Q & A with Debra Murphy about
The Mystery of Things

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.