My research techniques are scrupulous. I read, and not stuff off the internet, but proper authorities with massive tomes as their scholastic produce. Unfortunately, the print tends to be small, and my eyes won't take the kind of research I'd have to do were I to decide to write a novel about anyone from Genghis Khan to Lenin, or (shudder!) the Thirty Years' War.

I looked at my age, late 60s, my infirmities, and decided that I would have a bash at the classical detective novel, something I've never done. However, some criteria had to be satisfied. My books would have to follow the career of the same detective, who would inhabit a fictitious world that yet had a certain veracity to it. He would have to solve his crimes the old way, not through the wizardry of a CSI department that virtually stripped him of most of his detecting powers. And, endowed as I am with a huge store of PhilAmerican sentiments, my detective would be an American living and working in the U.S. The rules, I resolved, would be the basic rules of the true whodunit--no discovering that whodunit appeared once in the book, delivering a parcel to the front door! Whodunit must be an authentic presence in the book.

I have just outlined the differences between a whodunit and a thriller, incidentally. The Carmine Delmonico books are whodunits rather than thrillers, though of course one hopes they have the power to thrill as well as intrigue!

So the real answer to your question is that the infirmities of age dictated that I write a shorter kind of book, relatively easy to research, and with a cast of characters persisting from book to book.

How is the process different/similar to writing historical fiction?

To me, the physical writing process is the same, no matter what kind of book I write. I make an outline of the book; then proceed to write it from the first word of Chapter One to the last word before I type FINIS (my personal conceit). I don't jump around during the writing, it is an absolute progression. Otherwise, how would I know what comes next? I'm always fascinated by the doings of my characters, and no matter how ironclad the outline, they always manage to escape.

Why did you set the Carmine Delmonico series in the 60s?

Two reasons. One involved his being an American living in the U.S. and I go with Ernest Hemingway--write about what you know, never about what you don't know. I was at Yale from 1967 until 1977, when The Thorn Birds ripped my life and my scientific career apart; it was such a huge bestseller. So I had this 10-year window of personal experience, and that solved the second problem as well, for during that era the detective had to detect, he wasn't overshadowed by CSI.

A Creed for the Third Millennium, my futuristic book published in 1984, was the result of my wondering how a messianic character in the year 2030 would get his message to the people, and was, among other things, an allegory. My hero, Dr. Joshua Christian, was a psychiatrist working with women denied children by massive world overpopulation, and needed to be American. So I put him in a small city I named Holloman, the location of an illustrious Ivy League university I named Chubb. Holloman came out of the T.S. Eliot poem about hollow man "headpiece stuffed with straw"--why? I felt it suited the mood of the novel. And there are two famous locks--the Yale and the Chubb.

So when the time came to craft the detective novels, I simply stole the name of my town and my university from that earlier book. I grow so tired of pan-global anti-Americanism! It's nothing more and nothing less than a combination of envy and jealousy. So I wanted my American detective to be a part of one of those little worlds I knew while in New Haven, and chose the Italian-American one because of its close-knit ties and patriotism.

On the other hand, as an international novelist who sells in over 30 languages very well, I didn't want to be blatant, and gave him an English wife and an English sidekick. The important thing, as these characters would be ongoing, was that they should make logical sense to the reader. The wife is a typical immigrant of her time and background--she's there in America because the money's fantastic and she can save to go home later. The sidekick is an eccentric, and I plain love her because I love eccentric characters.

Making Holloman a combination of precision engineering and Ivy League university provides many of those enclosed environments so necessary for the whodunit, which needs a cast of suspects bound together by life's circumstances, as in a university college or an artillery manufactory. The important thing was that I knew my locale in the time period specified, and could have enormous fun crafting my own whatever it was without treading on sensitive toes. As the novels go on, Holloman grows more and more peopled with interesting characters, from M.M., President of Chubb, to Mrs. Tesoriero, who prays for miracles.

What kind of research went into writing The Prodigal Son?

It's old hat now, of course, but the very first appearance on the world stage for tetrodotoxin is hardly known at all, since it happened about 1950 in Sydney, Australia and is still a mere hypothesis. It was the time of wife-swapping in trendy Sydney circles, and there had been a wing-ding New Year's party among a group of university dons and intellectuals.

On New Year's Day, two bodies were found in a park rather off the beaten track; their condition was appalling, not from wounds of any kind, but from vomiting and voiding. The bodies were married, but not to each other. All this was to be gathered from the newspapers, but nothing ever came of the investigations, including a painstaking search for the poison police were convinced had been administered. A few years later, tetrodotoxin was isolated at Duke University in the U.S., and gradually it became assumed that the pair had been given tetrodotoxin. No one was ever charged, and it remains today a genuine mystery. If, however, tetrodotoxin was the agent of choice in that case, then it is the earliest recorded.

It was just becoming available as a research tool in 1969, and we had one investigator who used it experimentally. As with such things, a career in medical science is invaluable to a writer of murder mysteries. There are so many things I know without researching, so that the research is a follow-up, a necessary precaution. One cannot always be right, but it's a foolish novelist who doesn't check facts.

Will there be other Carmine Delmonico adventures?

Definitely! I can say that because Old Sins, Long Shadows has already been written, and will come out whenever the publisher feels is the right time. Probably, 12 months after The Prodigal Son.

There will be more if I live to write them, which I intend to do, but one must never tempt fate. I love being back in New England, with its climate of wild extremes, its matchless beauty, its history and erudition, its wonderful people. All spoken with the nostalgia of times gone, but when I settle myself into writing a Carmine story, all the terrible things come back too. Why should you waste mental energy on them when the need doesn't drive? I am an optimist, and will die one. Otherwise, why live at all?

What would people be surprised to learn about you?

Maybe that someone as educated, well-traveled and experienced as I should choose to live on a mote in the Pacific's eye, 1,000 miles from any landmass. Originally, it arose out of having an ancient mother and two almost as ancient uncles, the last members of my family, all three living outside Sydney, Australia.

Events showed me that Connecticut was just too far away from them, but on the other hand, I couldn't bear the thought of living on the same piece of earth as my mother, who was not a nice woman. A friend suggested Norfolk Island, a three-hour flight away from Sydney, and I applied to live here as a result. It took 18 months to get permission, but eventually I did, and moved here Jan. 1, 1980.

15 square miles are very few and overpopulation as real as the ocean that surrounds us on all 360° if one stands on top of the mountain and looks out to sea. So what took me from my spiritual home in Connecticut back to this part of the world was my sense of duty, which is very strong. I reaped some benefits from the change; as Thomas Hardy said, good novelists either come from or live in villages or extremely small towns, and he's right. If you live in a city, the cop car parked two doors down will remain a mystery. On Norfolk Island, the residents of the house will tell you, so will the neighbors all around, and so will the cops. Then the island grapevine will embroider it. If you would like it put a different way, we on Norfolk Island all know far too much about each other. There are no secrets. Human motivation and human behavior are meat and drink to a novelist.

I add that, four and a half years after I came here, I married Ric Robinson, a descendent of mutineers. I had never married anyone before that, or even lived with anyone. Until I met Ric, I was a complete loner, was never bored with my own company. Now, after 28 years of marriage to Ric, to think of my world without him is awful.

What else would you like people to know about you and your books?

Um--gee, I don't know! I love to write, my vocabulary as a writer is getting too big to please today's reader, but I soldier on despite that. If the words are there, why not use them?

I love the Carmine book that's coming next year, Old Sins, Long Shadows--different from the others, though they are all different. The Prodigal Son has a special place in my heart because it's a novel of character as well as a thriller--the consequences of wrong choices, the agony of racial discrimination, the war in women between husbands and children, and other things. There is a certain freedom about writing sequels, in that, though complete in themselves, one can continue as a writer to explore characters already delineated.

I don't think it was published in the U.S., but I wrote a collection of essays and whimsies titled Life Without the Boring Bits that has essays about my dreadful mother, how I did the research for the Roman books, time and Norfolk Island, among others.

Thank you.

*** 

The Prodigal Son

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Author: Colleen McCullough

Penned: Nov. 6, 2012

Time Out: 305 pages filled with enough twists and turns to make quite a rewarding ride

Beach Worthy: Sure, so long as you're not planning to nap. You'll need to pay close attention to the artful clues laid out in this marvelous murder mystery because half the fun is trying to guess whodunit.

Available: $26 hardcover from Amazon.com and other book sellers

* This contest is only open to entrants in the 50 United States and Canada.

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