Gin Kelly, the wicked redhead, is back! We chat with author Beatriz Williams about The Wicked Widow, which is the next installment in the Wicked City series, along with writing, book recommendations, and more!
Hi, Beatriz! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I was the curly-haired girl hiding in the corner stacked with books, the human encyclopaedia disguising a dark, earthy imagination behind her squeaky-clean forehead. Unless we’re close friends, you’d have to read my stories to know what I’m really thinking, and even then it’s a good idea to peer between the lines.
As the year gradually draws to a close, how has your 2021 been?
It’s been a little too much like 2020, frankly—flickers of hope followed by disappointment, constant interruption by the outside world. I don’t think I’ve ever been so restless to jettison the old clutter into the nearest Dumpster and start again from the bare walls, but I have four children to put through college, so any radical transformations will have to wait.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
My first book was that Mother Goose collection with the checkerboard boarder, which my mother caught me reading in the hallway at midnight when I was four years old because I didn’t want to wake my sister by turning on the light in our bedroom. I can’t pinpoint a single book that made me want to write my own—they did that together in a collective uprising—but I do remember reading These Happy Golden Years over and over again, aged nine or ten, all fevered with imagination. The other day on my racehorse Twitter I came across a colt named Almanzo and died of joy. As for the book I can’t stop thinking about—hell, there are so many, and sometimes they pop back into my head after the passage of years. If I have to pick one, I’ll go with Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, set in the British Navy during the Napoleonic wars, on the grounds that they constitute a single long elegiac story and also one of the great achievements in fiction.
The Wicked Widow is the third installment in your Wicked City series and it’s out October 26th 2021! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Wicked is as wicked does.
Where did the inspiration for this installment come from?
Desperation. I am an optimistic person by instinct, but 2020 really did me in. There was the catastrophic daily litany of news, bad enough on its own, but the blight seemed to leach into everything, every cranny of life. Both personally and professionally, I encountered a series of really soul-crushing setbacks. I needed to recover my mojo in order to survive, so I turned back to Gin Kelly, who is the queen of mojo and my wellspring of writing joy. Besides, I had always wanted to continue the Wicked City series, which left off at the end of The Wicked Redhead with all kinds of dangling threads that my diehard readers—God forever bless them—kept badgering me to pick up again. I wanted to start connecting all the dots I’d set down in the first two books and start revealing the master narrative behind it all, which brings together Schuylers and Marshalls and Hardcastles and long-forgotten plot points from eight novels ago into a grand tapestry of the twentieth century. This is the world inside my head, I’m afraid.
What can readers expect?
I really let go with this book. I held nothing back. I wanted to meddle in the darker side of human nature, the urges that lurk beneath the civilized surface, what we’re capable of when pushed into shadow. I wanted to talk frankly about sex, about human nature. I wanted to talk about how sexual attraction forces our destinies, about all this Freudian business of life and death instincts, about Jungian archetypes and how they shape the way we treat each other and the world around us. All the Wicked City novels are essentially morality plays—I set the series in the 1920s for that reason—and The Wicked Widow pushes both Gin Kelly and her modern-day foil, Ella Dommerich, into territory that requires them to make difficult choices, to really think about who they are, what they stand for, whom they can trust, what they’re prepared to sacrifice for those they love, how to resolve the conflict between duty and self. Each scene, each action, even Gin’s voice is meant to provoke a visceral response that forces the reader to engage in the book’s moral universe, because that’s what storytelling is supposed to do—explore the complexity of human reality and moral argument. To give you an idea, it’s the first time my editor actually asked me to tone down a scene that she thought was a little too extreme. So it’s a wild ride, packed with twists and revelations about Gin’s past, about Ella’s past, about the Schuyler and Marshall and Hardcastle backstories, and of course about the vast bootlegging conspiracy that forms the dramatic backbone of the series. Some major characters will meet their ends. Others will step into new roles. And the bond between Gin and Anson—as well as the bond between Ella and Hector—will be tested as never before.
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
The only challenges to writing The Wicked Widow were the external plagues I wrote the book to banish. It was absolute catharsis to return to Gin Kelly’s world, to return to the rhythm of storytelling as an escape from reality. I did make one narrative wrong turn—I went too far in a certain direction and had to backtrack and tame my initial impulse, so to speak—but even that detour taught me a lot about one of the secondary characters and brought me much more into sympathy with him. The real challenge came after I was finished, because I hadn’t told my editor I was writing it. I think she’d mentally shelved the series until some more auspicious point to pick it back up again, and it was actually quite fun to send off the email saying “Surprise! I just wrote the next Wicked City book!” I wasn’t there to see if she shrieked with delight, fell off her chair, or rolled her eyes, but her public response was graciousness itself, bless her.
Were there any favourite moments or scenes you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
The Wicked Widow is literally packed with those scenes—there are just so many moments of high dramatic or emotional tension that I kept returning to them as I wrote, actually wallowing in the story while I was still writing it. But I think my favorite section is Gin and Anson’s honeymoon—if you can call it that—in the Adirondacks. It’s idyllic and sensual yet still suspenseful, told in Gin’s dry, sly voice. The action sets up all the later events, and of course it ends with a bang!
Will we be seeing more of Gin?
I wasn’t sure if this book might be the last, but somehow on the last page both Ella and Gin encounter twists that suggest More to Come. I adore writing both characters, and I already have their ongoing narratives sketched out in my head. Of course, in the end it’s up to my publisher to continue the series.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
The best advice came early, from an agent reading a manuscript of mine in some kind of writing contest. She didn’t take on the novel, but in her evaluation she told me I needed to make sure each scene had a clear purpose—it should either advance the plot or reveal something important about a character. That’s obvious, of course, but the way she held up a certain scene as an example—I think the protagonist was on a foxhunt, a fine, evocative sequence described in luscious detail, very Trollope, very Flambards, nothing whatsoever to do with the actual story—forced me to look at each page of the manuscript with a fresh eye and judge whether it needed to exist, or if it just killed time. And from there I went further—how do I make each word and deed count? How do I extract the maximum torque from each sentence, so that even when nothing much seems to be happening, there’s a lot going on. As for the worst writing advice—probably something about adjectives. I’ve learned to discard anything that sounds like a rule.
What’s next for you?
I’m looking forward to rejoining my best friends (and fellow bestselling authors) Karen White and Lauren Willig for the release of our latest collaborative novel, The Lost Summers of Newport. It’ll be out in May and it’s a doozy, as Gin would say.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
So much fantastic historical fiction on the horizon, including The Vanished Days from Susanna Kearsley and Her Hidden Genius from Marie Benedict. I’ve also been gulping down Ann Patchett’s backlist—as a lifelong (and I do mean lifelong) operagoer, I came into her books via Bel Canto, and I’m simply blown away by the way her restrained lyricism and staggering storytelling talent. On the nonfiction side, I recently finished Ben Macintyre’s Agent Sonya, which feeds my Cold War imagination.
