by Sarah Smith
It turns out that this migration from academics to writing is a fairly frequent pattern for novelists, especially historical novelists. You out there, reading this, does it sound like you?
It’s also a pattern for biographers, and for detectives.
Q: How much research went into this novel? What kind of sources did you use?
SS: I read a lot about the period —I read a lot of books published in 1910-1913 about how the First World War absolutely could not happen, and if it did, it would be finished by Christmas. I read about stage magic, films, tunneling, psychology . . . but the ultimate discovery was going to northern France and walking around.
All those cemeteries . . .
In the municipal cemetery at Arras, there’s a whole section for people who died in the bombing of the town. One of the tombs says “Sacred to the memory of seven residents of the Old Women’s Home, one of whom was Madame such-and-so.” That says that the people who went through the ruins of the Old Women’s home found seven of something or fourteen of something else, but only one of the bodies could be identified. Brrr.
Q: In a novel of this scope and complexity, how difficult was it to weave all of the stories together?
SS: As long as I have my friend the delete key… I’m terrible at plotting so I use an outline and index cards to organize everything. Then I start writing, the characters take over, the book goes in a direction I never thought of, and there’s a lot of reorganization before I’m through. But an outline helps to remind me of what I thought the book was about.
(In case any of you write and have difficulty plotting, there’s a short article, “How to Plot When You Can’t,” on my Web site, www.sarahsmith.com.)
Q: Have you written books beside the Reisden-Perdita series?
SS: I have a non-series novel about a grad student who wants to write a biography of Shakespeare. He unexpectedly finds something, and gets involved in a four-hundred-year-old piece of detection that leads to vast conspiracies, unpunished murders, buried secrets, and romance. I loved writing Chasing Shakespeares, and I hope you love reading it.
My most recent publication is a YA novel about ghosts, interracial romance, missing treasure, and a secret kept since slavery times. The Other Side of Dark won the Agatha for best YA novel (thank you, everyone who voted for it!) and the Massachusetts Book Award for best YA novel.
Q: What other books about the period would you recommend for further reading group discussion?
SS: If you’re interested in this prewar period, there are many wonderful books—the classic is Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower. I’m also a huge fan of Sebastien Japrisot’s A Very Long Engagement. If you’re a writer, or interested in stage magic or mysteries, try Henning Nelms’s Magic and Showmanship. At a writers’ convention this year, about twenty of us were talking about the books that had influenced us and every single person mentioned it. I think it’s the greatest book about misdirection ever written. Dover reprints it periodically.
More about Alexander and Perdita
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT Alexander Reisden, Perdita Halley, their friends, and the mysteries they appear in at www.sarahsmith.com.
Reading Group Questions
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND Topics for Discussion
At the beginning of this novel, Alexander announces his distrust of Perdita, his blind and “risky” wife. Do you think he truly learns to trust and accept her? Why or why not?
Perdita has sacrificed a great deal in the name of her family. Does Alexander truly appreciate the extent of her sacrifices? Can Perdita reconcile herself to these sacrifices and move forward?
Will Perdita ever think of Paris as home?
Alexander and André are both struggling to find their home in the world. How do you define home?
This novel opens with a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke: “We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn’t matter where. It is only gradually that we compose within ourselves our true place of origin.” Do you agree? Or do you think we are prisoners of our past?
Alexander and Gilbert are both haunted by William Knight. Do you think they finally manage to exorcise his ghost?
Alexander tells Perdita, “I am sorry. I am more than you bargained for.” Have you ever felt this way? How did you deal with it?
After overhearing Perdita tell their son his secrets, Alexander vows to teach his son “that one can be wrong without being vile and right without being God.” What has Alexander finally learned?
The families in this novel have been fractured and reconstituted in many different ways—death, adoption, rediscovery. How do you define family?
Do you think Toby will have the happy family that his parents and uncle want so desperately for him?
André is very cruel to a wife who truly loves him. What do you think of André’s treatment of Sabine? Does she deserve it?
What do you make of Sabine? Is she a monster or a spoiled child or a gifted witch?
Why did André’s mother make her fateful final decision?
Will André be able to carry on with his role as Necrosar at the Grand Necropolitan? Or has the reckoning with his past robbed him of the need and ability to be Necrosar?
How do you define a citizen of a country? Is it based purely on legal documentation?
Cyron has become a national hero and symbol, but at what cost?
What do you think Cyron’s intentions were when Alexander confronted him in his office? Do you think Cyron would have shot Alexander?
Many characters in this novel are forced to choose between their personal lives and their duty to their nation. Under what circumstances does duty to country supersede duty to family and vice versa?
Did you figure out the secret of Montfort?
One reviewer has commented, “Smith defines even her minor characters clearly and crisply.” Which of the minor characters was most memorable for you?
When this novel ends, the outbreak of World War I is only a few years away. What do you imagine will be the fate of these characters in the midst of this devastating war?
Overall, how does your group rate this novel? How does it compare with other works your book group has read?
What is your group reading next? How do you decide what books to read?
About Sarah Smith
SARAH SMITH STARTED TELLING stories as a child in Japan. Her sitter would tell her ghost stories at night, and the next morning she’d act them out on the school bus for an audience of terrified five-year-olds. Back in America, she lived in an unrestored Victorian house, where every morning she would help her grandmother haul coal and break sticks into kindling to light the household stove. She’s loved storytelling and history ever since.
She studied English at Harvard, where she spent Saturdays in the library reading mysteries, and film in London and Paris, where she sat next to Peter Cushing at a film show and got to pet Francis Bacon’s cat. While teaching English, she got interested in personal computers; she and two friends bought 3 of the first 5 PCs sold in Boston. She realized that software could help her plot bigger stories, and she’s never looked back.
Her bestselling series of Edwardian mysteries, starring Alexander von Reisden and Perdita Halley, has been published in 14 languages. Two of the books have been named New York Times Notable Books. The Vanished Child, the first book in the series, is being made into a musical in Canada. Sarah’s young adult ghost thriller, The Other Side of Dark, won both the Agatha (for best YA mystery of the year) and the Massachusetts Book Award for best YA book of the year. Her Chasing Shakespeares, a novel about the Shakespeare authorship, has been called “the best novel about the Bard since Nothing like the Sun” (Samuel R. Delany) and has been turned into a play.
Sarah lives in Boston with her family. She has just finished the fourth book in the Reisden-Perdita series, about the Titanic.
More in the series
LOOK FOR THE FIRST two books in the Alexander Reisden & Perdita Halley series
The Vanished Child
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The Knowledge of Water
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Someone killed Richard. Now Richard wants to know why.
New England, 1887. The millionaire William Knight is brutally murdered. The only witness, his young grandson, is shocked into silence, then disappears three days later without a trace--presumably kidnapped and killed.
Switzerland, eighteen years later. Baron Alexander von Reisden, intellectual, cynical, and suicidal after his wife's death, is "recognized" as the missing Richard Knight. Despite Reisden's insistence he is not Richard, he is drawn into the affairs of the Knight family--gaining the hatred of the family's adopted son, who stands to inherit the family fortune.
Yet as Reisden tries to find out why Richard died, he begins to have vague, unsettling feelings of familiarity. For he is a man without memory of his own childhood, and his obsession with finding Richard is leading him closer to a shattering truth.
And to a killer, still at large...
"Stunning…Tells a grim tale of murder and duplicity in stately prose that subtly enhances the psychological horrors…." - The New York Times (Notable Book of the Year)
"A stunning tale of love, amnesia, child abuse, Victorian sexual repression and murder most foul….The satisfying denouement is a shocker." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Greed, suspicion, love, madness, and amnesia: Sarah Smith pulls it all together with a rare talent for telling a complex story in beautifully simple language." - The San Francisco Chronicle
"Smith deftly explores both the actual and the psychological mysteries…. Highly recommended." - Library Journal
"Deliciously intriguing…an artful literary puzzler featuring the kind of thick period detail and narrative intricacy mastered by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, and by few writers since…. This one belongs on the permanent shelf." - The Philadelphia Inquirer
“The Vanished Child”
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How can a madman fall in love?
"I will marry you," Perdita Halley said to Alexander von Reisden at eighteen, "but not until I study music." Now, at twenty-one, she has come to Paris, his city--but music still stands between them. She is pursuing her dream of becoming a concert pianist; he is trying for the less likely one of becoming an ordinary, unhaunted man. They are drawn into an all-consuming passion that seems destined for tragedy. Perdita cannot marry and attend the Conservatoire; Alexander, still haunted by his past, fears to marry at all.
As incessant rain dims the City of Lights, an intricate network of plots and counterplots swirls around the couple. And an elegant game of art and life turns deadly, as a madman follows them, threatening to destroy them both in retribution for a murder they know nothing about--
Or do they?
"Stunning," said The New York Times Book Review of Sarah Smith's historical mystery, The Vanished Child. Now, with The Knowledge of Water, Sarah Smith delves even more deeply into the realm of deception and menace that she has made uniquely her own. Set in Paris during the devastating flood of 1910, The Knowledge of Water is a lush, complex, beautifully written novel about the consuming pleasures of passion and the obsessive perils of art.
"A lushly erotic, feminist study of artists and lovers and killers swept up in their obsessive passions. An exquisite stylist, [Smith] observes her characters in the most intimate detail, defining them with witty precision and placing them in a rain-drenched portrait of Edwardian Paris that could hang in the Louvre." - The New York Times (Notable Book of the Year)
"Intellectual stimulation of the highest order...a ripping yarn with provocative and substantial things to say." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Haunting...An accessible mix of historical speculation, literary allusion, and suspense, The Knowledge of Water could become this year's Name of the Rose." - Entertainment Weekly
"As satisfying a mystery as the Mona Lisa's smile." - USA Today
"Brilliant...This splendid book centers on earning the right to see--and to express what one sees, feels, knows." - The San Francisco Chronicle
"Envelops the reader with history, mystery and passion…Dark and engrossing, this production is magnifique." - The BostonSunday Herald
“The Knowledge of Water”
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A FOURTH BOOK IN the series, set aboard the Titanic, is forthcoming.
Table of Contents
Title page
A baby, Jack the Ripper, and other disasters
Amber; suspicions fall on Reisden
Richard, Toby, and the Grand Necro
How not to cure the fear of death
Perdita leaves for America
Perdita between worlds
Gilbert's ghosts
Richard and his father
Jules asks for help
What secret of Montfort?
How Sabine became a witch
The Scottish play, with real witches
Reisden visits Cyron
Sabine's talents
A question of poison
Reisden talks with Necrosar
The old man of the boves
Reisden meets Sabine
Sabine makes a proposition
Zeno Puckett is looking for a cowboy
Mlle Françoise dies under mysterious circumstances
Sex, witchcraft, death, and families
Perdita meets Gilbert in Boston
Perdita gives Gilbert an ultimatum
Elphinstone makes a suggestion
André's birthday; Dotty and Milly at the Necro
The sexual frustrations of witches
Sabine conjures an incubus
Jules delivers the secret of Montfort
...with unfortunate results
Cyron gives Reisden a role
Dotty is blackmailed
Pawns
Cyron and Reisden; the tragedy of fathers
Perdita returns
Gilbert arrives in Paris
First scenes of the film
"Please let's dig my parents up."
The ash of St. John's fires; Perdita and Toby arrive in Arras
There is no meat loaf in Paris
Eddie Profane
Perdita on location
Sabine tells fortunes
Jules arrives; looking for secrets; the Arras Citadel
Sabine annoys Perdita
"Your fortune is below"; a dance with a bird
The trick guillotine
Results; ghosts; preparations for a party
The Ball of the Dead
Puckett speculates about T.J.; André goes mad
Necrosar stages a film
André unbricks a room
Pétiot makes an apology
Reisden and Gilbert in Arras
Ruthie at the Holy Well
Bastille Day
A life without Necrosar; Reisden's secret father
The end of a family
Ruthie in Mlle Françoise's garden
Cowboy, socialist, spy
Reisden finds a tunnel; the Fortifications of Montfort
Looking for Ruthie
In the hospital; flying ointment
Waiting at St.-Vaast
Sabine discovers Ruthie is a thief
Ruthie looks at buttons
Sabine among the pigeons
Ruthie has the wrong books, but the right button
Sabine sees the grey veil
André knows how to frighten Sabine
Sabine tells a fortune and cuts her losses
Reisden cuts hay with a sword
Cyron chooses Sabine
The show must go on
Andre stages a war
Perdita investigates Sabine
André asks Ruthie for help
Sabine discovers how to live forever
Perdita tells Reisden about the rabbit
The Abrahams play a role in the
film
The guillotine; André, Jules, and Reisden enter the boves
Perdita is alone
In the boves
A coven
The secret of Montfort
Reisden goes to Paris
Reisden and Perdita make plans
Gilbert watches the soldiers
Reisden accuses Cyron
They search for André
André is found; "he can trust me"
Reisden and Gilbert talk about money
Reisden confronts Cyron; opting for France
Night watch
Reisden makes a proposal
A tragic accident
Cyron's last speech; ghosts, families, soldiers
Acknowledgments
Reviews and Awards
A Conversation with Sarah Smith
More about Alexander and Perdita