. I wanted to try something I loved reading, but wasn't sure I could pull off: a historical novel. 

 

This straightforward wish evolved into four restless years of writing and rewriting a standalone novel about a young Bengali woman coming of age in 1930's and ‘40s India. The Sleeping Dictionary was a book that transported me—not just because of the setting, but because of the wealth of details that true history provided. Unsurprisingly, the characters grew on me in the four years that I took to write and revise the book. As it was being readied for publication, I daydreamed about making it a series. Yet as I pondered the type of follow-up this book should have, the answer was a very sober story. I knew what difficult political events marked 1950's, '60s and '70s Bengal. I feared becoming emotionally depressed if I wrote about matters like the kidnapping of women post-partition and the war for Bangladesh's independence.  

 

This is why I ultimately decided that The Sleeping Dictionary would stay a standalone. At the same time, I realized how much I wanted to write series fiction again. The emotional ride in such books is more predictable and satisfying for me. In my approach to series mystery, the unrest and crime is on a smaller scale--and it's fictional. Order is always solved by page 400, and the protagonist has time to recoup before the next book.

 

The Next Series

Second time around with series writing, I vowed to remember as many of the things I struggled with for the Rei Shimura books. My goal was to follow a route that had fewer pitfalls--and to write about a setting that had lots of story ideas.

 

Firstly, I was intent on giving my new sleuth a natural reason to repeatedly encounter crime and suspicious death. No women were allowed into the police until the 1970s in India, so she couldn’t be a cop.  However, my years of research in 19^th and 20^th century India meant I had a big file cabinet, and a specific file that included the names and biographies of two early women lawyers working in British Raj India. I knew I could give my fictional heroine such a real job without bending reality. Still, writing about a female lawyer would be challenging since I was not a law school graduate--and you know how I feel about writing 'what you know.' I began looking for people who had studied law willing to answer my questions about the likelihood of a judge doing this, or that.

 I also pored over law books published during the British Raj to make sure I had facts rights about laws about crime and punishment, inheritance, and marriage and divorce. I made my heroine a Zoroastrian because the early women lawyers of India were more likely to come from this faith community than others.

 

I read up a storm to get an interesting and realistic legal dilemma for The Widows of Malabar Hill. And then I returned to the facts surrounding Perveen Mistry, my lady lawyer. A young woman in her twenties is of marriageable age—especially in a country like India. But would a woman be able to practice law actively while married? Given the social constraints of the time, and the likelihood that a female sleuth’s husband could restrict her activities, I decided to make her the equivalent of a spinster; yet with a unique status that would keep her from being able to marry anyone intriguing she met within the series. And this itself became an interesting plot point. 

There’s another, often subconscious, decision about protagonist power that writers make. I argue that you can roughly divide the sleuthing protagonists in two categories: superheroes, and ordinary, flawed people. The characters Sherlock Holmes and Jack Reacher are examples of the superheroes, though fans would probably argue they have flaws that make them interestingly human.

 

Rei, my first protagonist, was an accidental sleuth from the start and she escaped dangerous moments using different forms of soft power. Perveen is closer to a superhero; while she’s not physically powerful, she has  extreme courage and social skill that comes from always having to fight for her ability to work and go about in public. 

There are so many women I consider superheroes in my daily life in America and also in India. Among the Indian stars are women who have been the first: the first to finish high school in the village, the first to perform surgery at the hospital, the first to drive a taxi. More heroes: the middle-class housewives who make sure the poor kids living in shanties nearby get homework help and schoolbooks; and who don’t hesitate to find a doctor and pay the medical bills for a servant’s wife who needs surgery. These women change and often save lives.

Remembering all this beautiful strength helped me pull my ideas together. After a few months of deliberation and exploratory writing, the characteristics of my series heroine had fallen into place. Miss Perveen Mistry, Solicitor at Law, had both a personal status and practical job for a permanent series position. Yet even more decisions need to be made to build Perveen a successful series to return to, book after book. More about these ideas in the next post. 

When Writing Series, Third Time's the Charm

Sujata Massey

Daisy's checking up on the day's progress

Did anybody ever tell you that it’s easier to raise three children than two? 

I am fine with the two that I have, but I’m beginning to believe the saying could be true.

Especially when I think about books.

If each book a writer births is like a child, I have fourteen. I am like the old woman in the shoe, and all my children are troublesome in different ways.

But this week it’s been a lot easier. Every day that I’ve powered on my laptop to write, I’ve had an idea of the next sentence.  The words have been flowing now better than they have in years. That is because the book I'm writing is Untitled Perveen Mistry, the third book in a series.

Having been in print for more than a couple decades, I’m starting to draw some conclusions. Don’t hire me to teach any writing courses yet, but I'll tell you that the third book is the magical point when a writer finally gets comfortable writing a series. 

Okay, I'll admit the first book is usually the most exciting part of writing a series. Book One is totally novel. A first book lays out the protagonist's backstory and introduces me to her family, lover, friends, career, and the world where it all takes place. 

Book One for Perveen Mistry!

Because it’s a first book, there is plenty of time to flesh the characters and build the location. Editors don’t usually accept Book One without it being written in totality, so there’s not so much pressure (this was completely different for The Widows of Malabar Hill, which was written on spec for Soho Press. But the pub date stretched so I could revise it to my heart’s content). 

My very first Book One was published in 1997 and had the typical lifestyle for such a creature. I wrote it over the course of four years of suffering and was thrilled beyond my imagination when The Salaryman's Wife was accepted by HarperCollins. I will take off my hat to everyone who has finished writing a first novel, whether or not it made it to print. 

After writing this first book in my Rei Shimura series, I discovered that the second one, Zen Attitude, came surprisingly slowly. Even though I had a due date to motivate me and could reuse characters from the first book, I still felt stalled. I remember trying many drastic

behavior changes to push myself to be someone stronger and capable of writing Book Two.  I changed my diet to avoid meat (it lasted two years). I ran daily around the Hopkins track. I went on research trips, not just to Japan but to a Buddhist monastery in update New York. I was thirty-three, childless and without the curse of a day job. I had no real pressures in life outside of the book ... yet  I stared at my desktop day after day and wondered if I really could write more than one book.

The first three books of the Rei Shimura series

Rei Shimura’s Book Three, The Flower Master, was—ha, another story! I don’t remember much about the process, except I began the book in India when I was staying there due to delays with my daughter's adoption. I did not have so much as a laptop with me, so to work on Book Three I had to go to my grandfather's office where there was an old desktop with viruses galore where I could ply my trade. I had a lot on my mind—but I still was able to proceed at a reasonable pace with this book. Frankly, it was kind of mental retreat. 

I have enjoyed writing the Rei series, but as time passed, I wanted to try something new. I had spent all that time in India--and I wanted to go back. In 2006 I began writing a long historical suspense novel titled The Sleeping Dictionary. That first-book process lasted more than four years, and the book was hard to sell. By the time it came out as a Simon&Schuster paperback in 2013, I felt all the work I'd done made it a natural opener for a new series. I figured that Book Two would occur several years later, when the daughter of the protagonist in Book One could grow up to be a moody teenager caught up in the horrific violence after India’s partition. I knew my characters well and felt the plot was sound, but as I worked on this book, showing my agent revision after revision, I never got farther in than a few chapters.

Writing a second book is always a struggle, and during that time, I was busy with two children and had no energy for tricks like changing my diet or starting a new sport. Also, there was no contract for the unwritten Book 2, which translated into no time pressure to press on with it. I also understood the book’s themes of violence against women and religious intolerance were darker than anything I’d ever written. Would my longtime readers be willing to spend so much time in sadness, when I thought writing this could put me into depression? 

This "book of my heart", first in a series that might never be. 

The second book in the Daughters of Bengal series was simply too daunting for me. I chucked it. Although I did not give up on the idea of revisiting it someday.

I'm working on my third series now. It's about Perveen Mistry, Bombay's first woman lawyer working in the 1920s. I’ll admit that while The Widows of Malabar Hill (Book One) was very exciting to work on, Book Two was a pain to write. This time I could partially blame my struggles on a health issue. Lyme Disease was diagnosed after nine months and I bucked up with medicine, acupuncture, and Ayurvedic herbs. Heck, I got so excited about Ayurvedic herbs I worked them into Book 2 (because it’s set in the mountains of India, it’s not such a stretch). And this Book Two, The Satapur Moonstone, had a deadline. I turned it in a month late, it still needed serious revision, but I'd done it!

I've come to understand that only when I slay the dragon that is called Book Two can I get to the love affair with Book Three. And while it won’t be a romance that makes writing every series book feel like fun, it feels like being on honeymoon this week.

Book Two of the Perveen series slated for May 2019

Upcoming events: I'll chat writing with fellow author William Kent Krueger on Saturday, Oct. 13 at 11 a.m. at the Morristown, NJ Book Festival. I will also appear on an author panel on Wednesday Oct 25, 7-9p.m. at Towne Books in Collegeville, PA. Finally, I'll discuss The Widows of Malabar Hill at a holiday signing party with many Maryland mystery authors 1-3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 3 at the Miller Library in Ellicott City, MD.

FROM ASYLUM TO INFAMY

I am delighted to welcome Sujata Massey as our guest contributor today.

Before she moved to Maryland, I was privileged to be part of a writers' group with her in Minneapolis, and say without reservation that her comments and suggestions helped to improve our Detective Kubu novels.

Sujata is the quintessential cosmopolitan!  She was born in England to parents from India and Germany. She grew up mostly in the United States (California, Pennsylvania and Minnesota) and earned her BA from the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars program. After that she worked as a reporter at the Baltimore Evening Sun newspaper before marrying and moving to Japan. The area where Sujata once lived, an hour south of Tokyo, forms most of the settings of her Rei Shimura mysteries. The series has collected many mystery-award nominations, including the Edgar, Anthony, and Mary Higgins Clark awards, and has won the Agatha and Macavity prizes for traditional mystery fiction. The Rei Shimura mysteries are published in 18 countries. The first book in the series is THE SALARYMAN'S WIFE and the tenth is SHIMURA TROUBLE.

Now Sujata has turned to India as the setting of her new novel, THE SLEEPING DICTIONARY.  In a well-deserved starred review, Booklist had this to say about this enchanting book:

“Trapped by her past and uncertain of her future, the peasant girl Kamala’s journey toward independence—personal and political—unfolds in this riveting historical novel. The award-winning author of the Rei Shimura mysteries turns to 1930s–40s India,with the British in control of the colony as Gandhi and others fight for freedom. The setting gives new life to the familiar story of an orphan girl struggling to make her way in a cruel world. Clever Kamala is front and center throughout, as Massey builds her coming-of-age tale around India as it moves toward independence, effectively combining personal narrative with the grandeur of a sweeping historical epic. The characters are easily categorized, but deft storytelling prevents them from being predictable. The book is also notable for its detail-driven depiction of the limitations imposed by caste and colonization. The Sleeping Dictionary, an utterly engrossing tale of love, espionage, betrayal, and survival, is historical fiction at its best, accessible to all audiences."

Please welcome my good friend, Sujata Massey.

Stan - Thursday

_______________________________________

He was the kind of man who disagreed with his government—and sought to reform its operations. He broke laws to spread his messages of unrest and felt forced to flee, lest he spend the rest of his life in prison.

In search of shelter, the radical traveled undercover to countries that were unfriendly with his own.  But the path was complicated, as he could not use his passport. The travel papers he hoped that other governments might produce for him weren't forthcoming. And then, when it seemed like he’d settled into a powerless rut, the fugitive traveler popped up on another continent, in the heart of a nation willing to help him wage war on his homeland.

Edward Snowden

Edward Snowden? Sorry, but that’s not the guy I am writing about. 

Snowden was preceded 72 years ago by Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian freedom fighter who outfoxed the British government of India and made it possible for a hostile army to invade his homeland. Which should make everyone think twice about what Edward Snowden can still accomplish.

Subhas Chandra Bose

Mr. Bose’s adventure began in 1897, when he was born in British India as the younger son of a wealthy upper-caste Hindu lawyer. Although he attended elite, English-medium schools in Calcutta and was tracking toward a conventional career in civil service or law, he witnessed enough discrimination to change his plan about working for the rulers of his country. The young Subhas joined Bengali political activists and rose from being a mere independence supporter to a position as an activist mayor of Calcutta. After serving a long political imprisonment and then banishment by the British government of India, he was permitted back into India in the late 1930s and promptly resumed his independence activities as president of the All-India Congress Party, and after that, his own new political party, the Forward Bloc. 

Bose, who was now admiringly called “Netaji,” or ‘honored leader,’ was enthusiastically received. Much of the population was upset at being commanded by the British to serve them in World War II when there was still no promise of a date that India might get self-rule. While the most famous independence activist of the time,  Mahatma Gandhi, counseled Indians to be patient,  Netaji demanded unconditional freedom and told his followers that violence against the British might be necessary.

The threat of Netaji disrupting war supply production was too much for India’s government. In autumn of 1940, Calcutta police arrested Mr. Bose on charges of plotting to deface the Holwell Monument, a proud symbol of British colonialism in Dalhousie Square. The activist had not actually laid a hand on the monument, but he was locked up under India’s War Rules, a measure that greatly expanded police rights to detainment. Mr. Bose felt his incarceration was unjust and undertook a hunger strike, weakening himself so much that the British were forced to bring him out of jail and into a hospital. 

Mr. Bose — who’d suffered respiratory problems since catching tuberculosis during a two-year-long imprisonment in Mandalay in the 1920s — stayed dangerously weak. His doctors proclaimed him too ill to stand trial, advising rest and recuperation at his parents’ house. The police reluctantly agreed, stationing constables to watch the family’s handsome bungalow on Elgin Road. But their round-the-clock presence wasn’t enough to defeat the clever politico who, while resting in a curtained bedchamber, grew a shaggy beard and hatched an escape plan with his nephew. On the evening of January 16, 1941, the nephew drove away from the house with what appeared to be a Muslim acquaintance, heavily bearded and dressed in the attire of the Northwest Frontier Provinces. Many days later, the house servants discovered one of the meals they’d been leaving next to Netaji’s curtained bedside hadn’t been eaten, and the alarm was raised.

The family house - now a museum

Subhas Chandra Bose had a sizeable head start on the police and, with the assistance of relatives and political supporters, traveled north by car and train through the Northwest Frontier Provinces that are now part of Pakistan. He posed as a deaf-mute, his presence explained at any checkpoints by two Pashto-speaking companions (one of whom—unknown to Mr. Bose--was a double agent informing on him for both the U.S.S.R. and Britain). The runaway reached Kabul and took shelter within a sympathizer’s home. 

Like Edward Snowden, Netaji could not travel out of Kabul using his own passport; he’d made a bet that the Soviet consul would give him travel papers, but this assumption proved wrong. Bose’s helpers spent two more months trolling various consulates before Italy granted him travel papers allowing him to travel under the name Count Orlando Mazzotta.

Following advice from their double agent, the British assumed Mr. Bose would go to Turkey, and sent assassins to wait along the border there. But he avoided that route. Using a combination of car, donkey, horse and his own feet, he was guided out of Afghanistan and across mountains to the Soviet border, where his Italian papers allowed him into the country that had shunned him months earlier. Once on Red soil, he declared his true identity, but instead of getting a warm welcome, he was offered the services of the German ambassador, who put him on a plane to Berlin.

In the 1930s, Netaji had written disapprovingly of Nazi polices, although he admired the structure of their government, and socialism. Now he was facing a life-changing choice, just as Snowden had when he decided to get help from China and Russia.

A popular saying at the time, among militant Indian freedom fighters, was “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Perhaps Netaji followed that reasoning when he decided to take the flight to Germany. And at first, it was wunderbar. His German hosts provided equipment for him to broadcast political addresses against the British. But almost two years passed, and Hitler still hadn’t signed his statement of India’s right to self-government. During this time Mr. Bose had also married an Austrian woman and fathered a daughter, but he had begun to question his future. And the Germans may have had their doubts too, about providing endless support to an undesirable racial type.

In 1943, the Nazis offered Bose a one-way trip out on a submarine, transferring him to a Japanese submarine near the Cape of Good Hope. It was in Tokyo that received the kind of support he’d longed for. Senior officers in the Imperial Army agreed that India should be freed from British colonial power. Together with Bose, they drew up a plan for a military force of expatriate Indians to seize their country from the British.

Japanese submariners who picked up Bose from a German submarine

The idea of an Indian National Army built from tens of thousands of captured Indian prisoners of war was something the Japanese had been thinking about since beginning their conquest of South East Asia. Their officers took care to treat their captured Indian POWs well and invited them to join a volunteer Indian National Army (I.N.A.) headed by Mohan Singh, a former Indian Army officer. However this first I.N.A disbanded after less than a year because few POWs were willing to desert their troops. But once Netaji arrived in Southeast Asia, and word spread that he would be the I.N.A.’s chief, their minds were easily changed. Over 40,000 Indians joined; not just POWs but ethnic Indian civilians living in Southeast Asia, including young women who would serve as combat soldiers and medics in a woman-commanded regiment. Supreme Commander Bose ordered the men and women to train together. He insisted that everyone to speak Hindi, erasing regional and religious boundaries. Seasoned Indian Army officers and senior enlisted men became his top officers, and they drew up strategies for entering and taking India.

But by 1944, Japan was dragging its feet. The war in the Pacific was turning, since the Americans had joined the British. Japan was running low on weapons, food, uniforms and boots - with nothing to restock. It wasn’t easy to give the I.N.A. the supplies it needed to mount a successful invasion. Finally, though, Netaji’s troops were given the all clear to invade along with the Japanese. They entered northeastern India and easily took the town of Moirang in Manipur, and after that laid sieges against the British-led Indian Army strongholds of Imphal and Kohima that lasted almost four months. In the end the Indian Army prevailed, and the Japanese and I.N.A, retreated back to Burma, many perishing along the way from injuries, starvation and exhaustion, while the survivors were captured as POWs by the Indian Army and Allies.

Surrendered Indian National Army troops at Mount Popa

The dream finally imploded after the US atom-bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought Japan to surrender. On August 18, 1945, Netaji boarded a Japanese military plane with Japanese and a few Indian officers, hoping for yet another ride to a safe haven. But the overloaded aircraft crashed over Taiwan, hitting the ground hard and erupting in flames.

According to the British Indian government — which received reports from the Taiwanese hospital —Mr. Bose died from severe burns within hours of the crash. Netaji’s surviving companion on the flight vouches for this story. But because Mr. Bose’s body was never seen, most Indians didn’t believe it. Some suspected he was captured by the Soviets who, angered by his alliance with Germany and Japan, sent him to a gulag. Another theory was that he disguised himself as a monk in the Himalayas —  trekking down to attend the 1964 funeral of Jawaharlal Nehru. Such is the power of a vanished man on a country’s psyche.

India’s situation changed rapidly after World War II. Sympathy for surviving I.N.A. veterans inspired civilians and even many Indian Army soldiers and policemen to contribute cash toward their rehabilitation. When the British government announced the plan to prosecute several I.N.A. officers for treason or war crimes, riots flared nationwide. The unrest the government had always feared Mr. Bose might be able to instigate was happening. They could no longer count on Indians in their employ to support their rule — a major part of their decision to finally quit India in 1947.

Today, there are garland-draped statues of Netaji in most Indian towns, and the airport in Kolkata is named in his honor. Quite a few people around the world think that Mr. Snowden deserves the same kind of recognition for his stance against covert intelligence-gathering. But because of modern technology, he doesn’t need a world power or terrorist group to provide guns and uniforms for him. To inspire action by followers, all he needs is to fire up his laptop and send out a webcast. Or simply tweet. 

Bust of Bose, not in India, but in Renkoji temple (Japan)

Bust of Bose in India

Thanks - Sujata Massey