Author: Karen Odden

Women in Collaboration

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a mystery writer in possession of a good idea, must be in want of a friend or two.” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, the first line, a little adapted

Recently, I visited the Poisoned Pen for a live author event for the book THE LOST SUMMERS OF NEWPORT, a triple-time-line novel by the three authors Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White. Listening to them talk about how they build a plot-line, each contributing a piece here and there, was a heartwarming treat. They laughed. They made ridiculous sheep puns. They do not ever reveal which sections of the book they drafted. And having started their book, I can tell you, the words blend well.

Barbara Peters (owner of the Poisoned Pen) with Lauren Willig, Beatriz Williams, and Karen White

On the drive home, I found myself thinking about my 2019 book A TRACE OF DECEIT because I leaned heavily on two of my artist friends for help. Just as those authors sat on three stools, the image that formed in my mind was myself on a middle stool and my two friends on either side.


Back when the book was published, I thought a story about our collaboration—one writer, two artists, all here in Phoenix—was so cool that I even tried pitching it to various small publications around town. There were no takers, alas. Perhaps the story of three women working together to produce art isn’t a particularly interesting one.

But I think it could be. Indeed, I think it should be of interest. I didn’t want to let that story vanish without making its small impression on the universe. Which is why I’m blogging about it here.

Inevitably a book comes together like a stew, with ingredients from all different shelves in the metaphorical kitchen.

For A TRACE OF DECEIT, set in the 1870s art and auction world in London, one ingredient was my experience working at Christie’s auction house in New York, back in the scandal-filled 1990s, when the head of Christie’s and Sotheby’s were accused of price-fixing.  

Christie’s Auction Room, illustration from “Microcosm of London” by R. Ackermann, 1808

Another ingredient was the true story of the Pantechnicon which burned down in Belgravia, London in February 1874. It was a warehouse for the (supposedly) safe storage of household valuables including pianos, furniture, libraries, historical documents, silver, paintings, and jewels. Somehow, it caught fire and burned for three full days, destroying millions of pounds worth of irreplaceable masterworks and antiques.


A third ingredient was a painting worth stealing. I chose one of François Boucher’s paintings of Madame de Pompadour, the official chief mistress of King Louis XV from 1745 to 1751. At my request the artist at Harper Collins who was designing the book cover inserted it into the frame in the upper right. (Originally, the image was just a bland reddish blur.)


A fourth ingredient were the biographical histories of two brilliant Victorian women artists—Evelyn de Morgan (https://www.demorgan.org.uk/discover/the-de-morgans/evelyn-de-morgan/) and Kate Greenaway (https://www.societyillustrators.org/kate-greenaway)—who attended the Slade School of Art in London in the 1870s. Their experiences served as a pattern that I could follow for my heroine, Annabel Rowe, a student at the Slade School in 1875.

An early class at the Slade School of Art, London (1880s)

But for the character of Annabel Rowe, for the way she thinks and speaks, for the metaphors she uses, for the way she looks at her world and describes it in words, I knew I needed to find an artist with a beating heart.

Fortunately, I have two longtime friends in Phoenix who are artists. One of them, Heidi Dauphin, has been a friend and fellow hiker since she arrived in Phoenix nearly twenty years ago. She works primarily in hand-cut ceramics, and her public art is scattered around town, including at the Heard Museum, Solterra Suns Development in Avondale, the Valley Metro Light Rail TPSS building at Goodyear/19th Avenue, the Pinnacle Peak Water Reservoir in Phoenix, and elsewhere. Currently the Exhibition Manager at the Shemer Art Center in Phoenix, Heidi arranges and installs all the exhibitions and select the jurors for their juried shows. She is also currently developing a public art project for Alamar, a new family living community in Avondale. Her blog showcases her art: http://heididauphin.blogspot.com/. 

My other friend, Hallie Mueller, is the head art teacher at Phoenix Country Day School. She came to Arizona when she was 21 (around eighteen years ago—we all arrived within a year or so of each other) and was captivated by the desert landscape, which inspired her expansive, vivid paintings. Her work has been exhibited at Five 15Arts Gallery in Phoenix, the Tempe Public Library, the Fine Arts Festival in Mayer, and AZ on the Rocks in Scottsdale. Nearly two years ago, while rock climbing, she fell 60 feet off a cliff, sustaining injuries that she has recovered from, but which transformed her art and her approach to life and creativity. You can find images and more information on her website: www.halliemueller.com. 

These two friends guided me while I developed the character of Annabel into a living, breathing painter, with an artist’s sensibility. Heidi and Hallie opened their hearts and answered innumerable questions on topics from which paintbrush bristles are best with oils to how to “read” a painting. 

Heidi in her home studio

Most of my conversations with Heidi took place on hiking trails over many years, as I learned about her time as an undergraduate and a graduate student, how she worked in the studio, her time in the classroom as a teacher, the process of applying for projects, developing her craft and her blog, and balancing being an artist with being a wife and mother, daughter and friend. Her reflections and insights provided the broad strokes, the underpainting of my portrait of Annabel Rowe.

Hallie Mueller

The details for that portrait came one night over a long dinner with Hallie. She was still recovering from her rock-climbing accident, but she was getting around, and we met at Flower Child, not far from her house. I still have my scribbled notes from that meeting, dated 2/25/19. I asked the basic, first question: “How does Annabel think about a painting?”

Hallie began by talking about compositional options—overlap, cropping, size variation and distance, angles, and foreshortening. She explained that there is a focal point, which is the thing that first grabs attention; then visual pathways, implied lines that you can create, for example, through repetition of a color that can lead the eye around the canvas. Shapes can function as arrows, as can the direction of the gazes of people in the picture. Where they are looking matters. (I found myself thinking … hm, this holds true in novels, too.) She walked me through oil painting, underpainting, and glazes; tightness (say, Titian) versus looseness (the Impressionists) in a painting. She explained the importance of the “light source” and illumination; think of Caravaggio’s windows. And she explained that with colors, there are different degrees of saturation, and they aren’t really “fixed”; for example, browns change depending on what they are next to. Oils come in tubes; a flat brush will give you sharp edges whereas a bright brush, with the oval top, is good for blending; a round brush and fan brush will give you still different effects. As for smells? Linseed oil, which makes paint less viscous; Damar varnish adds gloss and enriches darks; turpentine weakens the integrity of paint. All can be added to pigment. There was more, but this gives you an idea.

When I finished the book, there were three significant scenes where Annabel paints or reads a painting. I talked them through with Heidi and sent them to Hallie to read. I have received comments from readers who write, “I’m an artist, and the author got it right.”

I didn’t get it right. I got friends.

If you have ever collaborated in your creative work, please share your story in the comments below.

Costumes, Corsets, Collars: Why Clothes Matter in a Novel

At Malice Domestic last month, I was on a panel called “What do you wear to a murder? How fashion enhances a novel.”

I must admit, when I received the panel assignment, my first thought was, “I’m on a panel about fashion?” Aside from the fact that my personal closet has nothing worthy of comment, my Victorian protagonist, Inspector Michael Corravan, has all the fashion sense of a contemporary teenager who picks a t-shirt up off his floor and sniffs it to make sure it’s clean enough to wear.

But once I began paging through my book DOWN A DARK RIVER and the previous one, A TRACE OF DECEIT (2019), I realized … Hm! I do talk about clothes! Descriptions of overcoats, hats, dresses, shoes, canes, collars, hats, gloves, and so on feather into my character descriptions and scenes because my characters are sharply etched in my mind, and their clothing naturally reflects aspects of their identity—their age, race, gender, occupation, class, and so on.

However, clothing doesn’t only reflect aspects of a person’s identity; clothing can also either thwart people’s expectations or fulfill them. People (and book characters) can manipulate conventions of apparel (a.k.a. “sartorial codes”) to their advantage. As a simple example, in my second novel, A DANGEROUS DUET (2018), my heroine Nell dresses as a man to play piano in a music hall because male performers were paid 20 shillings a week, and women were paid 10.

One thing to recognize about the Victorian era is that there was no single “Victorian style.” Fashions for women and men changed drastically over the course of Queen Victoria’s reign, 1837-1901, influenced by dozens of factors including trends in architecture, such as the Gothic Revival whose narrow arches and angles lent shapes to women’s dresses, and the rise of leisure time, which necessitated clothes for boating, archery, and lawn tennis. New fashions depended upon what fabrics and dyes were available and upon evolving techniques such as gauging (a new way to form pleats at the waist) and the steam-molding of stays. In 1857 the development of the lightweight metal frame replaced the petticoats made of crinoline—a word derived from the French crin (horsehair) which was added to lin (linen) to make it bulkier. Until then, some fashions, with hems up to 5 or 6 yards in circumference, required the wearing of 6 petticoats! Can you imagine how hot that must have been?

Dresses physically reinforced the social, economic, and psychological constraints upon women during this period. Not for nothing do the metal hoops resemble a birdcage.

Victorian clothing was often used very intentionally to convey a message to the broader public. One real-world example of this occurred in 1829, when Home Secretary Robert Peel created the Metropolitan Police. Although Peel’s intent was to create an organization that would deter crime and protect the public, many Londoners were deeply distrustful that the creation of a unified police force would turn the city into a police state; their personal liberties would be trampled; and the police would be no better than French spies, peering about and condemning their every move, looking for a reason to throw them into prison or to collect a bribe for letting them go free.

The style of uniform was chosen to reassure the public. Rather than dressing the new police in red military coats with brass buttons and epaulettes and helmets, with the men carrying firearms, the new police uniform was a gentlemanly blue swallowtail coat and trousers, overcoat, ordinary boots, and a leather top hat, and the police carried a truncheon rather than firearms. That said, their top hat was reinforced with cane so it could serve as a step-stool when peering over walls in London. The brim was also reinforced, to be used as a weapon that could break someone’s nose. But the chief concern with regards to the uniform was reassuring the public.

Divisions of plainclothes detectives came into being in August 1842, after an attempt on Queen’s life and several other notoriously brutal crimes. So in 1878, Inspector Corravan, who came up through the Lambeth uniformed division, wears an overcoat that conceals the truncheon he tucks into a special pocket down the side of his trousers. There is no obvious sign of him being a policeman.

However, in DOWN A DARK RIVER I use clothes not only to indicate aspects of identity such as class, profession, and gender but also to suggest themes and character traits. For example, Tom Flynn, the newspaperman, is one of the moral compasses of the novel. He wears an overcoat that hangs a bit too long on him, which emphasizes that he is shorter than average; this provides a contrast to, and perhaps suggests a source of, his oversized determination when pursuing a story. His bowler hat is misshapen because of the long nights spent in the rain; this suggests his work ethic, an important value in Victorian culture.

I also show how clothing can be used as a form of communication, a way of signaling rebellion, admiration, or even affection between characters. For example, Mr. C. E. Howard Vincent (an historical figure) becomes the Director of the Yard — the new broom that sweeps the Yard clean after the 1877 “Trial of the Detectives,” when senior inspectors were convicted of taking bribes from a gang of con men. Mr. Vincent is the second son of a baronet and has never spent a day in police uniform or solved a case. Rather, he’s a former newspaperman for the Daily Mail, and he earns his new position at the Yard because he went to France to interview the police about their methods and presented his findings to the Parliamentary Commission that was deciding the fate of the Yard. (Yes, they were nearly shut down.) Vincent is tall and slender, and in this illustration from Vanity Fair, it is evident that the Victorian long coats and tailored trousers suit him. By contrast, Irish Inspector Corravan from Whitechapel wears a large dark overcoat and pays little attention to his dress. It is one of the subtle ways Corravan rebels against Mr. Vincent’s tidiness, his rigidness when it comes to the rules, and his adherence to upper-class Victorian codes of dress and behavior.

Like Mr. Vincent, Belinda Gale, Corravan’s love interest, attends to matters of dress. She is an independently wealthy lady novelist based in part on some real women authors of the time, including George Eliot, Mrs. Henry Wood, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Belinda dresses as befits her station, with gowns in the latest fashion, for the soirees she holds. Dressing beautifully for Michael Corravan is also one way she shows her affection for him. (My paper doll Marie models a style of hair and dress from 1878, the year the book is set.)

Paradoxically, the stricter the sartorial codes within a given world (fictional or real), the more powerfully they can be wielded and subverted. Considered broadly, clothing is at the nexus of cultural aspects including politics, economics, manufacturing, art, gender, class, race, profession, and social mores. Because clothing can be donned and doffed, the line dividing character from costume is murky, and it is in that murk, thick as the London fog, where the novelist can find rich opportunities for exploring identity, motives, and behavior.

With special thanks to my sister panelists, authors L.A. Chandlar, Andrea Penrose, Karen Neale Smithson, and Ellen Byerrum; and to Robin Agnew for suggesting the panel topic.