Genre Hopping with Juliet Grames

by Barb, in Maine but leaving for Key West a week from today! So much to do

I first met author Juliet Grames, the Editorial Director at Soho Press, where she curates the Soho Crime imprint (an imprint I have long admired), when we participated in a Sisters in Crime “Read Like a Writer” event. The book we discussed was The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin. Juliet, it turned out, was a long time fan, to the point where she asks her new hires at Soho Crime to read the book as a part of their orientation. I next saw Juliet at this year’s Maine Crime Wave, where she combined her experience as an author with her experience in the publishing industry to give a barn-burner of a speech that everyone found inspiring. Finally, this fall I saw her in Brunswick, Maine, at an event sponsored by Gulf of Maine Books in support of Juliet’s latest book, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia. (I realize I sound like a stalker. Honestly, just a fan.) Plus, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia takes place in Calabria, Italy, where longtime blog readers will recognize I’ve had my own adventures.)

The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a crime novel and an historical, both in our wheelhouse here at the Wickeds, so I wasn’t sure if I should label this post Genre Hopping. I decided the book is different enough from our usual fare but still something our regular readers would enjoy. I read it and loved it.

My interview with Juliet follows.

Barb: The Lost Boy of Chionia is set in 1960 in Calabria, the toe of the
Italian boot. What attracted you to this specific time and place?

Juliet: My grandmother was born in Calabria in 1920, and I am passionate about drawing attention to–and lending clarity to–southern Italian stories and history. As I was researching Calabrian ghost towns where my grandmother’s ancestors had come from, I encountered the story of Africo, an infamous ghost town that was very problematically forcibly abandoned in 1951. I knew I had the bones of a crime novel right there–the perfect spooky, marginalized, and magical setting against which I could present a puzzle mystery drawn from real stories of disappeared immigrant men, stories I had collected through interviews with members of the Italian diaspora. 

1960 was the right year to set the drama not only because of this phenomenon of forced displacement in Italy (and the world) but also because it was the moment of great flux: when post-war conservative policy was battling against progressive and humanitarian movements; when the female half of the population was still struggling for some of the most basic human rights; and when the ancestors of Italy’s modern criminal syndicates were still hiding in the woodwork. A moment of great hope, of thwarted change, and explosive frustration–sound familiar? 

Barb: The book’s main and only point of view character tells the story from a time far in the future from the events of the story. Why did you choose to tell the story from this perspective? I have to say, even though this was the structure, as I read the book, my heart was beating just as hard as it would have if the events were happening to the characters right in the moment.

Juliet: The truth there is that I needed my character, Francesca, to be capable of some anachronism. If I had written her point of view strictly as a 27-year-old in 1960, she wouldn’t have had the frame of reference to be enraged about some of the things I wanted her to be enraged about. Having her look back from many years later, though, let me comment on these topics with a little more seasoning. I confess I just don’t have the discipline to execute a true, pure historical novel–I have too many axes to grind. Plus, the distanced narrator was an extra tool for letting me control which information I was going to withhold, or distract with. 

Barb: (That strikes me a very clever, though I didn’t think of it when I read the book. Nothing takes me out of historicals faster than characters with unbelievably modern sensibilities. Or the opposite, modern authors with cliched views of attitudes in the past.)

At the heart of the book there is a twisty mystery. Much twistier, I must say, than it appeared to me to be at the beginning. As an editor of crime novels for two decades, did you come to this project thinking about things that must be in a good crime novel or must never be?

Juliet: I did absolutely feel that the stakes were very high here in terms of the composition of the crime plot–if I didn’t pull off a truly puzzling and tricky mystery I would lose all my credibility as a crime fiction editor. But I really wanted to give it the old college try–the book is as much of an homage to this genre I love so much as it is a contribution to it. I did indeed come in with a long list of which rules I had to follow and which I had to lovingly break at all costs. 

Barb: At the beginning of the book the narrator repeats a saying of her father’s. “Some people never grow up…Some people grow old still pointing their fingers, or waiting for justice to bring down its hammer. But finding a culpable party doesn’t fix a problem. A grown-up is someone who knows when to take action, and who knows how to manage consequences.”  I can’t ask how this plays out in the book, because I don’t think you can answer without spoilers. So I’ll ask, what does this aphorism mean to you? And, as I think about it, might we all improve our crime fiction if we paid attention to those last two sentences?

Juliet: The book, for me, is about the struggle to be a good person, and to make good, ethical choices, when the shape of society itself is fundamentally amoral, when obstacles are overwhelming. I hope that the takeaway from the book is an inspiration to readers to keep igniting their compassion: not to get burnt out by injustice, which is rampant in our world, or to lose stamina when the world doesn’t fix our problems for us. But you’ve cut right to the heart of things, Barbara. There is very much an intended second reading there that I hope unlocks how the reader wants to think about the story.  

Barb: What are you working on now?

Juliet: A mystery set in the Italian Alps, where a carabiniere (military police) officer is investigating World War One remains that have emerged from the melting glacier–including a mysterious violin of troubling provenance.  

Readers: Juliet was inspired to write this book by her grandmother. Do you have a family story/member that would might inspire a work of fiction? Tell us a little about it.

About Juliet Grames

Juliet Grames is the national and international bestselling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna and The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia. Her debut novel was shortlisted for the New England Book Award and the Connecticut Book Award, and received the Cetraro Prize for Southern Italian literature. It has been translated into nine languages. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in Best American Mystery & Suspense, Real Simple, Parade, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and the Boston Globe, among other venues. She is Editorial Director at Soho Press, where she curates the Soho Crime imprint. She is the recipient of the Mystery Writers of America Ellery Queen Award. She lives in Rhode Island.

About The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia

One unidentified skeleton. Three missing men. A village full of secrets. The best-selling author of The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna brings us a sparkling—by turns funny and moving—novel about a young American woman turned amateur detective in a small village in Southern Italy (“Terrific” –Boston Globe).

Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either.

Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When the local priest’s housekeeper begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival.

Set in the wild heart of Calabria, a land of sheer cliff faces, ancient tradition, dazzling sunlight—and one of the world’s most ruthless criminal syndicates—The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia is a suspenseful puzzle mystery, a captivating romance, and an affecting portrait of a young woman in search of a meaningful life.