Today’s issue features author Emily J. Edwards! Emily’s A Girl Friday series is a nod to noir: in 1950, secretary-turned-investigator Viviana Valentine, solves crimes in New York City.
Book two, Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River, is out now. In today’s interview, I chat with Emily about 1950s misconceptions, historical research, her bookish podcast, and more.
Connect with Emily on Instagram, Twitter, and her website. Subscribe to her newsletter here. Grab a copy of Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River from your favorite retailer here.
Hi Emily, thanks for joining! Viviana Valentine Goes Up the River is book two in your Girl Friday Mystery series, which stars an intrepid secretary-turned-investigator in post-World War II New York. What inspired Viviana’s character and the noir theme for the series? Are there any mystery books or authors that influenced your writing in particular?
So much of what defines noir is the cynicism of the text—and I think I was really feeling that with all the talk of “the way things were.” Can’t we go back to the 1950s?” is an incredibly disturbing question to ask; while most people who ask it are desperate for the candy-colored illustrations of homemaker magazines or fuzzy memories of parents and grandparents, I wanted to show, in a way, how awful the 1950s were. Not only were they not even remotely as modern as people think they were (I implore people to realize Mad Men’s timeline began in 1960, not the 1950s), but the myth of promise was just that—a myth. People were still reeling from the war. Nothing was sorted out. If anything, the legacy of the American mid century should be one of absolute dysfunction.
The movies and works of the actual time period spoke to me, of course, but I was also inspired by 1970s reminisces of the genre as well—there’s a fair amount of playfulness in the books, and that was all inspired by Neil Simon’s The Cheap Detective. Because I may be cynical, but I show it through comedy, not tragedy.
With the series set in 1950, what kind of historical research did you do for the books? What challenges did you face when writing for this time period? Can you share some interesting details that you’ve learned?
Like most people, I started out with a much, much more modern idea of what 1950 meant. In my mind, 1950 was much cleaner, better organized, and shinier than what it actually was. A huge source of information for me was the Library of Congress website, where you can find extensive image libraries of American life. I pride myself on writing a great sense of place, so I needed to know how Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, and Manhattan at large looked in actual reality. And man, it was not great. There was a lot more trash on the street, buildings falling down, things felt extremely old—there was no desire to restore as there is today. This was also the time period in which Robert Moses began really going to town on the city—there was more destruction than there was construction.
The most difficult part of writing an historical novel is to remove words from your vocabulary that just simply didn’t exist back then—and this is where you’ll find my occasional anachronisms. I can and do look up stock paint colors available on every car I mention in the text, but in book two, I had a total brain fart and used the term ZIP code. Guess what? Didn’t exist until the 1960s. There were postal codes. But not ZIP codes. (I corrected the goof for the paperback.)
I’d also love to hear more about your podcast, F***bois of Literature, which discusses some of the most infuriating characters in literature. What do you love about hosting this podcast? What characters were you particularly excited to pick apart, and/or who do you want to discuss in the future?
Oh, thank you so much for bringing this up! I’ve been hosting the show since 2019 and I have never learned more about reading and books. I won’t say that I necessarily learned more about literature, as I rarely go into the types of history seminars go into, but I learned about people and my own incredible biases. It’s gotten me to confront a lot of my own judgments and feelings about things—addiction, sex, tourism. It runs the whole gamut. I was extremely lucky to have Esmé Weijun Wang on to discuss Lolita, which was challenging, and certainly, our discussion of Jane Eyre is a perennial favorite (guess what: Viviana Valentine is no little bird). There are two wildly different books I have been begging people to choose to talk about, but no dice yet: Tartuffe by Molière and The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier. I’ll leave you to ponder about those choices, for sure.
The series’ setting—New York City in 1950—offers a gritty, noir backdrop to the mysteries. Why did you pick New York as the setting for these books? Is there another city, or even another historical time period, that you’d also love to write in?
I grew up right outside of the city, and literally everyone in my family for three generations was born there (me, my parents, and all of my grandparents). The great-grandparents were all Ellis Island immigrants, and one of the things that spoke to me the most about New York was that it was one of the last northern cities to desegregate (yup, it was really racist!), but even with keeping with the law-enforced white spaces that Viviana would most likely stick to, you could have all different cultures, and the conflict between them, the politics of their home countries, and confusion. Viv’s encounters eventually get less and less Caucasian, but it’s part of her naivete when the books begin that Viv is a product of her time—sometimes in the worst ways possible.
But believe it or not, I wrote the whole thing from Los Angeles, a city where I lived for 15 years, which is equally as embedded in my brain. I’ve thought about writing another historical, but set in the 1930s in LA, when the city was just turning over from orange groves to movie studios. I don’t think LA gets enough credit for its interesting history. And there are so many amazing novels from just around that time—The Day of the Locust, one of the greatest books ever written for its incredible blend of gothic and noir, and all the Phillip Marlowe books.
Lastly, what are you currently working on? Can we expect more books with Viviana, and/or do you have anything else in the works?
I was extremely lucky that my editor read Viviana Valentine Gets Her Man and asked me for not one book, but three. The third Girl Friday Mystery, Viviana Valentine and the Ticking Clock, comes out almost a year to the day from the first novel, on November 7th, 2023. As of right this moment, there aren’t any more in the series, but hopefully that will change, as I absolutely have more Viv stories tucked away in my mind. Hollywood? Atlantic City? The horse races up in Saratoga? You bet! I’m currently plunking away at a modern noir/thriller set in LA, and I hope to get it to my agent by the end of the summer. Fingers crossed on that!
Thanks so much to Emily for the interview. Sleuths, I hope you enjoyed it! If you aren’t already subscribed, please be sure to sign up for the Cluesletter and get author features like this alongside other mystery goodies, delivered to your inbox every other Tuesday.