Bio:
Kim Cooper is the creator of 1947project, the crime-a-day time travel blog that
spawned Esotouric's popular crime bus tours, including Pasadena Confidential
and the Real Black Dahlia. With husband Richard Schave, Kim curates the Salons
of LAVA - The Los Angeles Visionaries Association. When the third generation Angeleno isn't
combing old newspapers for forgotten scandals, she is a passionate advocate for
historic preservation of signage, vernacular architecture and writer's homes.
Kim was for many years the editrix of Scram, a journal of unpopular culture.
Her books include "Fall in Love For
Life," "Bubblegum Music is
the Naked Truth," "Lost in
the Grooves" and an oral history of the cult band Neutral Milk Hotel. The Kept Girl is her first novel.
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Thank you, Shots Ezine, for the
opportunity to drop by on my February blog tour for "The Kept Girl," a novel of 1929 starring the young Raymond
Chandler, his devoted secretary and the real-life cop who is a likely model for
Philip Marlowe.
With this post, I'd like to shine a
light on a digital search tool that had a profound impact on my writing of
"The Kept Girl" and that I
think more writers of period mysteries should know about. Properly used, it's
like having a phone line that goes directly back into the past, where long-dead
writers can offer editorial advice.
When working on a period novel set in
Los Angeles in the 1920s, there are numerous useful tools that can be tapped,
many of them freely available online. Archival
photographs and film clips illuminate the physical environment, the fashions,
signage and transit options. Scans of old menus reveal food prices and popular
dishes. Vintage newspapers spell out the
facts of the sensational fraud and wrongful death case that was at the core of
my fact-based fictional plot, along with basic facts like daily weather
reports. Census records give a precise breakdown of the demographics in a
neighborhood. Historic maps show various routes my characters might take,
decades before freeways simplified movement around the region.
I used each of these tools and more
besides, and they all contributed to the three-dimensional image of the
historic city that I drew on while writing this book. But while I appreciated
being able to access these research aids online, and enjoyed the speed of
digital searching over the old mode of scrolling through microfilm or
requesting boxes of archival material from busy librarians, all of these aids
could conceivably have been consulted by a writer working in 1980 or earlier.
But there was one tool that truly is
born of the digital age, and it's an incredibly powerful one. That tool is
Google's Ngram Viewer. A phrase-usage
graphing tool drawing on more than five million books scanned by the search
engine's now-stalled project to digitize every book ever published, it was
released on the web in December 2010.
With the Ngram Viewer, it is possible
to "hear" the voices of the early 20th century, or any
era, simply by throwing appropriate search terms into the database and seeing
what it spits out. When writing
dialogue, I'd sometimes find myself uncertain how a person in 1929 would phrase
something. I knew what I needed Raymond
Chandler to say — but how would he say it?
By narrowing my search to the window of
English language books published between 1925-1935, I could consult numerous
examples of sentences by contemporary writers using the terms I was trying to
chose between, and view a graphing chart showing if one term was much more
commonly used than another.
For example, when I wanted one
character to tell another than he believed talking with cult priestess Ruth
Rizzio might have driven his brother crazy, I initially wrote that she
"drove him around the bend." which sounded good to my 21st
century ear. But a check of Ngram
revealed that in 1929, this phrase was purely geographical, so I replaced it
with "turn cuckoo." Just a small thing, but one that made the voice
of the character and the era ring more true.
And when Raymond Chandler first
encounters May Blackburn, the leader of the cult, my initial description had
him noting that she had "body language" similar to that of a
successful businessman. But something
about the phrasing struck me as modern, and on throwing it into an Ngram
search, I confirmed that prior to 1970, the phrase would have been meaningless.
I cropped out the anachronism and breathed "thank you" to the
engineers who developed this clever, useful tool and to generations of dead
writers whose work answers questions they could never have imagined anyone
asking.
"The Kept Girl" is a modern novel, written on a MacBook Pro
using the Scrivener software program, sourced from ProQuest newspaper archives
and cinematic b-roll footage hosted by Archive.org, designed using the LuaTeX
typesetting program, printed on a digital press and available as an e-book for
the Kindle. But it is also, thanks to Ngram and a lot of hard work, a proper
period piece, deeply steeped in the voice of that fascinating jazz age
era. I like to think that if, through
some wormhole in time, a copy found itself on a shelf in Dawson's Bookshop in
1929, a Los Angeles reader could pick it up and feel quite at home in the city
portrayed within its pages.
You also can also win a copy of the book
#keptgirlbt
