Question: Tell us something about The Mystery of Things.
Debra Murphy: It’s essentially St. George-vs-the-Dragon in the form of a modern mystery-thriller. In keeping with the Elizabethan motifs in the book, the version of the St. George tale that I borrow from is the Redcrosse Knight/Una story in Book I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. And of course I also steal liberally from Shakespeare, particularly Othello, Hamlet, and King Lear.
Q: Where did the idea for the book come from?
DM: Thereby hangs a tale. I was on a weekend retreat at the Carmelite Shrine of Holy Hill in southeastern Wisconsin—praying, among other things, about my sense of having a vocation to write, though I didn’t know about what in particular. As it happens, I tend to be deeply affected by places and locations, and Holy Hill is incredibly atmospheric, rather like a European abbey or (at least at night or in winter) something out of Daphne Du Maurier. One afternoon as I climbed to the viewing platform at the top of the shrine’s Scenic Tower—it’s the highest point in southeastern Wisconsin, I understand—it suddenly hit me that this would be a terrific place to set a climactic battle between good and evil in the form of a contemporary murder mystery. Within a day’s time I had my main characters and basic plot. Of course, it took me another fourteen years to finish, polish, and get the thing published, but that’s another story.
Q: Was it a conscious decision from the beginning to work with a St. George and the Dragon theme?
DM: Not originally. I knew from the beginning I wanted to weave Shakespearean themes into it, by way of the protagonist being a Shakespeare scholar, but the St. George business actually came as a complete surprise to me. I was doing background research on Elizabethan literature, reading a variety of Shakespeare’s precursors and contemporaries—stuff I figured my characters would have read in the course of their graduate studies—when I happened to pick up Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene. Book I is Spenser’s treatment of the classic St. George-and-the- Dragon story, and I was absolutely pole-axed to discover that Spenser’s plot and characters mirrored my own plot and characters right down to the ground. It was really quite uncanny. There’s nothing new under the sun, I guess. And of course every writer is familiar with the idea of there being only “33 Basic Plots” or “nine basic plots,” or whatever-you-will, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that I had somehow managed to tap into a very old story.
In any event, after that, I couldn’t resist the opportunity of weaving in that extra layer of meaning, particularly since it had an Elizabethan origin. It’s by no means essential to know all this to enjoy the story, but it does add a bit of something extra for those readers who are into such things.
Q: Which you obviously are. What is Shakespeare’s attraction for you?
DM: There’s no bottom to Shakespeare. You can read or see his plays a hundred times and still not reach the end of Shakespeare’s insights and conundrums and layers of meaning.
And then there’s the unparalleled richness and extravagance of his language. We live in a time that has grown so accustomed to the spare minimalism of the Hemingway school of writing that we sometimes forget that there’s more than one way to tell a story. As a writer, I’ve found it very liberating. I would even say that spending a lot of time with Shakespeare has inspired me to throw off my temperamental timidity and get a little wild and woolly with the language sometimes, when I think the scene calls for it.
Finally, Shakespeare is impossible to pin down on almost anything. Incredibly slippery. Which makes it very easy for all of his fans, as diverse as they are, to read themselves and their obsessions into his work. It’s one reason, I think, that the so-called “Authorship Question” refuses to go away. You’d be amazed how many lawyers swear up and down that Shakespeare must have been a lawyer. Ditto “nobleman” and “courtier” and “doctor” and “Catholic” and “Jew” and “alchemist” and “Freemason” and who knows what all. In that sense, Shakespeare is completely unprecedented. The original literary Everyman.
Q: You tackle some pretty serious themes in the book: Religious redemption and religious fundamentalism; the ecology of evil; the so-called “language of the body” and the potentially destructive marriage of sex and violence in our contemporary culture, which John Paul II described as threatening to become a “culture of death”…these are the sorts of subjects usually dealt with in literary novels, or theological treatises. Why write a thriller, of all things?
DM: The best answer I can give you is to quote from an essay G.K.Chesterton wrote in 1930 called “The Ideal Detective Story.”
There is one aspect of the detective story which is almost inevitably left out in considering the detective stories. That tales of this type are generally slight, sensational, and in some ways superficial, I know better than most people, for I have written them myself. If I say there is in the abstract something quite different, which may be called the Ideal Detective Story, I do not mean that I can write it. I call it the Ideal Detective Story because I cannot write it. Anyhow, I do think that such a story, while it must be sensational, need not be superficial. In theory, though not commonly in practice, it is possible to write a subtle and creative novel, of deep philosophy and delicate psychology, and yet cast it in the form of a sensational shocker.
The essence of a mystery tale is that we are suddenly confronted with a truth which we have never suspected and yet can see to be true. There is no reason, in logic, why this truth should not be a profound and convincing one as much as a shallow and conventional one.
Like Chesterton, I have no hope of writing “the Ideal Detective Story”; but, like Chesterton, I also love detective stories and the pursuit of truth. To go for a bit of both in one story is my way of trying to come up with a novel that’s both entertaining on a superficial level, and satisfying―or at least challenging―on a deeper level.
Q: The Mystery of Things has a strong sense of place. And yet most mysteries and especially thrillers are set in cities like New York or Los Angeles or Chicago. Why, besides the fact that you lived in the area for twelve years, did you choose to set your novel in Milwaukee?
DM: I love Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin. Or I should say, I love everything about it except January, February, and March. Even so, we only moved to the Pacific Northwest because that’s where the extended family was, and we thought that was important to be close to them while our children were growing up.
Besides, Milwaukee has (I think) a wholly undeserved reputation for being a bowling-alley, blue-collar town, probably because of shows like Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and Wayne’s World. While that “biggest small town in the country” image is true to a degree, and part of the city’s comfort and charm, Milwaukee is also an architecturally beautiful city, and its history has made it one of the most ethnically interesting in the country. I can think of no other American city which so reminds me of Europe, for instance. Maybe it’s because of all the German restaurants, and the fact that I spent a college year in Austria.
And then there’s Lake Michigan. They don’t call it an “inland sea” for nothing. There are thousands of ships wrecked at the bottom of those seemingly placid waters. I think the Great Lakes are tremendously evocative and mysterious. The combination of the culture and the Lake were irresistible to me.
Q: The subtitle of the book is, “Book 1 of The Ashland Grail Cycle.” What’s that all about?
DM: As with the St. George business, I didn’t originally plan it this way, but The Mystery of Things, though a self-contained story, evolved in my mind thematically. I eventually realized that I was going to have more to say on the subjects touched upon in the book. Like the St. George-and-the-Dragon motif of Things, all the books—right now I’ve mapped out five, should I live so long—will be connected by the mythopoeic element of Arthurian themes. Specifically the Grail motif and the Grail Quest. And by some continuing characters, of course, or at least interrelated characters.
Three of the next four books will be set in the small town of Ashland in the Rogue Valley of southern Oregon, home of the world-famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Hence the “Ashland” of the title. Ashland may be small, but it’s like San Francisco writ small, and a lot of “culture” goes on there of every form and description. Too, the Rogue Valley, sometimes known among its eclectic citizenry as “the State of Jefferson,” is another wonderfully atmospheric setting for a series of thrillers. Studying up on the region’s history and culture is half the fun of working on the books.
Q: What’s the next book going to be about?
DM: The title of the next book is All the World’s a Stage. It will take place perhaps a decade after Things, and revolve around the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Q: You said that three of the next four books will take place in Ashland. What about the fourth?
DM: I’m planning a sort of “prequel,” to be published between books two and three, and set in Nazi-occupied Vienna. I’ve actually been thinking about and researching this one since I was a teenager, and I’m still wondering if I’m going to have the gumption to give it a go.
Q: Why is that?
DM: The more one studies the history of the twentieth century, Nazism and the Holocaust in particular, the more one is confronted with the flabbergasting reality of evil. Scripture calls it “The Mystery of Iniquity,” and they don’t call it a mystery for nothing. The biggest there is, second only to the Mystery of its opposite, love.
Q: Speaking of mystery then, one last question about The Mystery of Things…where did the title come from, specifically?
DM: “The mystery of things” comes from a famous passage in Act V of King Lear:
…Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones
that ebb and flow by the moon.
See? I just can’t get away from “mystery.” It’s all around us, and yet too many of us get too distracted by the “things” part to take note of it. In the end, I suspect that’s all I’ll ever really be writing about.
