Speaker 1: Hello, and good morning Marine. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2: I'm fine. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: You must have had a lot of fun putting this
book together, because I mean, first of all, you deal
with a modern day mystery, but you also travel into
the past. And I love it when authors can do that,
they can put us in two different places at the
same time.
Speaker 2: I find that I like working in dual timelines, but
I think it makes sense with mysteries because mysteries are
always about going back into the past, whether it's an
hour or one hundred years, and rewinding and taking it
apart and trying to figure out how you got to
where you are.
Speaker 1: How do you do your research for something like that,
just to make sure that the continuity is spot on.
Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot of things. I mean, it's just
a lot of general knowledge and reading, and then once
you kind of narrow down what you want to do,
then it's in person research. Like I go, I went
from this case. The book takes place in the Southern Island,
so I go there. You know, I look at beIN
mundane everything from you know, just stare sometimes staring at
the sidewalk what's on the street, to going going from
island to island, going into the houses, trying to pick
So sometimes what you need is really really small, like
you never know what is you're going to need. You
pick up little things as you go, just you know, oh,
a doorknob, a whole building, a doorknob, a feeling in
the air, you know, a local food. You never know
what is you're going to need to do.
Speaker 1: Where do you find the inspiration to create something like
the Ralston family and then a modern day Marlowe? I
mean because I mean it's it's two completely different things,
but at the same time they all come together in harmony.
Speaker 2: Well, it's Marlo in the modern story, which sounds like
I've just written some sort of weird you know, Nickelodeon
stick on there, But it's I always start with why,
why the thing happened, And because murder is a big deal,
even if you're writing a murder mystery, which is the
lighthearted kind of a thing, weirdly, you always have to
start with why, and then I build out to the
who and how, and I kind of build from that
censure outwards. The Wilson family in the past, there's loose
historical precedence I'm using there because what you find out
that the family was into in the past was very
There's a lot of stuff that happened in our past
that we simply do not talk about and don't want
to talk about, or that we collectively are forgotten. Was
really common. For example, the family is very into eugenics.
Eugenics was accepted day to day practice. Like it was
just like and you went, you could go to a
eugenics tent at the state fairs. You could get yourself
a corn dog, and then you could go to the
eugenics tent in case the baby's head measured. That is real.
That is what used to happen. So this was this
was a belief system. This was you know. It's also
you know Philip Roston, so that the Ralston family has
six older children and one younger children. So two children
die in the past, one of the older children and
a younger child. He adopted his six children as a
doctor in World War One. So there's a lot about
how families would put together, what the political situation was
like in the United States. It's a it's a real
mix of things. I mean, I guess I'm just you know,
when you're a reader, you're I've always been interested in
that period in history.
Speaker 1: I'm always interested in mansions and and all my entire life.
If I read about anything about a mansion, it's I
need someone to take me inside. And that's exactly what
you do, is you. It's almost like wearing those VR goggles.
You take us inside by way of your paragraphs.
Speaker 2: I'm very exacting. I like a map. I like a chart.
There's a map in all my books, all the mysteries,
and they always mean something. I have to really feel
like I understand exactly where everything takes place. I don't know,
like this might be a theater. I work in theater
as well, and it's and wrote for it. There's something
about having to touch the things to know, like this
is exactly how long it takes to cross the room,
this is how you get from one floor to another.
I feel like I have to know these things. You
know in some of the books i've you know, I
go and you go on eBay and you buy old maps,
like for my True dB series, which takes place in Vermont.
Part of it takes place in the twenty so I
went online and you find a bunch of maps, so
you know exactly what rose were there. But mansions are
They are kind of a personality made manifest. They are
wealth their personality. They are display their house, but they
are also legged. They're not just a house for your family.
It's a house for like all your servants. All of
these backs theres. They're designed part of the houses that
you're not supposed to see if you've given them, which
is strange. That's not how we normally think of houses.
But those houses have a backstage.
Speaker 1: Speaking of maps, my wife and I had a really
deep conversation about your style of writing. She says that
you leave bread crumbs, and so I always want to
make sure that that I can spot a bread crumb
when you leave in it forest, because it's almost like
you're pulling us into the story and you give us
something to hold on to so that we can grow
with the story.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean these are fair play mysteries, and by
that it means that they are favable by the reader.
You don't need outside information, and the perpetrator or perpetrators
are always introduced early enough that if it's a four
hunderd page book, they don't come in on three hundred
and ninety eight. You know you know who they are,
what you do, is you kind of I work from
the back, like I always write, I know exactly how
everything ends. I write kind of case files about it.
I write why everything happened, I break it all down,
and then I kind of pull threads out of that,
so I pull back to front, you know, rather than
kind of you know, I don't. I also don't write
in order, so I'll kind of pull the things I
want and write those sections.
Speaker 1: Because songwriters will sit there, they may get a guitar
riff here, they may get a lyric over there. Somehow, someway,
it all comes together. And that's what I'm learning with you,
is that when you build from the back first, it's like,
oh my god, that's so inspiring.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I've never written a book in order, but certainly
with mysteries I always I've never written a book in
order ever. Ever, I don't know how to write in order.
Everybody writes in their own way, everybody. And the thing is,
you also write, learn to write every book by writing
that book. You know. Kids off and ask me, like,
how do you learn to write? Well, I'm like, you
write a lot. You have to write all the time
and just fail constantly because you fail writing that book
until you've written it, so you have to learn how
to write each book by writing that book.
Speaker 1: Wow, where can people go to find out more information
about you Marine? Because I mean this, this book right
here is your first standalone book, but I mean you've
got a series out there like you wouldn't believe.
Speaker 2: I have a lot of standalone books. This is this
is a stand alone mystery I have. You can go
to Marian Johnson dot com. You can go to Marian
Johnson Books on Instagram or Marian Johnson on Twitter h
and also Morerien Johnson books on TikTok which is new
and in development, but Instagram on a lot more.
Speaker 1: I love it. Please come back to the show anytime
in the future. The door is always going to be
open for you.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Will you'd be brilliant today