The third number in Margot Douaihy’s Sister Holiday Mystery series, “Divine Ruin,” forges her experience in Catholic school and love for riot grrl post-punk primal scream into a hardboiled engima. I spoke with Douaihy ahead of the “Divine Ruin” book launch on January 12 at the Connexion in Somerville.
What draws you to writing mystery and crime fiction?
These are my passions. I came to reading late, I was sort of a wild child, and I found it hard to sit still. So, when I encountered mysteries and Agatha Christie’s books, I just became enraptured with the interactive, engaging quality of reading a mystery. I became almost freakishly hooked. I jumped into hard boil, the noir, and fell in love with voice, voice, voice. The point of view of the PIs — [Raymond] Chandler and [Chester] Himes and that kind of iconic, canonical crew [with] that snarky exterior, but also a deep kind of melancholy. I was a closeted kid in Scranton at the time and came of age during erasure and the criminalization or social punishment of being queer. So, I had a kind of tension between what I loved on the page and even on the screen and who I was internally. Writing mysteries — thinking about voice, insiders and outsiders, code-cracking and detection, reading between the lines — spoke to me as an artist, but really as a person.
In what ways do you think that the crime genre and mystery novels need to grow and change?
Genre is delicious because it’s a language we speak. If you go into an Italian restaurant, you’re gonna get Italian food; and it’s the same with genre. In crime fiction, I consider it to be both fluid and stable — we want the new, but within the familiar kind of lineage. I think we can tell a good story and tell an extraordinary thriller or gripping mystery, and bring in people’s lived realities and new epistemologies and new points of view. I actually think it’s better for genre when we are more inclusive. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of room to grow, but I’m part of a group called the Queer Crime Writers, and so we’re devoted to telling damn good mysteries and writing incredible crime narratives, and opening up the aperture, expanding the discourse.
What effect do you think queer representation in crime fiction may have on readers?
I think we see how important storytelling is. Whoever can “control the narrative” — there’s a lot of currency in that. When we can all find a home in these genres we love — within art, within storytelling — the more representation we have, the more empathy, the more humanity, the more equality, the less easy it is to erase, the less easy it is to scapegoat when we all feel at home in the art, in the culture that we live in. I’m going to paraphrase Jia Tolentino somewhat badly, but I think she has this quote: “The stories we live and the stories we read are to some degree inseparable.” The more inclusive, more diverse the range of stories and voices, [the] more exciting for readers and fans and artists.
“All She Wrote ‘Divine Ruin’ Book Launch” featuring Margot Douaihy in conversation with Ana Reyes at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Jan. 12. Tickets are $36 with book included or $5 with no book. Connexion, 149 Broadway, Somerville.
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