Make Note of Claudia Riess

Greetings, Noters!

Summer is here in full force, and I am seizing every moment of sunlight I can get by working outside. It’s my favorite time of year to write; there’s something about the outdoor scenery that makes me ten times more productive.

I am deep into editing Trending Topic Mystery Book Four and having such a great time. I’ve encountered some challenges over the past few months that have made me question this writing path I’ve been on, but I’m happy to say being with Coco has reinvigorated my love of what I do. Her latest mystery adventure is the perfect book to work on during summer. Coco and her friends are enjoying the season in Central Shores, and it’s nice to picture myself living it up in her beach-front condo while I whittle away at the manuscript. If all continues going smoothly, I’ll also be able to kick off revisions to the final Court of Mystery novel this month. I’ve been dragging my feet on that particular project, but I think I’m ready to return to the Realm of Virtues. Some authors don’t enjoy editing, but there’s something therapeutic about it for me. I love dissecting each scene to find ways to make it even better. It’s a fun challenge.

This week's featured author knows the editing process's ups and downs. Without further ado…

A Bit About the Author: Claudia Riess has worked for The New Yorker and Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and has edited art history monographs.  Stolen Light, the first book in her art history mystery series, was chosen by Vassar’s Latin American history professor for distribution to the college’s people-to-people trips to Cuba.  To Kingdom Come, the fourth, will be added to the syllabus of a course on West and Central African Art at a prominent Midwestern university.  For more about the author, visit www.claudiariessbooks.com.

Claudia, as a fellow Level Best author, it’s a delight to welcome you here to Noteworthy to celebrate the fifth novel in your Art History Mystery series. Writers are readers, first and foremost, so by way of introduction, can you share with us what book made you fall in love with reading?

Indirectly, all the Winnie the Pooh books, read to me by my father, so there was a kind of organic element to the experience, a feeling of being buoyed by both my father’s voice and A.A. Milne’s humanity expressed in deliciously giggly humor. More directly: Mary Poppins, and the captivating union of the real and imagined.

How did you make the jump from reader to writer? How did your writing take off?

I wrote my first novel when I was in my mid-forties: Reclining Nude.  I’d categorize it as a psycho-sexual odyssey.  An experiment, really, to see if I could suspend my inner censor and write freely about a subject that I otherwise felt rather prudish about.  It was published by Stein and Day and subsequently by houses in the UK and Germany.  It was a boost to my joy of writing and my confidence, and yet the determination and discipline required to make writing an occupation remained latent for years.  When they finally awakened, I discovered that my earlier experiment had affected my writing ability more broadly than I’d expected.  I was able to enter the mind of a character—woman, man, cop, killer—without barriers or restraints.  After sporadically writing two more novels, I finally began to write at a steady pace when I latched onto the idea of creating an art history mystery series featuring an amateur sleuthing couple—Erika Shawn, an Art News magazine editor and Harrison Wheatley, an art history professor, thus combining my interests in art, mystery and romance.  A contract with Level Best Books has helped bolster self-discipline.

What a fascinating writing journey! That’s great that you challenged yourself; it’s such a great catalyst for change. How did you first meet your protagonists in your Art History Mystery series?

At the crossroads of fact and fiction.  A college dorm-mate of mine had mentioned, somewhat off-handedly, that her father’s sugar plantation had been confiscated during the Cuban Revolution.  This was so far out of the bounds of my experience, thus far confined to Brooklyn and mid-town Manhattan, that the story was permanently etched in memory.  Years later, when I told my art historian brother that I was interested in writing a mystery with an art theme, he replied, without pause, “How about Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina—finding a lost study, a fragment of a cartoon, maybe?”  My Vassar mate’s story serendipitously came to mind, dovetailing with my brother’s suggestion.  I added the fiction that the American plantation owner had been an art collector, and I was off and running.  The sleuthing couple arose from the art world almost as a matter of course.

What themes/lessons can readers look forward to discovering in your latest book?

With each of the books in the series I do a lot of research, so I’m discovering things about the art world in the process.  In Dying for Monet, some interesting facts about the Impressionist movement and its history are woven into the fictional story, along with the business of art authentication and art collecting.  On the more personal side, there’s a strong emphasis on the evolving relationship of the series’ sleuthing couple, so there are, if not lessons, demonstrations of hardship and resilience, argument and compromise, safe harboring and dare devilling. 

What’s one thing you know about your protagonist that your readers don’t?

Erika Shawn was not inspired by anyone I know—friend, teacher, mentor—but rather (I discovered in retrospect) a composite of characteristics and life experiences a cut above my own.  Most significantly, Erika is far less averse to risk-taking.  

What was one of the toughest lessons you learned while writing Dying for Monet?

Since I’m a hopeless romantic, I have a tendency to focus on the sleuthing couple’s evolving relationship.  In a novel whose genre is “mystery,” that can’t be allowed to impede the plot’s driving force.  In Dying for Monet, one of the protagonists suffers a major trauma, so it was especially difficult not to get side-tracked for extended periods on the couple’s management of this.  By editing those passages with as objective a viewpoint as possible, I made sure the personal element was interwoven with the mystery’s primary plot, so that its thread was not lost—maybe even strengthened.

Is there anything you need for a successful day of writing?

First and foremost, a swath of open-ended free time.  If I’m editing a novel’s rough draft or plotting its endgame, I can work for a couple of hours in the morning, even though a lunch date’s scheduled for noon.  However, if I’m in the middle of the actual writing process, I can’t be constrained by an upcoming appointment.  When I need a boost in motivation or energy, a stint on my rowing machine will often provide it.  Writing a bit of dialogue can also get the juices flowing—my own as well as the protagonists’.  If I’m in a picky, edit-every-paragraph-multiple-times loop, I sometimes start a chapter in the form of an email to myself—on my laptop rather than my MacBook Pro.  This somehow frees me up to making errors in spelling and style without a care in the world.  A printout of this email serves as a great starting point when I return to the doc on my computer, providing some raw text and setting a more easy-going—forgiving—mood.

What book (other than your own 😊) have you been recommending to people lately? Are there any must-reads you have to share?

The most recent novel I’ve been recommending is Betsy Trask’s Orbital, which relates the 24-hour experience of six astronauts and cosmonauts orbiting the earth.  There is an immediacy to Trask’s narration that is poetic.  The book is an exploration of space, community, spirituality, wonder.  Ongoing recommendations include books by Umberto Eco—especially The Island of the Day Before—for their sheer brilliance; also books by Philip Roth—I was especially affected by Everyman—which cut to the heart of the matter—and to the soul—with seeming effortlessness.

Lots of recommendations, and plenty of time to add them to summer reading lists! Claudia, thank you for being here today to share your author experience and to give us insight into Dying for Monet. Book Five in the Art History Mystery series is available now!

Dying for Monet, book 5 of Riess’s art history mystery series, opens on a gala evening auction at Laszlo’s, an upstart auction house in New York City.  After a much sought-after Impressionist still life painting is without notice withdrawn from the auction block, its broker is found dead at the foot of an imposing statue in Laszlo’s courtyard.  Amateur sleuths Erika Shawn and Harrison Wheatley are once again drawn into an investigation involving an art-related homicide, this time with one sharing an unnerving coincidence with violent crimes occurring abroad.

As Harrison searches for clues in the archives at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Erika is on a stakeout in Brooklyn Heights gathering information on the owner of the still life.  After Harrison experiences a disastrous encounter in London, he returns home, where he and Erika, along with a few of their usual cohorts, find themselves ever more deeply at odds with the movers and shakers on the dark side of fine arts commerce.