A Noir Education - Hilary Davidson

I am absolutely thrilled to have Hilary Davidson guest blogging today and talking about her debut novel THE DAMAGE DONE. If you missed it, I reviewed THE DAMAGE DONE last week and it will be available next Tuesday. Hilary has written in many different formats throughout her career. She's worked as a copy editor, a freelance writer; she's been a restaurant reviewer and a travel writer. Hilary is also responsible for the Gluten-Free Guidebook, a website dedicated to helping people find gluten-free places to eat all over the world.

In 2006 she decided to try something she'd always wanted to do...write fiction. And boy did she prove she could do it. Ever since, Hilary has been writing amazing short stories, forcing folks to take notice. Now she is set to release her first novel.

My friend, Pop Culture Nerd, talks about people deserving of being shoved down the stairs. These are people who are blessed in too many ways to be real. Well Hilary is talented, funny, beautiful and one of the nicest people I've ever met. Plus, she's been able to travel all over the world! I think she qualifies for that category! But I know that Hilary's real - next week I'll get to meet her and prove it - and I couldn't be happier for her success.

I am very honored to host her today. She's written a beautiful piece to share here about her grandmother and her grandmother's influence on THE DAMAGE DONE. Please help me in welcoming Hilary Davidson to Jen's Book Thoughts. And everyone mark this day because I know in my heart of hearts we're all going to be looking back in a few years saying, "I knew Hilary when she first started out. And now she's taking over the book world."

Here's Hilary with A NOIR EDUCATION

It’s 8 days until my first novel, THE DAMAGE DONE, comes out, and I’m thrilled to kick off my blog tour at Jen’s Book Thoughts. It’s a bit like a homecoming, since Jen started telling people about me early on. Just after Forge bought my book last year, Jen e-mailed, asking if I would take part in her famous Six-Word Memoir series. After I recovered from my shock, this is how I summed myself up:

Thought small sins pointless. Dreamed big.

I wondered whether Jen might decide I was too crazy to be mentioned on her blog, but she ran my mini-memoir with a lovely intro about my short stories and travel guidebooks. I’d intended to explain my six rather provocative words at some point: they are rooted in a saying of my grandmother’s. Recently, people have been asking where my interest in crime writing comes from, and that has its origins with my grandmother, too. In fact, I think she’s the reason I’m writing crime.

(Hilary's mother and grandmother)

My grandmother was quite the dame. Her name was Maude and when I was growing up, I took for granted her red lipstick and varnished nails, her sharp suits and high heels. Her hair was dyed black and always perfectly set, and she never lost the Northern Irish accent she brought with her when she immigrated to Canada.

She made my friends’ grandmothers seem odd. Other grandmothers baked cookies; mine liked to knit, but she did so while watching pro wrestling. Other grandmothers didn’t tell stories about the time they punched out a guy on a street corner for making an obnoxious remark, and how the guy had gone to the cops, and the cops had laughed at him for getting beaten up by a woman. My grandmother was a voracious reader who bought me armloads of books, including a complete set of Nancy Drews from the 1930s, with blue cloth covers and pen-and-ink drawings inside. She also passed along issues of The National Enquirer, and introduced me to film noir.

She had very firm opinions on movies, just as she had with everything else in life. As far as she was concerned, Barbara Stanwyck was the greatest actress who ever lived. Her favorite actor was Tyrone Power, whom she had a crush on for decades. The classic movies we both loved were shown on television late in the evening. Sometimes we would snap them up on videotape. We would often debate the merits of a movie’s ending. The classic Double Indemnity was a favorite, though we both took issue with the femme fatale suddenly going soft at the very end. (My grandmother’s cynical explanation is still the best: “That’s what you get with men making movies. They always think the woman goes swooning for the man in the end. Good luck to them.”)

My grandmother passed away almost 12 years ago, but there’s not a day that I don’t think about her. That was especially true when I was writing THE DAMAGE DONE. For reasons that are hard to explain, my grandmother’s love of film noir found a home in the heart of Lily Moore, the book’s main character. When Lily was growing up, movies were her primary form of escape from a troubled family life, and in the book, they serve as an important point of reference. (Just like my grandmother, Lily has a crush on Tyrone Power, and it’s no coincidence that her former fiancé looks like him.) Lily is drawn to vintage clothes and mid-century music (Ella, Billie, Sarah), and she has my grandmother’s black hair, fair skin, red lips, and sense of style. Even the shiny black rotary-dial phone in her old New York apartment was borrowed from my grandmother’s place in Toronto.

There was something else of my grandmother’s I gave to Lily, too. My grandmother had a saying, If you’re going to sin, sin big. She believed that you had to put your heart and soul into whatever you did, because once you went off on your own path—in a big way or a small way—you were going to face the consequences for it. That motto could be Lily’s, because she’s willing to plunge headfirst into an adventure (moving to Spain, like her hero, Ava Gardner) or into a mission such as finding her missing sister. It is my motto, and it’s what I based my Six-Word Memoir on. The noir education I got from my grandmother has been passed on, in turn, to Lily.

You can read more about Hilary at her website. She also has a blog for her crime fiction writing called Dark Voyage. And you can check out The Gluten-Free Guidebook here. THE DAMAGE DONE will be released next Tuesday. Hilary has a slew of signing events scheduled; you can check them out here. If you can't make one in person, you can pre-order a signed copy from Mystery Lovers Bookshop, The Mystery Bookstore, The Poison Pen or Murder by the Book.

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