Books & Bites, Ep. 106: Discussing The Dark Library with Mary Anna Evans. === Carrie: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Books and Bites podcast. Each month we bring you book recommendations and discuss the bites and beverages to pair with them. I'm Carrie Green, and I'm here with my co-host, Michael Cunningham. Michael: Hello. Carrie: This episode is a little different because we are also joined by our special guest, Mary Anna Evans, author of The Dark Library, this fall's book club pick. Mary Anna Evans is an award-winning author with a PhD in English literature, a handy background for writing The Dark Library, the story of a woman menaced by her dead father, a literature professor whose rare book collection holds the secret to escaping him. Her crime fiction has earned recognition, including two Oklahoma Book awards, the Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, the Mississippi Author Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, and three Florida Book Awards [00:01:00] bronze medals. In addition to writing crime fiction, she writes about crime fiction as evidenced by the Edgar, Agatha, Macavity and HRF Keating Award-nominated 'Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie," co-edited with JC Bernthal. Bloomsbury will publish her "Agatha Christie and the 20th Century Woman: Rewriting Female Justice" in 2027. Welcome, Mary Anna. Thanks so much for joining us. Mary Anna: Thanks for inviting me. Michael: Just a couple of reminders before we get started talking about the book. We'll be discussing The Dark Library in person on Tuesday, October 21st at 6:30 PM. The first 10 people to register will receive a free copy of the book. We also have three copies that you can check out, and the ebook is available on Libby and Hoopla. For the purposes of this episode, we're going to assume that you've already read the book. If you haven't, you may want to save it for later, as there may be spoilers ahead. [00:02:00] Carrie: Sometimes it's hard to talk about books without giving a few hints. Mary Anna: It is! [Laughter] Carrie: So we couldn't help noticing that you dedicated this book to librarians. Michael: Thank you. Mary Anna: Love you. [Laughter] Carrie: So why was that important to you? Mary Anna: Oh, well, you know, I don't know that there's a devoted reader or writer on the planet that doesn't have library memories from a very early age. You know, for me it was, my mother would take my sister and me to the bookmobile every Wednesday when the bookmobile was handy, and it was Mississippi, and it was baking hot parking lot. And then we would get on that bookmobile and it was air conditioned and it smelled like that ink. And with the checkout machinery that went ka-tunk and it was just [unclear], I can tell you where the shelves were for young adult science fiction or whatever I was reading at the time. [00:03:00] So I've always loved libraries and librarians and I feel like it's critical to our society that we have this kind of thing where everybody can read. Carrie: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. We certainly appreciate it. And one of my favorite characters in the book was Leontine, the librarian in the novel. Mary Anna: Yeah, I love her too. And I, no spoilers, but one of my earlier books, the bad guy was a librarian, so, Michael: Ooh. Mary Anna: My librarian friends really liked that. They said, we don't ever get to be the bad guy. [Laughter] Carrie: That is very true. And that's one thing that I appreciated about the character in the novel who is a librarian, not that she was a bad character, but you know, she wasn't like a cardigan-wearing librarian. She was [Laughter] Mary Anna: She's very chic. Michael: It's not something librarians are typically known for. Carrie: No. Michael: All right. And the interview that's included in the back of the book, [00:04:00] you discussed some of your research, including spending time exploring the Hudson Valley where you now live. Can you talk more about the library research you did, whether that was through books, articles, archival photos, et cetera. Mary Anna: The research I did in libraries or about libraries? Or, I didn't quite catch the question, just, Michael: Just the library research you did as you were exploring the Hudson Valley. Mary Anna: Okay. Well, you know, I did physical research too 'cause I live here, you know, and rode the train and looked at the beautiful mountains and stuff. As far as the library research, the book is fictional, the town is fictional. I'm very clear in the book that this is not my new hometown of Nyack because terrible things happen there. Terrible people live there, and I have no plan to insult my new town. However, some of the terrible things that happened did happen in the Hudson Valley. There were Klan rallies. There were, you know, in New York City, there was a Nazi rally there, there was a lot going on that you don't think [00:05:00] of in the North, and you don't think of in these beautiful bucolic little towns, where on the flip side, the schools in Nyack have been integrated, I think forever. So, there's both, and I addressed that in the book too. Leontine went to public schools, so I had to look and see what this part of the world was really like in the early to mid 20th century, and try to portray it in a way that makes the story feel like it could have really happened. When you write fiction, that is sort of the problem, is you're writing this really implausible thing, particularly in murder mysteries. And so it really helps to do that library research so that the setting feels real. And so even though implausible things happen there, people are more inclined to believe it. Carrie: I think the setting does feel very real. Mary Anna: Oh good. Michael: Yeah, Mary Anna: it was the hope because, you know, I also was setting out, and this is different kind of library research, but I love gothic mysteries and gothic [00:06:00] novels and those, some of the things I checked out on that bookmobile all those years ago, I studied gothic fiction in graduate school. And so the setting in gothic fiction functions as another character. And so I wanted that on a lot of levels. The little town, the little college, the Hudson Valley as a whole, and then the houses function as characters that shape the people and how they react to things. Carrie: Yeah, actually one of our questions was gonna be about the gothic elements, but I think you answered it. Michael: You kind of answered that. [All laugh] Carrie: Yeah. Mary Anna: You know, I definitely had Jane Eyre in mind when I wrote this book, and Rebecca. There were definite callbacks with an intent to make it a story for our time. But Jane Eyre is considered the first feminist novel, so I didn't have to update the sensibilities at all. Carrie: Absolutely. So kind of piggybacking on what you were talking about with [00:07:00] your research earlier and to, you know, there being Nazi rallies and things like that in that area of New York, we were curious how common fascism was, like, especially in academia at the time. If you could talk about some of your research there. Mary Anna: I got less into that, but I do know that eugenics was heavily researched in certain areas of academia and you know, in medicine, in psychology and those two are inextricably linked, and that in Germany, the Nazis studied Jim Crow laws to figure out how to do what they, the terrible things that they did. So there's a linkage and I think we're only now sort of grasping the early 20th century. How much of that was underneath it all, you know that there were people here, you [00:08:00] know, famously, Lindbergh had sympathies with the Nazis. So very prominent, well-known people, that that was their belief. They felt it was right. And it shaped our public policy. And it certainly happened in England too. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Michael: Was there anything in your research that surprised or stood out to you? Mary Anna: Well, the Nazis and the Klan, you know, for sure. Other things. I just think it's, you know, when you look. When you leave New York and go north on the Hudson River, even now it seems very sudden that you're out of the metropolitan area and you have hiking trails and mountains and state parks and you know, all of the trappings of, not urban life, and then you have to just dial that back almost a hundred years and realize how isolated a little town would be back before the Tappen Zee Bridge was built, which is near where I live, you know when they depended mostly on [00:09:00] ferries to get across the river, that alone changes everything, when you think about it. You know, building a bridge is, it's like physically moving New York City closer to you. And so this insulated small town feel was maybe not what I expected, before I had spent much time in New York. Carrie: Mm-hmm. And what, just out of curiosity, what brought you to that area? Mary Anna: It was a sort of confluence of events. I was preparing to retire from the university. My husband is still working hard, and I'm not fully retired. I'm writing my books and everything, but we were trying to be--we're rational people. Let's do a controlled slide into retirement. And so he had been working remotely for a Manhattan law firm in Oklahoma. We were in Oklahoma for several years. And so this town, he can get on the train and be there in an hour. More importantly personally to us is loved ones. My daughter is an hour [00:10:00] away by car here. His mother has passed, but when she was alive, she was an hour away. I have a sister, two, three hours away. He has a daughter three hours away. So it just sort of was, and also he grew up just right across the river from here. So we actually, as I said, we tried to be rational. We took my sabbatical and just went from Airbnb to Airbnb in this part of the world, near our loved ones and near his work and fell in love with Nyack. It's a beautiful little town. And we renovated a Victorian house, and you can tell I like old houses if you've read my work. [Laughter] So, sort of living the dream. Carrie: Well, you bringing up the houses, the house that E. and her family live in is such an amazing house. And then, you know, you destroy it in the end. [All laugh] So what, can you talk about maybe that decision and why? Mary Anna: Well, I kind of knew going in [00:11:00] because you know, not only Jane Eyre and Rebecca, you know, we go all the way back and before there's the fall of the House of Usher. There's even in the 1700s, there were gothic novels where it's like the house becomes the embodiment of the evil and the people and it, and it goes. So I knew that I had to kill it, but I didn't wanna do it the same way that everybody else did. So I attacked it from several angles and, [Laughter] and the coal gasification plant part of it goes all the way back to when I was a practicing environmental engineer and had to do some work on the side of a coal gasification plant. And I knew from touring old houses that some of the really wealthy people built their own coal gasification plant so that they could have gaslight in their house. And I'm going, well, I'm gonna kill that thing. [All laugh] Carrie: So it sounds like you had a little fun with that too. Mary Anna: Oh yeah, I did. If I'm [00:12:00] not having fun, y'all aren't having fun, so, yeah. Carrie: Exactly. Michael: Well, I'm gonna follow up with some of the gothic, so I'm a personal lover of like history, suspense in the gothic. Do you have any modern gothic authors that you recommend or enjoy reading? Mary Anna: Carol Goodman, who also lives and writes about the Hudson Valley. But I knew her work before. I don't know if you're aware of her, but I was a judge for an award she won, several years ago that made me aware, and she actually blurbed this book because I wrote her and I said, you know, I think this is kind of close to what you like, and she did write a lovely blurb for it. So she's the first one that comes to mind. You know, a lot of my favorite writers have gothic elements, but you wouldn't call them gothic. Like, I really like Val McDermott. Michael: Yeah. Mary Anna: What's his name? Drawing a blank. Louisiana writer. James Lee Burke. As soon as I gave up his name came. He writes deep Southern gothic, which I love. And you know, this book is not set in the [00:13:00] South, but a lot of mine are. And I would characterize a lot of mine as having that Southern gothic edge. So I think James Lee Burke. And on top of that, all of these people have beautiful prose. And somehow I think, gothic literature is suited to really beautiful prose. People kind of wanna hear the poetry. And Stephen King has called William Faulkner gothic. Michael: Oh yeah. Mary Anna: Yeah. It's totally there. And so that's my natural storytelling style. It's a little bit over the top. Grew up in South Mississippi, so, you know, same roots as Faulkner, and I think that there's a bit of fable in fact that wa, actually Faulkner's last book wasn't it, A Fable. But there's a bit of a fable quality to gothic fiction that kind of flies into the face of modern literary fiction, which is very realist, which I also like. But you know, you, you have to know your goal when you sit down to write. And I think the goal of writing a Gothic is to just go a little bit over the top. Carrie: So [00:14:00] you talked about the house as a character, and we talked a little bit about Leontine. Other than those two, did you have a favorite character in the book as you were writing? Mary Anna: Oh, oh, you know, we haven't even talked about E. yet. I purposely made her a little bit edgy, but I do like her, and so I don't know that I would say she was my favorite, but I loved writing her mother. Her mother, that scene where she finds her mother was really a fun scene to write. And the scene of the two of them before the party, it's like there's the mystery, more than one mystery in this. But one of the mysteries is who, who is this, who is my mother? Who is she really? I don't know her. My father kept me from knowing her. So there's, there's an aspect that's not mystery and not gothic or anything other than people recovering from emotional abuse. And so E. became rebellious and an individualist, and mother just shut down [00:15:00] or went subterranean. She did have a life, but she went subterranean and that was probably the only response available to her. She had no access to money. No way to earn money. She was, she dealt with her problems the way she did, and so. This book, these two women, their worlds open because he's gone. And so I enjoyed E. And I enjoyed her mother and E's relationships with all the women in the book were very rewarding to write. Carrie: Yeah, and it is very refreshing too that they had a happy ending, at least most of them, I guess, not all of them. [Laughter] Mary Anna: I feel bad about Marjorie, [Laughter] but she's not done. Marjorie is living E.'s mother's life, but she's only 20-something. Carrie: Right. Mary Anna: It's not, it's not over. And she has, she has E., which mother didn't have. Carrie: Yeah. So hopefully she'll, we'll just think of her as pulling herself [00:16:00] out eventually. [Laughter] Mary Anna: Yes. Coming into herself. Carrie: You mentioned that there were a lot of different threads in the novel, different mysteries, and one of the things that I also appreciated was that they weren't all tied up, you know, all nice and neat at the end. You know, they're, some of them are implied rather than, you know, a lot of mysteries where I think everything is solved. Mary Anna: Yeah. Carrie: Yeah. Do you wanna talk about that? Mary Anna: Yeah. I'm a planner, so, you know, I knew who killed the girl. I knew what the clues were, but until it had all played out, it probably was at the end when I realized you can't tie this one up. Because there is no way to have, there's no provable, there's no eyewitness, there's no, the evidence is all circumstantial. So in a mystery, the only way to get around that is a confession. And the perpetrator's dead. So, [00:17:00] but by the time I got to that point, I was okay with it because it gave me this time for E. to sit down and absorb what had happened and form her own theory that fit all the facts and basically convince the reader that this is what happened. And there's no argument against any of her, you know, assumptions. And, you know, the reader won't have me sitting there to say it, but I think E. was right. You know, what she came up with was the scenario in my mind. And I think this book is more of a suspense novel than a mystery novel. And maybe I have a little more leeway with that in a, not a category mystery. But I did feel like the pieces came together well for E. That she was satisfied that things had turned out as best they could. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We always like to talk about recipes on Books and Bites and what we would pair with whatever it is that we're reading. And you have this wonderful [00:18:00] dinner party scene in the novel. Do you wanna maybe set that up because I think your recipes relate to that. Mary Anna: I'll do that. And I'll also set up, because the two recipes I have are basically foraged. They're very elegant, but they're based on food that, you know, Annie could scrounge. So we haven't mentioned Annie, but she is E. and her mother's housekeeper, and it's the early war, it's 1942. Rationing has just come in. So even if you, even if it's not rationed, it's not for sure that you can get what you want at the stores anymore. And so this beginning of privation hangs over the novel from the very first, but Annie's very self-sufficient and she can find onions in the woods and she picks raspberries and all these things. And so, the beverage that I have a recipe for is Wild Raspberry Cordial. In the early, you know, in the springtime, early summer when raspberries arrive, Annie will go out, gather their raspberries and use [00:19:00] them, to preserve them for the full year. So that is early in the book. And then the other recipe I have is from the dinner party, which was incredibly ill-advised. Mother is erratic and impulsive and she invites half the town, and E. has no money, no food, no nothing to make this elegant event happen. Mother wants things to be like they were before. You know, they live like rich people and now they are not rich. And so, E. and Annie just move mountains to make this thing happen. They barter, they find cheap things that look elegant. They get things out of the woods, and so they have asparagus in their garden. And they make creamed asparagus soup. And it's a very elegant first course too, to the meal. So I have recipes for those that I'll send y'all that you can distribute to people. Carrie: Okay, great. Yeah, we're looking forward to sharing those. Michael: That sounds delicious. Mary Anna: Yeah. Carrie: I loved how [00:20:00] resourceful they were in the face of this ill-advised party as you put it. [All laugh] Mary Anna: I was in mother's role with some of this because it's like, we have to have a big party because I've got Rebecca in mind, and I'm going, how are we gonna do that? And I'm going, well, that'll be a good part of the plot. Because I knew I wanted a big party. I knew I wanted a big stairway scene, but clearly it couldn't be like the one in Rebecca, it had to be pertinent to this book. And I think it came out, it came out well. I think the party scene is probably my favorite part of the book. Carrie: Mm-hmm. Mary Anna: And the preparation for it was, was, [unclear] Carrie: Yeah. I also loved the clothes for the party scene and then how they all got dolled up with their older clothes. Mary Anna: Yeah. Had to recycle, you know, what they had because again, there was the war and that gave Leontine a chance to shine. Because her mother had made them, her mother had been the seamstress for E.'s mother.[00:21:00] And so, yeah, Leontine. So any number of times in a book you have a character that grows as you write. And she was one of the ones that really, really came into her own. Especially in that passage. And really in the climax. She's the one that saved the day. And so, yeah. Carrie: Yeah. We can get behind a librarian. Michael: Oh yeah. Carrie: saving the day. Mary Anna: Using books to do it. [Laughter] Carrie: Do you have any other questions, Michael? Michael: Is there anything you're currently reading that you'd like to share? Mary Anna: Oh, Michael: with listeners, Mary Anna: well, I'm getting ready to do a book group through the Center for Fiction. It'll be on Zoom and it'll be in October, and I'm calling it Bite Sized Reads for Spooky Season. And so I'm rereading these things to teach them, but they are, a lot of people haven't read the classic horror novels that we reference every year. So we're gonna read Portrait of Dorian Gray, Jekyll and Hyde, Fall of the [00:22:00] House of Usher, Legend of Sleepy Hollow, all of which except for Dorian Gray, have a New York connection. So, having a lot of fun with that. I can take the train to Poe's house. Michael: Wow. Mary Anna: I can take the train to, not the train. I can take the car and be at Washington Irving's house in 15 minutes. So it's a fun part of the world to be a writer. And Toni Morrison is buried here. Carson McCullers lived here. It's really a great, and all of the characters in The Dark Library, apparently. Carrie: That sounds like a class that would be right up your alley, Michael. Michael: Oh, yeah. Carrie: Well, thank you so much, Mary Anna, for joining us. We really appreciate it. And thank you for writing The Dark Library. Mary Anna: Thank you for reading it and for inviting me. It's been a lot of fun. Carrie: Thanks for listening to the Books and Bites podcast. Our [00:23:00] theme music is The Breakers from the album In Close Quarters with the Enemy by Scott Whiddon. You can learn more about Scott and his music at his website, adoorforadesk.com.