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Lyndsay Faye: Storytelling Beyond The Literary Canon

Anna Ty Bergman

When retracing her steps back to her initial love of literature, author Lyndsay Faye says it began with her father when she was 10 years old.

“When I was done with Nancy Drew he essentially told me that I should read the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. And I said, 'Well yeah, that sounds like a great idea.' And my uncle gave me a very pretty copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," says Faye. "And I'm grateful to both of them because it just changed my entire life."

Credit The Mysterious Press / Grove Atlantic

Faye's latest book emerged from that influence. It's called The Whole Art of Detection--a pastiche of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but her own Sherlock Holmes mysteries.

"There are people who read the Sherlock Holmes mysteries; they read them and they finish them and they say, 'OK, that was great.' But there are other people who read the Sherlock Holmes mysteries and they never stop reading them. And I never stopped," she says. "I just read them over and over again. So I'm always going to be happy about that."

Even though she has been a lifelong fan of this classic crime-solving team, Faye says that’s not the reason she can channel Doyle so seamlessly in her own collection of detective mysteries.

“It's because I have a degree in theater; I don't have a degree in writing. So I think that that's why I actually am able to mimic style and his syntax and I pay a lot of attention to things like accents and you know turns of phrase," she maintains. "So I think that probably I'm only good at it because of the fact that I was trained in something other than writing.”

Credit G.P. Putnam's Sons

All five of Faye’s books have historical settings. This allows her to use history’s tendency to repeat itself as a direct connection to today's audiences. That's especially true with her book Jane Steele. The title character is a murderer, but when she kills in self-defense or to protect a helpless child from a predator, the reader must decide, is it justified? Faye says she can talk about issues like these that are still going on today through her historical fiction.

“Instead of standing on a soapbox and shouting through a megaphone, I can simply talk about them," Faye says. "We are still making the same mistakes. So I can just point them out. And that tends to be something that is very satisfying for me. It's not politically controversial but it is definitely politically relevant. So I like that fact.”

Just like her love for Sherlock Holmes, Faye's love for the classics also began in her youth. But this time she introduced them to herself.

“I was a terribly precocious, horrifying person when I was a teenager and I decided that I need to read all the classics," she says. "When I read Jane Eyre, I of course loved it. And I tried to read as much of Dickens as I could. Essentially Nicholas Nickleby is Jane Eyre, but with jokes."

Faye might love the classics, but that doesn't stop her from creating her own version of them. In fact, Jane Steele has been described as 'Jane Eyre meets Dexter.'

"I started reading them because of the fact that I wanted to know what the sort of literary canon was," Faye says. "But at the same time I started adapting them because I think that literary canon is not necessarily the be all and end all of where we can go with storytelling.”

Lyndsay Faye is on tour for both of her new releases, Jane Steele and The Whole Art of Detection. She's giving a talk Friday, March 17, at 6:00 p.m. at Watermark Books in Wichita.

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Beth Golay is the director of marketing and digital content at KMUW and host of the Marginalia podcast. Follow her on Twitter @BethGolay.

Beth Golay is KMUW's Director of Marketing and Digital Content. She is the host of the KMUW podcast Marginalia and co-host with Suzanne Perez of the Books & Whatnot podcast. You can find her on Wichita Transit in conversation with other riders for En Route, a monthly segment on KMUW's weekly news program The Range.