We chat with author Karen Odden about An Artful Dodge, which sees Victorian London come to vivid life in this riveting heist novel about an all-female thieving gang and one young woman’s heroic plan to escape a life of crime.
Hi, Karen! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
First things first, I’m a research nerd. I first began studying the Victorian era in 1996, when I was in grad school at NYU, where I was wrote my PhD dissertation on Victorian railway disasters. I was interested in the way medical, legal, and popular literature written about 1860s railway accidents and injuries laid the groundwork for Freud’s theories of “hysteria” in the 1890s, WWI’s “shell-shock,” and today’s PTSD. After graduating, I edited for the academic journal Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP), wrote introductions for Victorian titles in the Barnes and Noble Classics series, and taught Victorian and Modern literature at UW-Milwaukee. When I turned to writing fiction, I plundered my dissertation to write a mystery about a young Englishwoman in 1874 London who experiences a trainwreck. That became A Lady in the Smoke (2016), and I’ve camped out in 1870s London for all my books since.
Other things about me? I was born and raised in Rochester, NY; my husband and I moved around a lot but have lived for 20 years in Arizona, where I love to hike the desert. I have two wonderful 20-something kids, adore beagles, and can’t grow plants.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I think I was nine. I wrote a short story about a girl who owns a wild horse, cribbed very transparently from The Black Stallion. My dad kept the whole series from when he was a boy, and I tore through it. I went through a serious horse phase, though I only owned imaginary ones.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Nancy Drew #1, borrowed from my friend Laura Jean
- The one that made you want to become an author: Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting, which I read in the very 70s fur-covered recliner in my grandmother’s library.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: From childhood? The Witch of Blackbird Pond. Or Anne of Green Gables
Your latest novel, An Artful Dodge, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Grimy London. Clever women thieves.
What can readers expect?
The book centers on twenty-year-old Kit Jimeson, the most accomplished member of an all-women thieving ring operating in London in 1879. Kit is responsible for her sister Sarah, age 14, who has just gone out in service as a scullery maid in Mayfair. After one of the thieves is caught and sent to prison, Sarah begs Kit to leave the ring; Kit says they don’t have enough money yet, but she will try. Then the beautiful former thief Maggie Wirth O’Connell returns from a penal colony in New South Wales (now, Australia), where she’s been a convict for 20 years. She has a scheme for revenge against those who put her away, and she needs Kit to carry off an almost impossible jewelry heist—and makes it impossible for Kit to refuse.
Readers can expect authentic historical detail. I’ve been studying, reading, and writing about Victorian London for thirty years, and I still find historical nuggets that give me the “Wait, WHAT?” feeling I love, but I know my way around this world, so my books are often praised for being “well-researched crime fiction” and “historically accurate” without bogging down in descriptions.
That said, my books are always, at their heart, about relationships. This is a heist novel, but it’s also a book about loyalty between women—between sisters, among friends, among thieves. What does loyalty look like? How is it different for different relationships? How does it change? What will we do for the people we love?
Where did the inspiration for An Artful Dodge come from?
I made a trip to London to visit my daughter Julia who was studying abroad for a semester. One stormy December night, with our umbrellas turned inside out, we ducked into the Great Scotland Yard Hotel, which I’d wanted to see. It’s now run by Marriott, but it’s a Victorian-themed hotel, located where the Scotland Yard police division was in the 1800s. The foyer had glass cases filled with 19th-century crime memorabilia (be still, my nerdy heart), and the bar was called The Forty Elephants. I thought the name alluded to Britain’s imperialism in India and Africa, homes of real elephants. But no – these forty elephants were a gang of women thieves operating out of Elephant and Castle, a crime-ridden neighborhood in Southwark, south of the Thames, beginning in the 1870s. I don’t know what expression I had on my face, but when I looked at Julia, she said, “You’re thinking this is a book, aren’t you?”
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I loved writing Kit Jimeson, my heroine, partly because I researched all the women thieves from that period! Who knew there were so many? Pirates, jewel thieves, fences, con artists. And they were clever and shrewd and quick on their feet.
But I also loved researching Maggie Wirth O’Connell—the antagonist. I was fascinated and appalled by the history of impoverished London women who were transported to the penal colonies—for stealing as little as a few yards of ribbon—and then left there for 7 or 14 or even 20 years. In these colonies, there was one woman for every seven men. What did these women have to endure? And what would such an experience do to someone? Maggie comes back full of rage and resentment, but she comes by it honestly.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
Elephant and Castle in Southwark, south of the Thames, is an area of London that’s new to me. (My previous books have had characters from Whitechapel and other areas north of the river.) I’ve never even been there in real life—although, like everything else in London, it’s changed a good deal in 150 years. So I hunted around for anything I could find on Elephant and Castle in the 1870s and ‘80s. I really had to scrounge because there isn’t much online and very few photographs readily available. Fortunately, I have some good books on my shelf about the Victorian underworld, and I reread sections on thieves, gangs, smuggling, brothels, bookies, railways, crimes, pawnshops, murders, and stagecoach inns. I drew upon those to imagine what E&C might have been in 1879; it was like gathering pieces from a variety of jigsaw puzzles to assemble a new image.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently at work on the sequel to An Artful Dodge about a series of art thefts from wealthy homes during the 1880 London Season by a very clever, daring thief. As a result of certain clues dropped with the first stolen painting, Inspector Stiles suspects Kit or some of her old thieving ring might have something to do with it … so Kit gets involved in the case.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up? Any you’ve read so far this year that you’ve enjoyed?
Some books I’ve really enjoyed this year:
- Jacinda Ardern’s memoir, A Different Kind of Power
My husband and I took a trip to New Zealand, and I picked this up in the Auckland airport. Ardern was the Prime Minister during Covid, and one of three women PMs in that country. - Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game: Why we fall for it every time
This book outlines the 7 distinct steps to a long con and what suppositions and expectations most people bring to an encounter, making each step a likely success. It was unsettling, for it made me uneasily aware of how there are people out there who instinctively prey on our desires for belonging, for believing, and for not wanting to appear the fool. This is a primer on the con, with psychology thrown in, and accompanied by vignettes about accomplished con men including Madoff and Jim Bakker. Fascinating. - Ariel Lawhon, The Frozen River
Atmospheric and historical, a propulsive page-turner. - Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore
Intense and beautifully written. It’s a novel, not a mystery, but it has the locked room feel, with a small family on a remote island. - Michael Koryta, Die Famous
This book doesn’t come out until September; I read an advanced copy for review. But I want to feature it here because I thought it was excellent. A historical crime novel set during the Depression, it’s told in three separate stories. The language is fresh, and though every reader will see heartbreak coming, the pages fly. Excellent fare for fans of William Kent Krueger’s historical novels, J.R. Moehringer’s Sutton, and Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang.
I’m also looking forward to my friend Mariah Fredericks’s Murder on 34th Street (October) and Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by V.E. Schwab, which I’m reading for a book club in the fall.
