Sara Gran: Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

Jul 2, 2012

Tags: book, New Orleans, mystery, author, Sara Gran, Sara Gran Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

Sara Gran has been writing for many years, but it’s her most recent novel “Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead” that has taken her to a new level. The book, just out in paperback, is set in post-Katrina New Orleans and stars Claire DeWitt, a woman who is arguably the world’s greatest detective. This isn’t quite the major accomplishment that many people might think; most people who know Claire tend to hate her or think she’s crazy. A devotee of Jacques Silette, a French detective who wrote about the nature of mysteries and their investigation, Claire’s story is as much about the nature of mysteries and why we’re captivated by them as it is about this particular crime.

In her previous novels, whether she was writing about being young and screwed up in New York City, a woman who finds a demon controlling her, or a recovering drug addict in fifties New York, Gran doesn’t shy away from dark corners or rough edges. In her books there’s violence and drugs, addiction and tragedy, but also possibility and change. The heroine of her latest novel is a brilliant creation. Like Gran herself, Claire, as a woman who marches to the beat of her own drum and isn’t afraid of walking into dark places, is the perfect epitome of a Suicide Girl. The book is original, hypnotizing and addictive. The second book in the series comes out next year.

ALEX DUEBEN: Where did this book start?

SARA GRAN: I had wanted to write a detective series for a long time. This is my fourth published novel and I had wanted to do one since I started writing, but it’s a huge undertaking. I was in New Orleans for the storm and moved to California afterwards. I started writing a book that took place there. It was a very different scenario. It was about a book dealer; I’m very into books and I used to be a book dealer. Then I thought, fuck it, I want this to be the detective series that I always dreamed of. (laughs) I made it the detective book and I’m just finishing up the second book now.

AD:

I was wondering if the book was the first of a series or not. It feels like a possible first book, but it’s very satisfying on its own.

SG:

Good. I have four books planned. I don’t know if I’m going to keep going past four or not, but there’s going to be at least four Claire DeWitt books if all goes well. If nobody stops me. And we’re going to solve all the mysteries that are raised in the first book of what happened to all the various missing girls and missing people.

AD:

One element in the book that struck me was that she was a teen detective, or at least that’s when she becomes obsessed with idea of becoming a detective. We all love teen detectives but I don’t think any of them grow up well.

SG:

Do any of them ever grow up? (laughs) Well or poorly? I didn’t read those books as a kid. I just got into that concept as an adult. I liked Harriet the Spy, but I never read Nancy Drew until very recently.

AD:

Really, Claire is just an eighties punk kid who just happens to notice more than most people.

SG:

Yeah. It’s basically my childhood if I was a teen detective; which sadly, I was not. (laughs)

AD:

Where did the idea for Jacques Silette’s book Detection and these strange epigraphs throughout the book come from?

SG:

The idea of a book that changes you when you read it is something that’s interesting to me. I think there are really books like that. I think if you look at some of the classic spiritual texts they’re like that. Some of the things in Detection are blatantly from the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching and some of them are just fabricated by me. I think there are books like that; that when you read them, they do change you. They make you a different person and you can’t ever go back again. I like that idea so much.

Also I love that every field really does have its weird esoteric schools. I’m sure if you would go talk to a butcher, there’s different schools of how to cut meat. No matter what the job is, people have different ideas of how to do it. Of course if you’re a writer there’s all your different little clubs and schools and genres of people. I thought that would be fun to apply to detection as well.

AD:

That idea of being changed and never being the same after is the theme running through book. Everyone gets changed, but not everyone changes their circumstances based on that.

SG:

Not everyone changes their circumstances based on it. That’s a really good point. For example Kelly reads the book [Detection], but she stays in Brooklyn, where for Claire it sends her off on the odyssey of traveling around the country and finding a new home.

AD:

There’s that great scene where Claire speaks with Terrell at the end where she says, you survived this, it changed you, now you can be someone else.

SG:

That was the big thing about Katrina. I was also here in New York for 9/11. One thing that was so sort of horrifying to me after both incidents was people saying, when are things going to go back to normal? How do we go back to normal? Things don’t go back to normal after a big, traumatic incident. There is no normal again. That was really frustrating for me. You have to change. You have to let things affect you or you become this brittle, fake person, which people do become after disasters. I think it’s very widespread unfortunately.

AD:

And the nature of people–and cities–is being in a constant state of flux.

SG:

I think so and I think that’s another thing that was frustrating. In our philosophical point of view that we have in this country, we are not well-equipped for change. That was one reason why the Tao Te Ching was such a big inspiration for Detection. That book is all about change and all about being with change and experiencing change. In all the classic Eastern texts, that’s the fundamental point. Here, although there are so many wonderful things about our philosophy and our point of view, people want things to stay the same. Especially after these big disasters people just want things to go back to normal and there’s always this goal to not change and that’s a shitty goal. (laughs) Not changing is a stupid goal. It’s not a goal that’s going to get you very far or give you an interesting life. It will be constant disappointment.

AD:

Where did the character of Andray come from?

SG:

Andray is such an amalgam of so many people I’ve known. Growing up here in New York City and living in New Orleans I’ve known so many young people like him who just don’t have much of a chance in life, but you see what chances they could have. Since this is my fantasy, Andray will have many wonderful chances in life and good things will happen to him as the series progresses. He’s very much like Claire.

AD:

There’s a great line where Andray asks Claire how you become a detective and she goes, you have to go to school and study hard and meet the right people. He’s like, really? She’s like no, that’s all bullshit. Is that your thinking about how one becomes a writer?

SG:

Absolutely. And a lot of the stuff about being a detective, I think is stuff that applies to anything that you love to do or feel called to do in life. If you feel called to be a writer or anything. A butcher. (laughs) I don’t know why I keep going back to butchers. I’m a vegetarian. (laughs) A vegan butcher? Being a writer is a great example. I mean now writing is so fucking corporate. Everybody wants you to have an MFA and do this and do that. An MFA is a fucking Ponzi scheme. It’s bullshit. I know some people feel like it’s helped them a lot and that’s a good thing. It’s good for some people, but for most people it’s total bullshit. (laughs) There’s this corporate thing where you’re supposed to go from getting your MFA and go into publishing and that’s one reason why there’s so much mediocrity in American fiction these days, whether it’s genre fiction or literary fiction.

People will give you the worst advice about going to the right schools and publishing in the right places. What you should do if you want to be a writer is write a good fucking manuscript and have an interesting life so you have something to write about. I think the same would apply to being a detective. (laughs) Although we don’t know for sure, we will say that.

AD:

Claire has a great line at one point about how the perfectly reasonable thing would be to go home and got o bed, but the detective’s job is not to be reasonable.

SG:

Yeah. And you know I more and more I’m trying to think of a delicate way to put this if you’re recording this. (laughs) There is more and more of a drive as all media becomes more and more corporate–I also work in TV and film now–and there is more and more of a drive to turn the writer’s work mediocre and more and more of a drive to take out all the sharp edges and the scary parts. Those are the parts that make work lively and interesting. I myself would rather read a bad book that makes one hundred interesting mistakes than a very, very good book that is just down the line bland and mediocre but good enough. I don’t ever want the good enough thing. I want the thing that takes chances and fucks up and that’s what I want to write as well.

AD:

It’s interesting that you always wanted to write a detective novel because Dope has that feel. Did you always have that ending in mind?

SG:

Always. From the very beginning. I was always a big fan of Jim Thompson and he ends a lot of his books with a similar ending. Well at least two books that end like that. It’s something I always wanted to do.

AD:

Dope and Come Closer both end in a way that feels inevitable but they’re brutal endings.

SG:

It was a fun thing to inflict on your readers, but I don’t think I would do it again. (laughs) It’s fun to know you completely fucking ruined someone’s day and have that influence on them and really shock someone. There’s also something a little bit immature and childish about just wanting to stick it to people like that. I think I’ll do something like that again some day, but right now I end my books on a slightly more hopeful note.

AD:

Claire has a hopeful ending, but in some ways I think it’s your darkest book as far the content.

SG:

It’s going to go up and down as the series progresses. The second book is actually quite a bit darker, but then in the next two books things are going to turn up for her. I wanted her to have the experience of someone who is capable of going to these very, very dark places. Like I was saying, after the storm and after 9/11 and people going when are things going to go back normal, well, she is someone who is very okay with not normal. She’s very comfortable in dark places.

I don’t know if you know Greek mythology at all but do you know the myth of Persephone? That was a big model for Claire. Someone who is capable of going into the underworld and spending time there, but then coming back up as well, whereas most people tend to get stuck in one place or the other. She has this liminal quality, this almost shamanic quality of being able to be in all these different spaces and be comfortable there. Although in the second book, she’ll be much less comfortable.

AD:

You referenced Persephone in the book. In one of the Silette epigraphs, he writes that Persephone the first detective.

SG:

Exactly. That was the guiding metaphor for this universe and for Claire. There’s a wonderful, wonderful book which I would love to recommend called Persephone Returns by a Jungian therapist called Tanya Wilkinson. It is a wonderful Jungian take on trauma and the Persephone myth and it was a big influence.

AD:

I’ve always thought of Persephone as a kind of punk story. She doesn’t chose this life, but she’s not destroyed or consumed by it.

SG:

That’s interesting. Before she was Persephone her name was Cor and Cor just means maiden, so she didn’t even have her own name. She was just this nothing of a person. This nothing little girl and then she had this experience and she became Persephone, the Queen of the Dead, which sounds better than being nothing little Cor.

AD:

And she’s not trapped in the underworld, or by the underworld, however you want to think of it. She can leave.

SG:

She goes back and forth. That liminal quality of being able to do both things. And again it has to do with accepting change, saying now it’s time to be upstairs and now it’s time to be downstairs.

AD:

I’m not sure anyone’s made that exact metaphor about a detective, but it’s a good one.

SG:

I think detectives are our highest mythology in American secular culture. We create mythology, but like all mythology we don’t call it mythology, it’s just what’s floating around in our popular culture. I think detectives fulfill such an interesting role in our mythology and such an interesting role in our personal psyches as well as our national and cultural psyche. Are you a Raymond Chandler fan at all?

AD:

Oh yeah.

SG:

There’s this great thing in one of the essays he wrote for The Atlantic. It’s him taking about what the detective is and his conception is not quite my conception but he spoke about it in these mythological terms. A white knight who can go into these very corrupt places and not be corrupted by them. He had this great classical education which influenced his work and he had a strong sense that he was creating a mythological character with Marlowe. His unconscious motivations in creating Marlowe are almost more interesting than his conscious motivations because consciously he describes Marlowe as this great hero but when you read it, Marlowe is actually much more complicated than that. So despite all my highfalutin talk about mythology, your subconscious motivations as a writer are almost always more interesting than your highfalutin notions, I think. (laughs)

AD:

That’s the difference, I think, between the stories we tell ourselves and how we think about mythology functioning for other people and cultures.

SG:

That’s true. There’s always the overt thing and the hidden thing. I mean Marlowe is this sad, weird complicated character. Not so much as a hero as Chandler, I think intended for him to be.

AD:

You would have to be somewhat damaged or in search of something that’s missing to do that.

SG:

Yeah and with Claire’s that’s very explicit. She’s this really damaged character and that is her natural milieu. More than the upstairs world, she is at home in the downstairs world. I just made up this upstairs/downstairs metaphor right now but I think it’s working well. (laughs) With Chandler’s Marlowe you never find out. The Long Goodbye is my favorite book because it doesn’t make any sense.

AD:

All Chandler’s books are like that, though. I couldn’t help but think of that when reading Claire and how if she had just followed up with this clue she gets at the beginning, the other 200 something pages would have been unnecessary.

SG:

Yeah. That was just a plot device. (laughs) I struggled with that plot device but I decided, fuck it. She just forgot about it.

AD:

But Silette makes clear that the mystery is everything around the events and it’s that which we get caught up in.

SG:

Yeah. In the second book it’s more explicit. I will now come up in retrospect with a high falutin reason why I did that. In the second book it’s more clear that when you follow a mystery, you see what you want to see. You are bringing as much to it as you are taking from it. So maybe she didn’t want to see?

AD:

In that sense, the detective is no different than anyone else. We all see clues but while the detective sees more, it doesn’t necessarily provide more answers or greater insight.

SG:

That’s a really good point. The detective doesn’t necessarily see more clues, they just put it together differently. They recognize them as clues in a way that other people don’t.

AD:

Claire’s teen detective moments are realizing many of the things that kids learn about adults as they grow up.

SG:

Most of their experiences are normal childhood experiences but they’re put in this framework of being a detective.

AD:

Can you talk a little about the next book?

SG:

The next book takes place in the Bay Area. Each book is going to take place in a different place. The third book is going to take place in Las Vegas and Los Angeles and the fourth book is going to take place in New York. It’s going to see Claire going through a lot of changes. This will never be a normal detective series. It’s not going to be the same Claire shows up and she solves a different crime. She’s going to change. She’s going to go through really hard times and she’s not going to change in the sense of a steady uphill growth that many people like to see in a character these days. She’s going to go through a lot of hard times of her own and we’re going to stay with her as a character and every book is going to be very different. I’m just starting the third book so hopefully that will be three or four years from now.

AD:

Will we learn about some of the stories behind why Claire’s been banned from various places?

SG:

Claire has been banned from many places. She was institutionalized in the State of Utah because she was arrested and no one believed her when she said she was a very important detective working on a very important case. They thought she was delusional and locked her up. (laughs)

AD:

She may not have expected to be thanked for being a detective, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t expect that.

SG:

No. She never expects to be thanked, but that was a bit weird. It ties into you have to do what you love and you have to stay committed to your vision. You have to stay committed to your point of view. You have to stay committed to what you’re called to do, whether by your subconscious or some higher forces. Making other people happy is not your goal. Making other people think you’re not crazy can’t be the goal. I feel like so many writers and artists today are trying to fit into corporate media, but corporate media should be trying to accommodate us and all our craziness and eccentricities. I for one will hold the flag for that.

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