What She Laughingly Calls Her Career: Susan Moody on Thirty Years of Writing (and Almost as Many Books)

Abstract

January–February 2014 • 9 S usan Moody is among the most respected crime writers of England . She has published nearly thirty novels since her first, Penny Black (1984), which the Crime Writers Association voted in 1990 as one of the top one hundred crime novels of all time. She has been chair of the Crime Writers Association, world president of the International Association of Crime Writers, and has even been elected to that most exclusive and august body, the Detection Club, whose members have included legends Agatha Christie , G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers , and Simon Brett. It is a record to envy, and she continues to shine in a very unpredictable vocation. Her last four novels (three written under the pseudonym of Susan Madison) have received very positive reviews, and her newest, the recently released A Final Reckoning, was called “spine-tingling” by Publishers Weekly. Susan agreed to discuss her work from her home in Dordogne, France. J. Madison Davis: How did you begin in this crazy business? Susan Moody: I knew I was going to be a writer from my earliest years. I was always passionate about words, about literature, about reading and books: there really was no other career I could have gone into. I went into crime writing after having two historical novels published in the US—and no, you don’t want to know their titles! I grew up in tall, dark houses in Oxford, peopled by tall, dark academics for whom reading crime fiction was an allowable indulgence, so I had a rich store of those lovely Penguin greenbacks to devour. Those were the days, in any case, when children were supposed to be seen, not heard, so nobody ever talked to me, which What She Laughingly Calls Her Career Susan Moody on Thirty Years of Writing (and Almost as Many Books) Crime&Mystery international j. madison davis 10 worldliteraturetoday.org meant I could hide behind sofas and read while the clever grown-ups discussed the finer points of the Oxford comma or the abstruse subtexts of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I had access to any number of books, no censorship of what I read, and massive encouragement to read. Plus the fact that among the Oxbridge academics, it was considered respectable not only to read detective stories but also to write them. Years later, one of the national Sunday papers launched a competition to find a new and memorable female sleuth on the grounds that very few people recognized fictional female detectives. I was married, divorced, and had two children by then, and I thought, Yeah, that’s interesting . . . how many female sleuths could I name? Miss Marple and . . . erm. There are dozens of female sleuths now, but when I started what I laughingly call my career, there weren’t. So when Penny Wanawake, the daughter of an African diplomat and an English aristocrat—tall, black, sassy, rich—burst onto the crime scene, she was a breath of fresh air, a female equivalent of James Bond walking down the mean streets, taking no lip from anyone, considering herself the complete equal or superior of any man she met. JMD: Penny’s adventures lasted through seven novels. What inspired her creation? SM: In the 1960s, I moved from France with my husband to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. A huge eyeopener for a gently bred Oxford High School girl! I was astounded at the manner in which black people were still being treated: forced to live in ghettos away from the white folks, not allowed to swim in the same part of the municipal pool, addressed as “boy” by redneck twelve-year-olds. We found it deeply shocking. I can honestly say I had never seen any sign of such prejudice, growing up in liberal Oxford, nor working in both London and Paris after I left school. It must have been there, but I wasn’t aware. Perhaps I was too blind or too stupid! Oak Ridge was a National Laboratory: you can imagine how embarrassing it was when distinguished nonwhite scientists came to deliver lectures or take up positions and found themselves treated like third-class citizens. We worked for the NAACP; we saw the Klan come...