Thank you for taking a moment out of your holiday weekend to stop by. It is my pleasure to bring to you another fellow 5 Star author, Susan Oleksiw with her Anita Ray Mystery book, Under the Eye of Kali.
Every time someone asks me where I get my ideas, I instantly
have an image of the person opening a notebook, writing it down, and then
checking her calendar, so she can plan to go there, wherever “there” is and
pick up some ideas, along with stopping for yogurt at the supermarket and the
post office for stamps. I am tempted to say, “I subscribe to a magazine called
IDEAS.” Or how about, “I steal them from my grandmother’s stash. She never used
hers up.”
The truth is, no one knows where ideas come from because
they don’t come from somewhere else. They are there, in front of us, in our
brains, or sitting on the page open on the computer or rolled into the
typewriter. And, again, truthfully, I wish there were someplace to go to get
them. The discovery of Anita Ray is a case in point.
For several years I had tried writing about India, and
whatever I wrote came out miserably. The story was awkward, the characters
alien or flat or just strange. I couldn’t get the hang of a good story about
India. I was frustrated. Perhaps I was too close to the idea? After all I’d been
in love with India since I was a young girl; I’d studied the country and its
culture and history all through school (I went to advanced schools). I’d lived
there, written academic articles about it. Perhaps I was having trouble finding
a popular India to write about.
After several false starts I decided to just write a mystery
that hinged on something interesting about India. The result was the short
story “A Murder Made in India.” And in this story emerged Anita Ray, the
unmarried niece of the owner of Hotel Delite, a young woman who would rather
take photographs than eat, who hated the idea of work, and who had managed to
fend off her aunt’s ongoing efforts at an arranged marriage. The story was a
success, it seemed, and appeared in Alfred
Hitchcock Mystery Magazine in 2003. I had loads of fun writing stories
about India in which Anita Ray wielded her camera and investigated murders
among relatives, friends, and strangers. The idea for the first story, when
traditional India collides with modern India, pointed to an unlimited supply of
mysteries.
Once Anita Ray as a character was established in my mind,
along with circumstances that could lead to murder, I had little trouble
expanding her stage, so to speak. I made one of my many return visits to India
working out in my mind a story idea that would be substantial enough for a
novel-length mystery. As I sat at breakfast one morning listening to other Westerners
enjoying their meal and getting to know each other, the idea for the novel
began to take shape. Strangers meet, share a few personal details, and soon are
linked in an intricate web of lies, deceit, and murder.
Under the Eye of Kali
appeared in 2010. The story takes the reader into Anita Ray’s world of a resort
catering to foreigners where old grudges are acted out, the workers behind the
scenes live double lives, and anyone can assume a new identity. The reader
meets the restaurant owners, the tailors and booksellers, the touts and fruit
sellers, and all the others who work mostly out of sight but are ever present.
The murder occurs among foreign guests, and the reader gets to know them too,
and enjoy their experiences in this strange land.
As I began writing the story of two women who travel through
India, one of whom ends up dead and the other nearly so, I heard the voices of
people I’d met long ago, during my first visits to India in the 1970s and
1980s. Out of the blue I heard the young man, probably still in his twenties,
asking about how a certain sports team was doing back in the States. In those
days, news about local matters traveled slowly if at all. Prompted by the curious
way he posed the question I asked how long since he’d been home to the States. Something
distracted me, and when I turned back he was gone. In less than a minute he
evaporated. My husband commented, he was probably AWOL from Vietnam and my
question had spooked him. I’ve never forgotten him, and more of that encounter
will probably appear in another story, triggered by a character who makes an
offhand remark and opens a door to murder.
This is where ideas come from—everywhere and nowhere, and
somewhere we can’t find but we stumble into when we need it.
Under the Eye of Kali
is the first in the Anita Ray series, and explores Anita’s home territory of
the resort area where Hotel Delite is located. The Wrath of Shiva is the second in the series, and takes Anita
into an old family estate. I’ll talk about the ideas behind that book next
month.
To learn more about Susan and her books, go to www.susanoleksiw.com
Her books are available through Five Star/Gale, Cengage
Learning and on Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords.
Well Friends, hope you enjoyed this spotlight. Thanks again for taking the time to stop by and once again....
Have a BLESSED & Happy Easter holiday!
PamT
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