A. I very much like the sequence when Kay goes to Nevada City to take a serious combat shooting course. My son, who took a similar course in Las Vegas, says he wishes the one he took was as good as my fictional one. I also like the auction room scene, and, perhaps strangely, the scene where Kay, looking to find Bee Watson, stumbles into a medical clinic in the Mission District that it in the midst of stress and chaos as the director has suddenly departed to take up a position as Deputy Minister of Health in Haiti. I really like this concept of a person on a quest (Kay) finding herself in the middle of a totally unrelated if equally emotionally fraught situation. I'm also fond of Kay's meeting with Vince inside the Camera Obscura in the outer Richmond near the Cliff House. I feel it plays very well with Kay's total color blindness.
Q. You didn't continue with Kay in another novel. Why?
A. There were many requests from readers that I do so. I still receive them. Truth is that my publisher at the time, Putnam, lost confidence in the series. It didn't sell nearly as well as they'd hoped. And then I found myself wanting to write about something else. This is a problem I've always had: a desire to move on, create new characters, set stories in new milieus. I also felt that Kay had gone through two very serious life-altering crises, and that it would stretch credibility to put her through a third. One possibility was to wait a few years, then pick her up again in her early 40s, a way of discovering what happened to her, how her life may have turned. But I find that if I leave a character too long, I lose track of her, and then it's very difficult to get back into her mindset, especially important in the case of the Kay Farrow novels in that they're narrated in the first person.
Q. Is there any factual basis to the Goddess Gun Club?
A. It's fictitious, but I did have in mind the Bohemian Grove, not because it's a hunting club (it isn't) but because of its all-male captains-of-industry-and-finance exclusivity aspect. And from what I hear, the security guys at these clubs are pretty tough on trespassers . . . though, hopefully, not so rough as Chipper and Buckoboy are on Kay!
Q. There's all sorts of information in the novel. You must have done a lot of research?
A. I love research, it's so much easier than thinking up stuff. I had great fun on this project researching apitherapy (the use of bee-sting venom to relieve arthritic pain); aikido blackbelt training and exams; rare gun auctions; dueling in California; criminal activity on the San Francisco waterfront; smuggling in of exotic reptiles; smuggling in of desperate Chinese illegals; Mendocino (a gorgeous town); and the very strange ghost town called Drawbridge situated in the salt marshes of San Francisco Bay; etc.
Q. Kay actually kills somebody in Trick of Light. Was that scene difficult to write?
A. I was worried about it. Kay is no kind of killer. But when she's facing off with Julio Sanchez, the guy who killed her friend and mentor, Maddy, she must take certain actions in self-defense. In the end, Sanchez makes mistakes and basically gets himself killed. Still, Kay is very shaken up by the experience.
Q. Will we see more about erotic guns in future books?
A. I feel that in Trick of Light I've said all I have to say about erotic guns. But not, to be sure, about eroticism!
The author has provided photographs of examples of the erotic gun engravings mentioned in the novel. For readers who are not offended by erotic imagery and who are interested in seeing images of guns engraved with erotic motifs, we offer the following:
View the images on line here
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Bayer's novel The Magician's Tale (to which Trick Of Light is the sequel) is available in e-book form from Crossroad Press, as are his three Detective Frank Janek novels, Switch, Wallflower and Mirror Maze, his noir thriller, Blind Side, the New York Times best-seller Pattern Crimes, and other novels including Tangier and Visions Of Isabelle.
He and his wife, food writer Paula Wolfert, live in the California wine country. For more information please check out his website: www.williambayer.com. You can also write him directly at [email protected].
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