Coffee break with Reader's Digest

RD asked: Both the plot and characters are strong in Murder at Cirey. Do you begin with the plot or the characters ...?

The question came from Alison Fraser, then chief editor of Select Editions in Sydney. Murder at Cirey appeared in Reader's Digest in English, Hungarian and Czech.

Cheryl: What I really begin with is a very specific situation. I wanted to do a murder mystery at Cirey, and I thought, what if Voltaire discovered a body in the woods around the château, on the very day when Madame du Châtelet came to live with him? That was a very fraught day for Voltaire. She’d taken a long time to join him and really made him wait, and so it would have been horrific to have a murder on his hands, just as he was preparing this wonderful idyll for her. In addition, I decided somebody was trying to frame him for the crime.

That situation gave me my consultant detectives, but of course it was a police procedural, therefore I had to have a policeman as the main investigator. I did my research on the mounted police, the Maréchaussée, and found out what their uniforms looked like, and what their duties were, and why my investigator might be at the nearby town of Joinville at the time, and why he might be called onto the case. So that gave me my hero. I also worked out who my villain was, and then I just had to let the situation plus characters develop into a plot. Victor had to be the mover and shaker. He had to take his own steps towards discovery.

Before I start writing I always know the arc of the story right to the end, but many crucial elements of the plot only come to me along the way! For instance, I did not know where Victor was going to confront the murderer until I was about three quarters of the way through the book. It had not occurred to me that the crisis would happen at an ancient neighbourhood castle that I’d created earlier in the novel, but it turned out to be just the right spot. It was a very Gothic sort of place, with crumbling buildings around it—quite different from the Château de Cirey, which is a Renaissance château and a cradle of the Enlightenment.