Murder, She Writes

It’s one of those patented late spring afternoons in Southern California. Temperature hovering in the mid-80s. A light, flag-flapping sea breeze. A let’s-play-hooky-and-go-to-the-beach kind of day.

But Elizabeth George has something far more chilling on her mind this day.

Hunkered in front of her computer in the upstairs study of her Huntington Harbour home, the author’s thoughts drift more than 5,000 miles away, to a dying seaside town in Essex, England.

There’s been a murder, you see.

The victim is a young Pakistani man who had come to England for an arranged marriage to the Anglo-Pakistani daughter of a wealthy businessman. It’s the fourth day of an investigation into what appears to be a racially motivated hate crime, and Scotland Yard Det. Sgt. Barbara Havers and an inspector with the Essex constabulary are gathering evidence and pursuing alibis. . . .

George is writing diligently to make up for lost time. It’s been a hectic year. She is less than halfway through writing what will be the ninth installment in her acclaimed series of British mysteries.

“In the Presence of the Enemy,” George’s latest national bestseller featuring the aristocratic Scotland Yard Det. Inspector Thomas Lynley and Havers, his dumpy proletariat partner, hit bookstores in March and rose to No. 2 on both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times hardback bestseller lists.

George has a January deadline for her new book, which she began researching in England a year ago. Normally, she’d be winding things up by now.

And for this self-described goal-oriented perfectionist, being six months behind her own self-imposed deadline is an anxiety-producing state of affairs.

But George can forgive herself for the tardiness.

She not only went through a divorce from her husband of 24 years last fall--a difficult time during which, she says, “I didn’t do a lot of writing”--but she has spent an unusually large amount of time traveling over the past nine months, spending only two full months at home since September.

There were book tours in Germany, Sweden, Britain and the United States. She taught a weeklong fiction-writing seminar at the University of Oklahoma. Then the “fun” trip to England, the ski trip to Utah, the seminars on the fine line between creativity and madness in Rome and Venice.

And after only two weeks at home playing catch-up on her work after the April trip to Italy, she left May 17 for a nine-day promotional trip to Amsterdam, where she was honored as suspense author of the year.

“She stuns me,” says Kate Miciak, George’s longtime editor at Bantam in New York. “I really don’t know how she can keep complicated novels like hers in her head and walk away for three or four weeks and then literally pick up where she left off.”

“In the Presence of the Enemy” (Bantam) deals with the kidnapping of the daughter of a female member of Parliament and the sleazy world of British tabloids. It has only added to the stature of an author critics call a “master of the modern English mystery.”

Eight years after “A Great Deliverance” earned her both the Agatha and the Anthony awards for best first novel, fans continue to be surprised to discover that George is no more British than Coca-Cola.

“People still come up and say ‘I can’t believe you’re an American,’ ” says the Ohio-born George, 47, who grew up in the Bay Area.

Even British fans who know she lives in the United States often tell her they thought she was an Englishwoman living in America.

“It’s always gratifying,” she says, “because I want the books to be as believably English as I can make them, so if people tell me they think I’m English, it tells me I’m succeeding.”

A former El Toro High School English teacher, George wrote “A Great Deliverance” on her summer vacation in 1985. Her ex-husband, Ira Toibin, quit his job as an acting school district superintendent in Cerritos several years ago to be her business manager. The couple had met at UC Riverside, where she earned a degree in English (with an emphasis on British literature) and he was an economics and urban studies major.

Three years ago, they bought a spacious “modified Cape Cod” in the upscale gated community that George continues to make her home. But now it’s just George and Brandy, her totally blind and nearly deaf 15-year-old, longhaired miniature dachshund who, at the moment, is curled up on the leather couch next to her in the family room.

George says she and Toibin had “just really come to a time where we were going in different directions.” They have a “tremendous amount of respect for each other and consequently parted well,” she adds.

Indeed, Toibin, who is remarried and lives three minutes away, continues as George’s business manager.

*

Elizabeth George has been an Anglophile since the British music invasion of 1964.

She has been writing almost as long as she has been reading, and remembers as a teenager writing a group of short stories set in England, before she had ever set foot on British soil. George’s first visit to England was on a six-week Shakespeare study course during her junior year of high school in 1966. “I just absolutely loved it,” she says.

But she also loved teaching, and chose it as a career.

George says she was fired from her brief first teaching job--at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana--for union activity. She spent 12 years at El Toro High School, where she taught everything from remedial English to Shakespeare. In 1981, she was named the County Department of Education’s teacher of the year.

While teaching a class on British mysteries, George dissected several novels and, she says, “over time I thought, ‘I could write one of these.’ ”

Writing during summer vacations, she completed two British mysteries featuring her now familiar lead characters. Both novels were rejected. But she struck gold with the third, “A Great Deliverance,” which she wrote after returning from a summer research trip to Yorkshire in 1985.

With an initial $75,000, two-book deal with Bantam, George quit teaching in early 1987. Within 18 months, however, she had returned to the classroom to teach a class on the fundamentals of fiction for Coastline Community College in Fountain Valley.

She still teaches the Coastline class, and for the past four years she has been conducting a weekly writer’s workshop in her home for a select group of no more than a dozen advanced students.

George now commands seven-figure advances for her books, and her novels are printed in 21 languages. “A Great Deliverance” has been optioned by a British production company for airing as a three-hour movie on British TV. Her fans include Marcia Clark, Emma Thompson and Hillary Clinton, who took a copy of “In the Presence of the Enemy” on her trip to Bosnia.

But for all her success as a novelist, George remains a teacher at heart.

“I think I was a born pedagogue. I didn’t start writing because I wanted to leave teaching. I left teaching because I needed to devote more time to my writing in order to complete my obligations to my publisher.

“I think we always return to the things that we get constant reinforcement for. I got tremendous reinforcement as a teacher.”

*

Members of the Tuesday night writer’s workshop begin gathering in George’s family room shortly after 7, taking seats on the couches or on the floor in front of the fireplace.

Three of the aspiring novelists will be reading this evening.

The chatting and joking ends when George sets a kitchen timer for 33 minutes, the allotted time for each reading and round of critiques. (Why 33 minutes? “Because,” George later explains with a laugh, “30 minutes wasn’t quite long enough.”)

George eyes the first reader: “OK, Carolyn, why don’t you regale us.”

As Carolyn Honigman of Laguna Hills reads the latest chapter in her murder mystery, George listens intently, occasionally jotting notes.

When Honigman finishes, each member describes what worked and what didn’t. Then it’s George’s turn.

“Carolyn, there’s a lot of tremendously good writing in this,” she begins, quickly zeroing in on what needs attention. “You give Todd plenty of attitude. I think the only question is, does he perhaps have too much attitude?”

Workshop members describe George as a patient and nurturing teacher, a successful author who is generous in sharing her thoughts and experiences and gifted at critiquing in a way that helps develop each writer.

“She’s like every writer’s secret dream,” says Barbara Fryer of Huntington Beach, recalling the time George called her on a Saturday to say she had been thinking about the long scene Fryer had read in the previous workshop and had some ideas for improving it.

“She spent 45 minutes on the telephone just talking about this scene,” Fryer says.

But workshop members say George is more than an inspiring writing coach. As one puts it, “She’s a hoot!”

Whenever the word “crazy” is mentioned in the workshop, George and a couple of other members will break into a chorus of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

The group’s camaraderie isn’t relegated solely to the workshops, however. George once organized a movie night to see “French Kiss,” and they all stopped off to buy berets on the way to the theater. They continue to have beret-optional gatherings. They also get together for “bad movie nights,” and once a year they assemble for their weekend writer’s retreat in a Ventura condo.

“It’s very much like a family, really,” George says.

*

George begins her day on an exercise bike in the room next to her study, followed by breakfast and a workout on a weight-training module.

By 9, she’s in her book-filled study. Yellow notes, reminders for her current novel, form a halo around her computer terminal.

One note lists her current novel’s 10 subplots. Another lists characters’ names she doesn’t want to forget (“They’re minor, but important”). Another lists items--ranging from a key to a ferry schedule--”that can be interpreted as clues and need to be dealt with.”

On George’s desk are 30 pages of character analyses. More stacks of paper represent her research on Islamic beliefs, on the town that is the setting for the novel, on poisonous spiders and fossils. There are transcripts of her research interviews, ranging from a girl who helped her learn Pakistani culture to the owner of a mustard factory.

Still, George doesn’t jump right into work. She spends 15 or 20 minutes reading about writing. Recently she’s been reading from Anne Lamott’s book about her writing experiences, “Bird by Bird.”

George also looks back at a journal she kept while writing “In the Presence of the Enemy.”

“It sort of reminds me that any particular fears I have right now about the project I’m working on are fears that I’ve had before,” she says. “I haven’t had kids, but writing a novel is a lot like I would imagine childbirth to be: It’s painful, but then you have the baby, and you recover from the pain.”

George’s editor in New York helps her deal with the pain. They talk frequently by phone.

Explains Miciak: “She’ll run through the various scenes when setting them up and trouble shoot with me: ‘Does this work? Would a character do this?’ It’s like a tennis match shooting these questions back and forth.

“It is the most exhilarating author relationship I have. She tests my mettle again and again.”

Miciak says George always does her homework.

“I have no other author who is quite so diligent about running plot outlines, character sketches, etcetera, before she even starts to write the novel itself. She’s so determined it’s going to be perfect. She drives herself that hard.”

Although Miciak works with her on plot and characterizations, George’s English editors serve as fact checkers. They scrutinize the manuscript for violations of British vocabulary, anachronisms or even whether a certain road runs north or south.

“It can get bloody at times,” Miciak says with a laugh. “They’ll say nobody uses this word or thinks this way or says this, and she always finds three to five examples where they do think, say or do it.”

*

George has never been daunted writing about a country she knows only as a visitor.

“I always learned what I needed to learn for a given book and don’t worry about anything else beyond that,” she says.

She learned, for example, about the British public school system when she wrote “Well Schooled in Murder,” cricket for “Playing for the Ashes” and British government and tabloid journalism for “In the Presence of the Enemy.”

“So whatever I’m doing, I’m learning that particular segment, and over a period of time you sort of build up a backlog of stuff that you know, of expressions that people use, ways people interact, products that they buy, things like that,” she says.

George begins each novel by visiting the part of England she has chosen as a setting, taking pictures and soaking up atmosphere.

Although she can create plots out of her own imagination, she says, “I’m not good at creating settings out of my head. I need to really be able to see the setting, and when I see the setting I find that my mind just comes alive with all kinds of plot possibilities.”

So much time was spent traveling to England for research, in fact, that she decided to buy a flat. It’s the fourth floor of a 19th century mansion near the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. She has furnished it with antiques and, she says, it came with its own ghost:

“You’re going to laugh, but the ghost manifests in a very strange way: through the olfactory. In other words, you smell him. You do ultimately see him, but you smell him first. It is a very strong male body odor.”

George’s ghost, a diagonal shaft of vaporous light, comes and goes. Not to worry, though. “Actually, I think it’s somebody who’s real concerned about me,” George says. She’s in no rush to get to the bottom of the vaporous mystery but figures one day she’ll investigate the history of the house.

Honigman, one of two workshop members George has hosted in the flat, was less impressed with the possibility of seeing a ghost than having George as a tour guide.

She was thrilled when George took her to the murder site in “Playing for the Ashes” and the house that served as the model for the home of Thomas Lynley’s best friend, Simon St. James, an independent forensic pathologist.

Says Honigman: “It’s like going to England with Arthur Conan Doyle and he shows you where Sherlock Holmes lived.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Elizabeth George

Background: Age 47. Born in Warren, Ohio, and moved to Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay Area as a child; has lived in Huntington Beach since 1973. Divorced in November after 24 years of marriage.

Passions: Writing, reading, theater, movies, skiing, photography, gardening.

On what makes a good mystery: “I think it’s really the same as what makes a good novel--and that is good characters.”

On why she doesn’t write from personal experience: “If I was writing about what I knew, I would have been writing about being a classroom teacher. I always preferred to look toward a more exotic world.”

On why she doesn’t move to England: “So much of what we do in writing is to be able to pull the telling details out of what we see and what we hear. That’s why I don’t write about the United States, because I don’t even notice the details. By just going to England periodically, I stay fresh for all those really unusual things that bring a story to life.”