Happy Valentine's Day! If you'd like a dash of murder mystery with your romance today, we have just the guest for you. R.O. Thorp tells us all about her new series with scientists and sleuths, the Blanchard Twins, in this new interview.
Thank you so much for joining us! First of all, tell us a little bit about yourself.
I’m a queer Australian (she/her) with blue hair living in Ireland, with my deeply charming Welsh spouse and two goblins masquerading as cats. My first book, Learwife, was all about King Lear’s wife and was set in a medieval abbey of women, complete with sapphic undercurrents and High Drama. Death On Ice is my first foray into crime fiction.
Congratulations on the release of Death on Ice! We would love to know all about this new cosy mystery and what inspired you to write it.
The germ of Death On Ice actually comes from a real thing: luxury cruises around the Arctic and Antarctic that double as scientific research vessels. I read an ad for this in a magazine, thought it was a hilarious setting that would undoubtedly produce a murder, and off I went. I’ve always loved the propensity of murder mysteries to lampoon the foibles of characters, and wealthy people on a cruise paired with egocentric scientists sounded like a mix made in heaven.
The book surrounds marine biologists in the Arctic. What drew you to this chilly setting, and how much research did it require?
It was very important to me that all the Arctic science in Death On Ice is either based on fact or completely believable as a potential research subject. So everything you read - facts about Greenland sharks, some of the longest-lived creatures in the world; ideas about Arctic hare camouflage; the behaviour and colouring of manta rays - not only sounds cool as hell, it also has a solid scientific basis. The research bibliography for this book would be pretty bloody long! I also moonlighted as a scientific journalist for years and have interviewed bucketloads of scientists, particularly during the COVID pandemic, so luckily I know my way around a research paper. I also know a few marine biologists, including one whose PhD involved running around on boats tagging whales…
Fascinating! Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? Which do you hope readers will connect with most, and are there any you feel closest to?
There’s a core foursome: twins Finn and Rose Blanchard, marine biologists attempting to do some research on the Greenland shark while dealing with scientific egos and wealthy entitlement; and Tom Heissen and Titus Williams, a pair of British police officers seconded to Svalbard. Through happenstance, they’re the ones who investigate the murders as a group, very chaotically. Readers absolutely love Finn, who is a very gentle ray of sunshine who never believes the worst about anybody. I’m personally partial to Titus, a detective with a very precise mind and a terrifying aura he exerts without apparently thinking about it. Disconcerting characters are extremely fun to write.
Similarly, what made you decide to centre twins as the main characters, and how does this family dynamic aid the story and detective work?
To understand the twins we have to go back a little to why the book was written in the first place. I had finished the promotional cycle for Learwife, struggled to write a sophomore novel, and was burnt out. My best friend, Bex, was on maternity leave with newborn twins, and was going round the twist with nothing to feed her considerable brain. We both adore murder mysteries, so at her suggestion, I wrote this book entirely for her: I sent her a chapter a day to read and discuss while the twins snoozed or yelled or did what newborn humans do (which is mostly stare at you unnervingly). It was actually never meant for publication; it was just an act of love for my friend. The main characters were twins because of the baby twins, who were gorgeous and fascinating, and somehow completely separate personalities even at a few months old.
Twins in fiction can do many jobs: create an already-extant little team, provide an intensely close relationship that informs how they approach the world, become mirrors of one another. It was also important to me that Rose and Finn didn’t stay still; their dynamic shifts throughout the novel, they come together and move apart again, and that affects the way in which they interact with characters and the mystery itself.
The book also features queer representation (yay!). Why was it important to you to include this diversity within the murder mystery genre?
I’m queer, the vast majority of my friends are queer, and so it was a simple choice, and not really a deliberate one: the world of the novel is the world in which I live, in which there’s queerness of all varieties in everyday life, normal and humdrum and not, for the most part, very remarkable. The queerness is the least interesting part of most relationships in the book. Cosy mysteries can take us somewhere else, to exotic cruises and weird locales, but they can also reflect the things we know and understand. My community deserves to see people who resemble them playing all the roles: acting the fool, being the sleuth, making both poor and excellent decisions.
We were stunned to discover that you completed this novel in just 27 days to entertain your best friend! Tell us more about this creative collaboration and how it came to be.
There are several people to blame for this. One is Bex, the best friend, and her twins, now toddlers of rampant destructive power and infinite sweetness. It was her idea, after I read the aforementioned article about luxury cruises and idly commented that it would be a fun setting for a murder mystery. I still have all the voice notes she and her husband sent me in the evenings, dissecting the chapter I’d sent during the day, and sometimes yelling at me for unexpected twists that endangered their favourite characters. The other person is Claire, my agent, who saw me struggling deeply with a sophomore experimental novel and told me to put it away for two months and do something else. Without that permission to have a creative space, to refind the joy and fluidity of writing for fun, this wouldn’t have happened. Claire is the wisest person I know about writing work.
Did you find any challenges while writing this book so quickly, and how did you overcome them?
Because the book wasn’t written for anybody except an audience of two, I felt free to make a lot of mistakes: people changed names, were occasionally in the wrong places, and a cat kept appearing and disappearing. The stakes were extremely low. When Bex, who once worked as a bookseller and has an extremely refined literary sense, told me I should refine the book and send it to my agent, I resisted for about four weeks, then went back and corrected everything I could. (I still presented it to Claire as a frivolous Christmas present; after all, I was known for serious literary fiction about Shakespeare.)
However, Faber’s commissioned a Blanchard Twins series and as an experiment, I wrote the second book in the same way: it was all done in a little over 30 days, sent to Bex every day. I planned a lot more this time, had a series of spreadsheets and a far more thorough understanding of overall plot, but it turned the wheels very freely and allowed for a lot of work in a short amount of time.
What did the shift from literary fiction to murder mystery look like for you? Did you discover a preference for one or the other, or perhaps differences and similarities between the two?
There’s a lovely interview with John Banville, who also writes a series of mystery novels under the name Benjamin Black, with this question, and his answer is the same way I feel, though from a position of much greater skill and experience. He says Benjamin Black is a craftsman while Banville is an artist, and that the feeling of completing a Black novel is one of intense satisfaction after doing “a fine piece of work”, like an elegant armchair. Murder mystery is about construction and playing with expectation, but it also allows for so much fun.
I feel as if the two play off one another; I can do writing tricks I love in the murder mysteries I can’t in the literary fiction, and vice versa. Pinpointing a person’s personality in three lines of introduction, for instance, is an expected murder mystery element, and I adore it. The two things also reinforce my skills, particularly with plotting, in which I rarely feel confident. Doing a plot-forward novel leaves no room for error, whereas in literary fiction you can get away with very little Actually Happening.
Is there a secret ingredient when creating the “perfect” mystery novel? How do you manage to keep the balance between cosiness and murder along with your background in literary fiction?
There are many kinds of mystery novels, so I only every try to emulate the ones I loved growing up - and their strengths, for me, weren’t so much in the twists and cleverness (though that was always delightful) but in deep knowledge of human nature. Mystery writers can be some of the most perceptive in fiction; when you’re giving the audience a character in a single glance, you have to be as accurate as an arrow. That and humour are what really propel good mysteries for me; I prefer a lightness, even if the situations of the novels are quite dark. Hence Death On Ice includes misbehaving manta rays, somebody being hit on the head with a flipper, and a very dumb pun about scotoplanes (a variety of sea cucumber known as a sea-pig).
Death on Ice is the first book in the Blanchard Twins series — can you give us any hints about what might be next for Rose and Finn?
I can tell you that the next book is Finn’s chance to shine, as an investigator and an academic coming into his own power. And it won’t be on a boat - but it will involve water, because marine biologists have a tendency to require the stuff.
We can't wait! Have any shows, movies, books, or games influenced your own work at all?
The list is exhaustive! Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Ellis Peters, GK Chesterton, Dorothy L Sayers - the greats of detective fiction all have their moments. The Miss Marple series is a particular favourite. I’m also a big fan of the Death in Paradise series produced by the BBC, which has sustained a kind of magic death-of-the-week mystery for thirteen seasons without ever losing its sense of humour or freshness.
Our podcast focuses on media we’re currently loving. Are there any books, shows, movies, or games you’re enjoying at the moment? Any recommendations for our audience? Bonus points if it includes sapphics!
It’s a new year, so my TBR pile is groaning! I bought Queer: A Graphic History over Christmas, from a queer bookstore, The Bookish Type in Leeds, that had a break-in over the holidays and needed some love. (Supporting LGBTQIA+ spaces is very important to me.) Sabrina Imbler’s My Life In Sea Creatures is a favourite at the moment too - and it combines marine biology with their exploration of identity as a queer non-binary mixed-race scientific thinker. Movies-wise, I just watched the beautiful The Taste Of Things, which isn’t overtly sapphic but is basically about Why Everybody Should Be In Love With Juliette Binoche, a thesis I totally agree with. And I’m loving playing Wytchwood on Switch, in which you’re a furious little witch in a helmet, making potions and saving maidens. It’s cottage-core with a delightful sour twist.
About the Author
R.O. Thorp is an Australian living in Cork, Ireland, where she writes lyrics and herds cats. She was one of the Observer‘s top 10 debut novelists of 2021, and her writing has won the London Short Story Award and been shortlisted for the BBC Opening Lines Prize. Death on Ice is her first foray into murder mysteries.
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