Kate Christensen is a novelist. If you go to her website, you’ll see 11 books attributed to her.
But, upon closer examination, Christensen appears to have only written 10 of them.
The most recent novel is called "The Arizona Triangle," and it’s a detective novel written by someone named Sydney Graves. "The Arizona Triangle" tells the story of the mysterious death of a poet.
Christensen joined The Show to talk about it why Southwestern crime fiction is more humanistic than its British counterpart.
Full conversation
SAM DINGMAN: Now, I recently read “The Arizona Triangle,” which tells the story of the mysterious death of a poet, and I'm actually joined now by the author of the book. I guess the first question of this interview is, what should I call you?
KATE CHRISTENSEN: That's a really hard question to answer because it's an open secret that I'm Kate Christensen. So I guess, call me Kate, and then the author of the book is Sydney Graves, and I'd be happy to talk about this whole distinction also.
DINGMAN: Well, you have, you have anticipated my first question. Tell me about that.
CHRISTENSEN: It's so funny. I've always wanted to write detective fiction, and it never occurred to me that I would do it under a pseudonym. But as I was writing this book, I felt a different literary persona emerge. I had been spending a lot of time with my mother, who lives just north of Tucson, and so I've been spending a lot of time there and thinking, walking in the foothills of Mount Lemmon, thinking about murder. And I was thinking like, this is outlaw country. This is a place to set a murder. This is, the book sort of announced itself to me.
DINGMAN: OK, so if I'm hearing you right, the story came to you before the persona.
CHRISTENSEN: Yes. The setting came to me first. And there's something about Southwestern noir. I'm thinking about Sue Grafton and of course, Raymond Chandler and Donald Westlake and Sara Gran. And they're all writers of the dark desert, and the idea that the detective is, I think, more than other detective traditions connected to identifying with the criminal.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, that's particularly interesting to me in light of your detective character, Jo Bailen, because she spent some time as a cop and she has seen the corruption and graft that can often be part of that work, and she ends up leaving the force because she doesn't want to be part of it. But there is a very real sense that while she doesn't want to be part of it, it, it's not that, it's not like she doesn't understand it or have empathy for the people who are drawn towards it, right? Is that fair to say?
CHRISTENSEN: That's so fair to say. Yeah, that's exactly right. I was thinking about the cerebral, sort of puzzle solvers of British crime novels. And, and the Scandinavian sort of hapless cops who are very much embedded in their kind of socialist countries and their more codified societies. And I wanted to graph that onto a hard boiled Southwestern voice.
DINGMAN: So one of the reasons that this phenomenon of you assuming a different identity to write this book is fascinating to me is that one of the big questions at the center of the book is whether a poet has fabricated significant parts of her identity. What was interesting to you about that storyline and was it at all related to, like, did that idea occur to you after you had decided to become Sydney Graves?
CHRISTENSEN: No, actually, I think deciding to become Sydney Graves kind of came out of what the book is really about, which is, yes, you're so right. It has to do with a poet who fakes Navajo identity, which is something that was in the news a lot at the time. It made me think about the slipperiness of who we are, how we present ourselves to the world, and how we can make ourselves into something else. And that's a very uniquely American thing, too, especially Western, and the idea of what is the American identity, really.
DINGMAN: Yeah, well, there's an interesting cultural tension, I guess, in some of the secondary and tertiary characters in the story where there are Native American folks who play a critical role in the story, and then there are also this group of hippie artists who have set up this compound in the middle of the desert and just kind of claimed this unlikely space as a place for like wanton self-expression. And one of the things I found interesting is it seemed like Sydney Graves, I'll say, if not Kate, had an equal amount of affection and understanding for both of those constituencies.
CHRISTENSEN: I'm really interested in the very different groups of people who sort of coexist, and the idea of Arizona and Bohemia, and this old dude ranch that is now populated by a lot of baby boomer artists who moved there in the ‘70s. And this gets actually into British crime territory. The idea of a closed system. Like a very small British village, and the idea of people recombining as couples, reusing all the material, staying connected in spite of everything, all the old loyalties, all the old rifts, and there's something about that that I think lends itself well to murder.
DINGMAN: There is, but, but it also strikes me again that there's an interesting way that you're departing from tradition there, ‘cause the other thing I associate with, particularly those British mystery stories, is that the reaction of everybody except the lead detective is, we just can't believe that something like this would happen here.
CHRISTENSEN: No, you're completely right. There's, there's, in British crime fiction, a murder is seen as, you know, a big sort of rip in the fabric of a very closely woven society. And in Scandinavian noir, it's that weary kind of acceptance that human darkness is always with us, and murder, murder, the most grisly murders are to be expected. But I think in Southwestern noir, it's more of a style. It's more of, it's like murder is kind of cool. It's neon streaked, it's like back alleys and old files and, you know, the detective kind of flirting with the gray areas of the law and identifying with the killer to find him or her. It's more porous.
DINGMAN: Well, so that idea makes me think about the voice of Jo as a character because she has this very kind of dishy energy, like she's always kind of letting us in on a secret, and it often feels like we're reading her diary. How did that voice come to you? Do you remember any particular moment when you felt like this is her, this is, this is how she writes about herself?
CHRISTENSEN: Yes, I love that you call her dishy. I love that because the idea was to let you in fully to her brain. And one of the great pleasures of a detective novel is the psychological connection to a detective that we get, the pleasure of the kind of person who's a detective, which is the kind of person who's a novelist. And as you know, nosy, nosy and observant, and the process of writing a novel is so much like the process of solving a crime that I felt this pleasurable fusion of Sydney Graves with Jo Bailen, neither of whom is precisely me.
DINGMAN: I love that you said it's the same kind of person who writes a novel, because one of the one of the things that Jo Bailen tells us that is at the heart of her investigative approach is that sometimes she just needs to go places and talk to people and ask questions to satisfy her own curiosity without even necessarily knowing why she's asking that question or if it's connected to the case, she just kind of needs to intuitively feel her way through it until an answer presents itself, which strikes me as, I mean, that's something you hear authors say a lot, and I, I wonder if that's true for you, too, that sometimes it's like this just feels like what I need to write about right now. I'll, I'll figure out if it's part of the story later.
CHRISTENSEN: Yeah, that's exactly right. And so she's the kind of detective that I am a novelist as opposed to Hercule Poirot, I think, who I think of as a brain in a jar with a mustache.
