"An Excellent Thing in a Woman"

Allison Montclair is the author of the Sparks and Bainbridge mysteries, beginning with The Right Sort of Man, the American Library Association Reading List Council's Best Mystery of 2019. Under her real name, she has written more mystery novels and a damn good werewolf book, as well as short stories in many genres in magazines and anthologies. She is also an award-winning librettist and lyricist with several musicals to her credit that have been performed or workshopped across the USA. She currently lives in New York City where she also practiced as a criminal defense attorney.

Montclair applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, An Excellent Thing in a Woman, and reported the following:

On page 69 of An Excellent Thing In A Woman, Iris Sparks, co-proprietor of The Right Sort Marriage Bureau, is interviewed by DS Michael Kinsey after discovering the body of Jeanne-Marie Duplessis, a Parisian dancer:

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me this has nothing to do with you, Sparks,’ he said.

‘I wish I could, Mike,’ she replied. ‘She was a client.’

‘Of The Right Sort?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘But she’s from Paris. How did she manage that?’

‘She walked in two days ago,’ said Sparks, and she recounted everything she could remember of the interview. By the time she was done, he was shaking his head in disbelief.

‘Strange,’ he said. ‘Any idea why she was in such a rush to get married?’

‘Nothing specific,’ said Sparks. ‘She mentioned something about Paris, about not being able to continue on there, but we didn’t get any more detail than that.’

‘She’s here with a dance troupe,’ said Kinsey. ‘Maybe one of them will know. I wish my French was better.’

‘Would you like me to translate?’

‘No thanks, Sparks,’ he said. ‘You’re a witness.’

‘Not a suspect this time?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I must be losing my touch.’

This is a nice test for this book. Amateur detectives have contentious relationships with the police, and this is particularly true for Iris and Mike — because he’s also her ex-boy friend.

Mike is not in all the books — Scotland Yard has more than one detective — but he’s back and things continue to be tense between Iris and him. Iris and Gwen both have varying encounters with the different detectives they run across in the series, but Mike and Iris are a special case. She considers him the man she loved the most in her life, but her work for British Intelligence during the war led her to betray him, an act that wounded both of them deeply. Her continuing silence as to what happened is required by the Official Secrets Act, so reconciliation between them may never be possible. Yet here they are, once again.

Visit Alan Gordon's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Saint of the Narrows Street"

William Boyle is the author of eight books set in and around the southern Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend, where he was born and raised. His most recent novel is Saint of the Narrows Street. His books have been nominated for the Hammett Prize, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France, and they have been included on best-of lists in the Washington Post, CrimeReads, and more. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Boyle applied the Page 69 Test to Saint of the Narrows Street and reported the following:

From page 69:

Chooch opens the back door, and he pushes the wheelbarrow straight outside. No stairs this way. Again, Giulia and Risa trail him. Communication seems less and less necessary. They're following his lead. He's trying not to feel, only do what needs doing.

Page 69 finds the main characters--Risa, Giulia, and Chooch, with baby Fabrizio in tow--in a precarious position, away from Saint of the Narrows Street (their block in southern Brooklyn where most of the action of the book is set), at Chooch's crumbling country house in upstate New York. They have arrived there after things took a dark turn in Risa's apartment with her bad seed husband, Sav. To say too much about this scene would spoil a key plot point in the first part, but I do think that reading this page would give readers a good idea of the whole book. The tone and feel of it, especially. You can get a sense of the position these characters are in, their backs against the wall, the desperation they're feeling, the way they're struggling with decisions they've had to make. You can get a sense, I think, of what's coming in the future for them. The way this moment, this memory, will haunt their lives. This scene is freighted with tension and heartbreak, but there's also dark humor to it.

Visit William Boyle's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

The Page 69 Test: City of Margins.

My Book, The Movie: City of Margins.

Q&A with William Boyle.

The Page 69 Test: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

My Book, The Movie: Shoot the Moonlight Out.

Writers Read: William Boyle (December 2021).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beneath the Poet’s House"

Christa Carmen lives in Rhode Island. She is the author of The Daughters of Block Island, winner of the Bram Stoker Award and a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, the Indie Horror Book Award-winning Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated "Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell" (Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror). She has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Boston College, and an MFA from the University of Southern Maine.

Carmen applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Beneath the Poet’s House, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Beneath the Poet’s House passes this Page 69 Test with flying colors. Protagonist Saoirse White has just walked from her home on Benefit Street to a career fair on Brown University’s campus. After deciding the career fair is a bust, she goes to leave and literally runs into the man whom she suspects has been following her since her arrival in Providence. Emmit Powell convinces her to join him at a nearby café, and from there, their relationship evolves into something imaginative and intense. The meeting between Saoirse and Emmit on page 69 is the single most important event of the novel.

With that being said, I don’t love the idea of someone using page 69 as the example of my writing with which to decide whether to purchase the novel. Not that the writing is bad or there’s something I would change, but the interaction captured on page 69 is a moment that hinges more on the position of two bodies in space and time—and their coming together—as opposed to rich characterization or lush description. It also occurs at what is probably the least interesting, i.e., the least gothic or historically significant, setting in the entirety of the novel. Prior to page 69, we see the action unspooling in an old library and beside a possibly cursed fountain, at the former home of Sarah Helen Whitman—brief fiancé of Edgar Allan Poe—on 88 Benefit Street and in an architecturally quaint-and-curious coffee house. After page 69, the action takes place anywhere from an underground séance parlor to the secluded corner of an off-the-beaten-path restaurant, in a hotel room shadowed by the poor vision that comes with too much drinking and along the labyrinthine passages connecting H.P. Lovecraft’s Shunned House to other East Side locations across Providence. In short, the decidedly unthreatening energy of a midday career fair at Brown’s Chaffee Garden isn’t necessarily what I would put forth as the best excerpt with which to form an opinion on the novel as a whole.

For that, I’d encourage you to read at least until you get to walk through Whitman’s rose garden and beyond, into the cemetery frequented by Poe and his poetess, nestled beside a darkly Gothic cathedral. A cemetery where, on foggy nights, the tops of the headstones cut through the fog like rows of teeth.

Visit Christa Carmen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue