LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with filmmaker and author Rosanne Limoncelli, the Senior Director for Film Technologies at the Kanbar Institute and at the Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center, both part of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She has written, directed, and produced documentaries, educational films and short narrative films, and has taught writing and filmmaking for more than three decades. Limoncelli’s first book, Teaching Filmmaking: Empowering Students Through Visual Storytelling, was published in 2009. She has published short stories in the Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Suspense Magazine and Noir Nation. Her debut mystery novel, The Four Queens of Crime—offered in our January Early Reviewers batch—is due out next month from Crooked Lane Books. Limoncelli sat down with Abigail to answer some questions about her new book.
The Four Queens of Crime follows a woman detective chief inspector in 1930s London who enlists the aid of four famous mystery writers—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham—in solving her case. How did the idea for the story first come to you?
I love reading biographies of my favorite authors because I always wonder what experiences from their lives might’ve made it into their books. I love the psychology. Reading about Agatha Christie led me to the other three and it fascinated me that these four women were the bestselling authors of the 30’s. How amazing was that! The lives of Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham were just as fascinating, and of course I started wondering if they had ever met and that led me to, what if they did meet and got involved in a murder case? Would there have been a woman DCI they could’ve collaborated with? And then I found Lilian Wyles, the first woman DCI at Scotland Yard. And miraculously, she had a memoir!
Were you an admirer of these four authors’ work, before beginning your book? Which one is your favorite, and why?
That’s too hard a question! I think that sometimes I’m in the mood for one author over another, and they constantly switch places for number one. I love Christie’s puzzles, Ngaio’s characters, Allingham’s language, and the patter between Sayers’ protagonists. In the book they talk to each other about writing and how different they are from each other. That was one of the fun things about writing them as characters. I will say that for each author I have my favorite titles in all formats, hard cover, kindle and
Audiobook, and I go back to them often, not just for research reasons, I need to keep in touch with the main characters like they are real people in my life.
What sort of research did you have to do on your four queens, in order to incorporate them as characters in your story, and what were some of the most interesting things you learned?
I’m a research nerd, and I went way overboard researching all four authors, consuming all their books, plus articles, biographies, documentaries, movies and tv shows of their work, and the time period, 1938. I’m lucky that my husband has always been into the history of World War Two so we watched a lot of feature films and documentaries from and about that era. The four queens all came alive for me quickly, mainly through their biographies. I found it interesting to notice the differences between the four writers, as well as their similarities. For example, they were all big lovers of Shakespeare, they each had very different writing styles, they all grew up so differently. Agatha was home schooled, Dorothy was one of the first women to get a degree from Oxford, Ngaio was a painter and travel writer before she wrote mysteries, and Margery grew up surrounded by writers. I got very interested in the accuracy of their real lives pertaining to my story, figuring out the possible real time they could’ve spent together. The spring of 1938 would’ve been the last chance for them to meet before the war, since Ngaio Marsh returned to New Zealand shortly after that spring. I also noticed that they all had a change in their writing careers right about that time, so I imagined that the experiences on that weekend of my imagined murder changed them personally to bring about that literary change.
What influence has your career as a filmmaker had on your mystery writing? Would you say you were a visual storyteller? Do you see the scenes and characters before writing them?
I do think I see scenes and characters before I write them, which actually can make it more challenging for me because I forget I have to translate my visual imagination into text so I often leave things out without noticing. An early reader will mention they’d like more description of a certain place or person, and since I see it so clearly in my mind, I have to remind myself that no one else can see it, that I actually have to put it into words! But what is the same for me, in writing films and writing fiction, is the story structure. The logic and sequence of what happens and what should happen next is my favorite part and I make charts and spreadsheets and notes and lists obsessively before writing a project and throughout the whole process. It’s the puzzle of the story that I love the most. Building it up, breaking it down, deciding on the clues and all the information that leads to the climax and makes for a convincing ending, sorting and resorting every detail until it makes sense to me and I’m satisfied with it.
You have written short stories, films, and an academic text, but this is your first novel. Was the writing process any different, when working on this kind of text?
Technically this is the fifth novel I’ve written, just the first one to be published. (Keep writing out there, writers!) Each project is a bit different for me, but one thing that was quite similar in this project and the academic text (which stemmed from the dissertation for my PhD) was the research. In both cases I didn’t know exactly what I was going to write, at first, but I kept reading what interested me and taking lots of notes and underlining sentences, and marking sections with Post-It notes and noting links of websites and movie clips, then when it had gathered a certain satisfying accumulation, I stopped. I looked at everything I had gathered, all the notes, and sections, and visual images, etc. and it all seemed to magically come together thematically and emotionally. Like I was making a collage that found its shape from my subconscious. I think that the story starts to form itself in the back of my mind, while I’m gathering the research, and the story writing is easier after that once I get down to it.
What’s next? Will there be more stories featuring DCI Lilian Wyles? Might there be a film adaptation?
I am working on a sequel that takes place two years later. The war is raging and there are different problems to solve. This story is still a murder mystery puzzle, and Lilian Wyles leads the case, with help from the four queens, but it has a bit of a spy thriller spice added to it. I’m constantly inspired by the parallels from that time and our current day issues, there are so many similarities. As far as a film adaptation, I’d love to adapt The Four Queens of Crime into a feature or a tv series, we’ll see what happens!
Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?
Besides the Four Queens of course, because they fill a lot of my shelves! (And by my “shelves” I mean paper books, E-readers and audio books.) A sampling of other books on my shelves include: P.D. James, John Irving, John Le Carré, Edith Wharton, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene, and I’m a science fiction fan also, Octavia E. Butler, William Gibson, N.K. Jemisin, and Ray Bradbury.
What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?
I just finished reading every Mick Herron book in the Slow Horses series. The TV show is great and the audio books are also very well done. I just read Still Life by Louise Penny who is amazing! I can’t wait to read all of her work. I just started All Systems Red by Martha Wells. I will definitely be reading the whole Murderbot series. When I am trying to make a lot of progress with my writing projects, I have to ban myself from reading because I won’t get enough writing done or get enough sleep!
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