Laurie R. King

• Born: September 19, 1952
• Place of Birth: Oakland, California

TYPES OF PLOT: Historical; police procedural; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Kate Martinelli, 1993-; Mary Russell, 1994-

Contribution

Laurie R. King is probably best known as the writer who dared disturb Sherlock Holmes’s century or so of bachelorhood by reinventing him as the mentor, partner, and eventually husband of Mary Russell, a scholar and sleuth whose wit matches that of the fabled detective. Although some Sherlockian purists objected to any tampering with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation, King’s Mary Russell series has won her many fans and critical accolades, including a Nero Wolfe Award. Keeping Holmes’s astute eye and amazing reasoning ability, King takes him out of the world of gaslights and hansom cabs and into the early years of the twentieth century, from World War I through the 1920s. By pairing Holmes with a modern, independent young woman, King breathed new life into the legendary figure and created a character with whom female mystery readers can identify.

However, King is more than a reinventor of Sherlock Holmes. She is also the author of the Kate Martinelli series, featuring a thoroughly modern, lesbian female police detective in San Francisco. Amazingly, these two series began at approximately the same time and have continued to coexist, often with a title from each series published in the same year. While different in style and setting, the Russell and Martinelli series do share certain elements: a strong female protagonist and plots that concern themselves with aspects of women’s lives and women’s rights. Mary Russell, coming of age during and shortly after World War I, lives in a world in which a woman’s place is still strictly proscribed; women could not vote, were discouraged from working in many professions, and were expected to devote themselves to child rearing and homemaking. In her pursuit of freedom and adventure, Russell must, at times, go undercover dressed in men’s clothes. Kate Martinelli, however, lives in a time when women do vote and even hold office; like Martinelli herself, they may work in traditionally male domains, such as police work. This is not to say, however, that subtler forms of sexism and discrimination do not exist; they do, and Martinelli must confront them at work and in her personal life.

King has a background in theological study, and as befits a scholar, all her mysteries are meticulously researched so that the details of time and place ring true, whether in a historical or modern setting. They are seldom simple mysteries, and they bring up complex questions on the path to their complex solutions. In A Letter of Mary (1997), for example, Russell uncovers signs of a deliberate suppression of historical evidence about the role women played in the early Christian church. Night Work (2000) has Kate Martinelli investigating a series of murders of men who have been accused of abusing women or children, an investigation that becomes even more emotionally charged for the detective when she realizes that she may know the vigilante killer. Along with their willingness to take on big questions, King’s novels are also notable for their attention to character development. Her characters are not only extraordinary crime solvers but also fully-rounded human beings with rich personal lives.

Biography

Laurie R. King was born in 1952 in Oakland, California, and grew up on the West Coast. As a child, her family moved often, so that the library was her true home and books her only constant companion. Although reading was a constant in her life, writing came later. King earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and later earned a master’s degree from the Graduate Theological Union. Married in her twenties, she raised two children and did not start writing until the age of thirty-five, when her younger child started preschool. King said that the character of Mary Russell suddenly appeared in her head and began telling her story. The bulk of the first draft was written within a month, but The Beekeeper’s Apprentice: Or, On the Segregation of the Queen (1994), the first volume in the Mary Russell series, was not King’s first published book. Instead, the second work King wrote, A Grave Talent, introducing Inspector Kate Martinelli of the San Francisco Police Department, was published in 1993, winning an Edgar Award. Although there were some initial legal problems over King’s use of the Sherlock Holmes character, these were resolved, and The Beekeeper’s Apprentice was published in 1994.

King found herself in the enviable position of having two successful mystery series, both widely read and critically praised, although the Mary Russell series was the more popular of the two. Mary Russell's story continued for more than two decades with many well-received novels, including the winner of the 2015 Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel, Dreaming Spies (2015), as well as Island of the Mad (2018) and The Lantern's Dance (2024). The Kate Martinelli mystery series also continued into the twenty-first century, with the Lambda Literary Award-winning The Art of Detection (2006) and Beginnings (2019). Although two ongoing series might seem enough to keep most writers busy, the prolific King has also written nonseries thrillers—A Darker Place (1999), Keeping Watch (2003), Lockdown (2017), and Back to the Garden: A Novel (2022)—and a futuristic novel, Califia’s Daughters (2004), released under the name Leigh Richards. She wrote the introduction to a reissue of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902), contributed to How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America (2022), and has published short fiction in several anthologies. With her extensive collection of award-winning novels, she earned the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award.

Analysis

Laurie R. King’s versatility as a writer allows her to span time periods and to write convincingly of places as diverse as World War I-era England, the Middle East, British India during the 1920s, and present-day San Francisco. King’s lifetime love of reading is evident in the fun she so clearly has in paying homage to her favorite books and writers. The Mary Russell series, for example, not only plays with characters from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works but also features “guest appearances” by other characters both real and fictional, including the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), scholar and folklorist, in The Moor (1998); a glimpse of (1888-1935), the legendary British soldier known as Lawrence of Arabia, in O Jerusalem (1999); ’s character Kim in The Game (2004); and crime writer in Locked Rooms (2005). Possibly unable to resist cross-pollination, King brought a mysterious manuscript that may have been written by Sherlock Holmes himself into Kate Martinelli’s world in The Art of Detection.

Beyond the games and literary name-dropping, however, is a writer of serious intent and considerable skill. King’s novels take on emotionally charged and sometimes controversial themes, from feminism to religious beliefs, all within the context of an elegantly plotted mystery. Although the crime and its investigation exist as a stage for the characters to play out their desires and conflicts, it is ultimately the characters who matter. As King said, she does not write whodunits; she writes stories about people within the format of the mystery novel.

A Grave Talent

In A Grave Talent, the brutal murder of three small girls, all of kindergarten age and in the San Francisco Bay area, prompts police officials to team veteran investigator Alonzo “Al” Hawkin with a junior partner: Katarina Cecilia Martinelli, known as Casey (K.C.), or Kate, to her friends. Initially, Al is reluctant to work with Kate, who has only a year’s experience as a detective, and she is wary of his reputation as the terror of the force. However, police protocol determines that when children are involved, a woman should be part of the investigation. It is this sort of casual assumption about women’s roles that underscores a central theme of A Grave Talent: the struggle of women to be who they are in a culture that prefers to place them safely within domestic roles. This theme is highlighted when suspicion falls on Vaun Adams, a woman artist who has served time in jail for a child murder, and Kate and her lover, Lee Cooper, debate the old question of why there are so few great women artists. Are women who defy norms—choosing art, for example, rather than marriage and family—bound to be twisted, perhaps even dangerous?

Choosing to obey or defy behavioral norms for women is also, for Kate, a personal conflict, because Lee, her lover, is a woman. Kate keeps her private life carefully guarded, fearing discrimination from fellow police officers and from the public, but her need to separate her public and private selves causes both internal tension and conflict within her relationship. As Kate and Al learn more about Vaun Adams and get closer to finding the truth about the child murders, Kate must also come to terms with her own true self.

A Grave Talent was praised by critics for its well-drawn characters, psychological complexity, and intricate plotting. It received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

If Sherlock Holmes were a woman, he might look something like Mary Russell, the young, Jewish Anglo-American detective and scholar featured in King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and its sequels. On her website, King describes Russell as Holmes in feminine dress: a woman of the twentieth century and interested in theology but with a mental acuity to match that of the great detective. King has said that The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is the book she wished she had when she was age twelve or fourteen: the story of a bright, independent teenage girl who becomes first apprentice, then an equal partner to Sherlock Holmes.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice begins with the voice of Mary Russell, who tells the reader that she was fifteen years old when she met Sherlock Holmes. Russell, orphaned after a car crash that killed her parents and brother and living with an aunt whom she dislikes, discovers the middle-aged detective in retirement in Sussex, raising bees. Interweaving quotations from a manual on beekeeping throughout the chapters, King gradually and skillfully develops the growing friendship and mutual respect of two extraordinary minds. Holmes teaches Russell his crime-solving secrets, and the two of them, disguised as Gypsies, go undercover to investigate the kidnapping of a visiting senator’s daughter. Finally, with Russell’s “apprenticeship” over, they find themselves confronting a dangerous and relentless adversary whose hidden past contains a connection to Holmes’s most notorious enemy.

Although some purist fans of the original Doyle stories objected to King’s reimagining of Sherlock Holmes, one reviewer noted that King captured the spirit of Holmes with affection for the original creation, yet also created a space for female readers to project themselves into the novel. King’s Holmes is still a brilliant thinker, but he has been humanized and rounded. Russell emerges as a fascinating, multilayered character of considerable complexity. Although their relationship is entirely platonic in the first novel, the stage is set for the more complete partnership that will develop as Russell comes of age.

Locked Rooms

In Locked Rooms, a psychological mystery, King probes deep into Mary Russell’s psyche to gradually uncover a years-old crime buried amid repressed memories. Holmes and Russell, fresh from adventures abroad, visit Russell’s birthplace, San Francisco. The initial reason for the visit is to take care of some business matters, including the house Russell inherited from her parents, but troubling dreams involving locked rooms, flying objects, and a “man with no face” haunt her sleep. Her husband, Sherlock Holmes, fears for her well-being, and with good reason: In addition to her night terrors, Russell faces a daylight attack by an unknown shooter. Holmes believes that the dreams and the shooting are related and hires a young former Pinkerton detective turned writer, Dashiell Hammett, to help with the search. As the layers of Russell’s memory are peeled back, she and Holmes learn that she survived the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and that a crime committed during the quake may be the reason someone killed her parents and is now trying to kill her. Filled with colorful details of San Francisco in the roaring twenties, this Holmes-Russell adventure drew praise for its character-driven story and use of alternating viewpoints, Holmes’s and Russell’s, to tell the tale. The addition of Hammett is a noteworthy and amusing touch, as King imagines the meeting of one of the mystery genre’s greatest writers with one of its most enduring fictional creations.

The Art of Detection

In The Art of Detection, the fifth Kate Martinelli novel, King brings together her two fictional worlds, that of Sherlock Holmes in the 1920s and that of modern-day San Francisco police detective Kate Martinelli. In this work, Kate investigates the murder of a Sherlock Holmes fanatic who has created a gaslit shrine to the fictional detective in his home. Or is Holmes, after all, a fictional character? The discovery of a manucript dating from 1924 and seemingly written by Holmes, may hold the clue to the motivation for a seemingly senseless killing. The nearly one-hundred-page manuscript is reproduced in its entirety in the novel. Told in the first person, it seems to be a pastiche of the Conan Doyle adventures, but its San Francisco setting and the case it describes, involving Billie Birdsong, a male singer who dresses in women's clothes, make it unique among Holmes stories. The manuscript, whether truth or hoax, would be a hot property. Hot enough to kill for? That is what Kate determines to find out.

Booklist praised The Art of Detection for its impeccably logical plotting and its seamless melding of the Russell-Holmes series with the Martinelli series. Readers of Locked Rooms will notice details from the earlier novel resolving themselves here, giving them the sense of being deeply immersed in a fully imagined fictional world.

Principal Series Characters:

• Katarina Cecilia “Kate” Martinelli, an inspector with the San Francisco Police Department, begins the series as a somewhat closed, guarded woman who seems confident in her professional abilities but unsure in her personal life. As a woman in a traditionally male job and as a lesbian in a largely heterosexual society, Kate tends to keep people at a distance. Although she lives with a woman, she refuses to make their relationship public because she fears that being branded a lesbian will hurt her career. During the course of the series, Kate becomes more open about her sexuality and accepting of herself. Her confidence and maturity increase as she takes on new roles, including that of a mother, as she and her life partner raise a daughter together.
• Alonzo “Al” Hawken is a stocky, rumpled police detective, fond of coffee and chocolate doughnuts, with a dedication to his job that makes him nearly a workaholic. His first marriage ended because he paid more attention to police work than to his family, but in the course of the series, he begins a relationship and eventually starts a new family. Initially assigned to work with Kate Martinelli on a case involving a child murder, he grows to like and respect her, and provides a sometimes teasing, sometimes steadying force in her professional life.
• Leonora “Lee” Cooper, an art therapist, meets Kate Martinelli at a time when Kate is still dating men. Although Kate initially tries to deny her attraction to Lee, they fall in love and begin sharing a house and a life. More introverted and analytical than her partner, Lee encourages Kate to accept her true self. During the course of the series, she is seriously injured by a gunshot to her spine and must undergo years of rehabilitation. At one point in her recovery, Lee leaves Kate to spend time alone but decides to return. A quiet but confident presence, she provides Kate with a safe haven from the violence of her work life.
• Mary Russell is a young woman—only fifteen at the outset of the series—whose sharp intellect and unconventional thinking make her only the second woman to win the respect of Sherlock Holmes, with whom she works. An early feminist, Russell defies her era’s norms for feminine behavior. She cherishes her independence, seeks higher education, and, in her detecting adventures with Holmes, often disguises herself as a man and takes unusual risks, sometimes rushing into action while the older, more experienced Holmes prefers to watch and wait. She was orphaned in a car accident that took the lives of her parents and brother and left her physically and psychologically scarred.
• Sherlock Holmes, the detective invented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is perhaps the best-known fictional sleuth of all time, and certainly among the best-known fictional characters. Holmes, as reinvented in the Mary Russell series, is a middle-aged, solitary, and sometimes rather arrogant man whose “retirement” from detecting is constantly being interrupted by cases that call for his expertise. His initially supercilious attitude is modified when he realizes that, age and sex notwithstanding, Russell’s is a mind to match his own. Holmes has given up cocaine injections, though not his ubiquitous pipe, and has modified some of his more Victorian attitudes. This modern Sherlock Holmes, while still a formidable foe of criminals, is also capable of deep love, humor, and human weakness.

Bibliography

"The Author." Laurie R. King, laurierking.com/the-author. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.

Burgess, Michael, and Jill H. Vassilakos. Murder in Retrospect: A Selective Guide to Historical Mystery Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2005.

Child, Lee, and Laurie R. King. How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America. Scribner, 2022.

King, Laurie R. “Historical Mysteries: The Past Is a Foreign Country.” Writing Mysteries: A Handbook by the Mystery Writers of America, edited by Sue Grafton, Writers Digest Books, 2002.

Nichols, Victoria, and Susan Thompson. Silk Stalkings: More Women Write of Murder. 2nd ed., Scarecrow Press, 2001.

Winks, Robin W., and Maureen Corrigan, editors. Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1998.