It was at university in Dublin that “Gerry” began. It just seemed to come easier to Dubliners. I had never thought of myself as Gerry, but I got used to it, at least in ordinary conversation. Somehow, though, I never really liked the look of it, written down. Many years later the Abbey Theatre was producing a play of mine and I found myself having a rather ludicrous argument with the marketing person, who decided it was better—and he really was insistent—that I credit myself on the poster and program as Gerry Stembridge. He was mystified that I should prefer Gerard. In the melodrama of the moment I harnessed my inner John Proctor and cried out, “Because it’s my name!” On another occasion a newspaper columnist wrote “Gerry,” then corrected himself, sardonically adding that apparently I was now calling myself Gerard, implying that he had caught me practicing some subtle deception on the public, trying to be someone I was not. Gerard indeed! The affectation of it!
This may account for the genuine relief I felt when, very recently, I discovered that my mother had kept an old poster (as mothers do) from my first college theater production. There was the credit, large (to be candid, rather too large) and proud: Gerard Stembridge. I really had always used my full first name.
By contrast the family name never posed any problem: the joy of difference. For as long as I can remember I loved how unusual it was. In my school there were many, many Gerards (or “Jur”s) but only one Stembridge. Our family was the only Stembridge in Limerick. There were no others in the phone book, I never encountered another in Ireland. With a name so particular it felt almost a duty to put it out there. Lack of skill rendered athletic fame out of the question. Neither science nor mathematics was ever my thing, so I was never likely to invent or discover anything. I might have tried politics, but luckily I preferred writing.
However, despite the pride in the family name, a pseudonym has always seemed an attractive, even romantic notion, even better if the real name can be buried in it. A full anagram of Gerard Stembridge is tough. I have thought of only one. How about Bridgete Remsgard? I like that it’s female; the family name actually exists; the unusual spelling of the first name is acceptable (think of Karin, Annika, Jo, Leena); and, most excitingly for potential book sales, it has a Nordic noir ring to it.
Ice and Bone by Bridgete Remsgard. Great, except that Google informs me that “Ice and Bone” is already a title. Who’d have thought?
All right then: Dead Elk in the Snow.
Google concedes that one. Let’s see how it looks in dramatic font and large typeface?
REMSGARD
Dead Elk in the Snow
I’m tempted. Seriously. Of course, there is the small matter of writing the book.
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About the book
The Origins of What She Saw
It began at the major Hopper exhibition in Paris in late 2012. Seeing so many of his greatest works for the first time all in one room was, as expected, extraordinarily atmospheric, but the greater and more surprising impact was discovering the profusion of narrative possibilities, in particular the stories of women: mysterious, mostly lonely stories, so many on journeys whether actual or emotional. And in every image a sense of place, so particular, yet somehow creating a profound yet elusive quality of displacement.
The effect was inevitable. Afterward on the real streets of Paris a woman appeared. First she was sitting outside a café—where else?—but not relaxed, her head twisting this way and that, smoking extravagantly. Then she was striding ahead of me, in a hurry somewhere. She hovered by one of those impressive Haussmann apartment entrances, waiting impatiently for someone to open it for her. She grabbed a bike from a Vélib’ station and rode off without checking for oncoming traffic. Then I saw her gazing intently over a bridge into the turbulent Seine. Soon this woman had a name—and, very quickly, two names—and there was now a reason why she was alone in Paris.
That was when it became even more exciting and purposeful to walk around this great walking city. Soon other characters emerged and with them incidents and encounters and a journey, a geography, began to be mapped out. The entrance beneath the green neon DULUC DETECTIVE sign on rue du Louvre was considered and discarded, but it led to Le Fumoir, only a hundred yards away, and a very different encounter. Always the question for me was, where is Lana going, and for what reason? There were trips on the metro, stepping out and stepping back and stepping out again until finally, the destination felt right. And soon it became clear that, whatever was happening, there had to be an urgency and immediacy to it; time was of the essence for Lana; the clock was ticking.
There is a moment when the needs of the character and the realities of the place coalesce and that vital element, the plot, takes shape. It is Paris, so of course language and food and art were always going to play their part, while the old standbys politics and sex mingle in a special way here, never more so than in 2012. Naturally there is satisfaction in finally reaching conclusions about what happens, because thrillers thrive on plot, but there is regret too in the realization that, for the author, much of the fun is over, the adventure of discovering who Lana is and what does she want and why—not just what she saw. Once the story is in place there are still many journeys around Paris, but these feel like a furtive return to the scene of the crime, confirming a detail or finalizing the choreography of an encounter.
But one pleasant mystery remains even now after the work is done: some characters live in places I have never entered, certain events occur behind doors never open to me. Unlike Lana, who could not resist stepping into the private elevator, I prefer not to cross these thresholds, so that it will always feel special to pass by a certain door or look up at windows on a certain floor and wonder, what is the story?
Read on
Have You Read? Gerard Stembridge’s Favorite Kind of Thriller
Some thriller writers imagine the future, others like to re-create the past, and most prefer to stay in the here and now, the world they live in. There is another kind of thriller I love to read: the contemporary thriller from the past, particularly the mid-twentieth century. I recommend four, though there are many more just as brilliant. If you haven’t read Double Indemnity (James M. Cain, 1936), The Mask of Dimitrios (Eric Ambler, 1939), Strangers on a Train (Patricia Highsmith, 1950), or A Bullet for Cinderella (John D. MacDonald, 1955), then considerable pleasures await you. They are great stories, written with deadly economy, but they have also left us a special legacy: the moods and colors of the world as it was then, the language and viewpoints of those living through that time. So in The Mask of Dimitrios, Eric Ambler, at the precise moment he wrote, was observing the mood of suspicion and dread in Europe on the brink of war. The Great Depression underpins the brooding tone of Double Indemnity, and A Bullet for Cinderella reeks of the angst of a generation that survived a world war only to end up dying in Korea. Highsmith’s observation of and contempt for pampered, dunpleasant young white men in the patriarchal America of 1950 is real and immediate in Strangers on a Train. None of these writers are looking back to an earlier time. They live in the world of their stories and have no idea what the future will look like. It was not remotely in their minds how readers seventy years later would respond.
This simple reality not only affects the prevailing tone, the broad sweep of politics and life in these classic contemporary thrillers, but also offers special delight in the throwaway descriptions of social behavior or daily routine that effortlessly put the seal of authenticity on these stories. Whereas the modern writer of period thrillers will carefully insert specific information as evidence of good research and the reader will admire the meticulously created “period atmosphere,” contemporary writers from the past offer up quotidian detail without any sense that they are creating a kind of social history. When John D. MacDonald has the teacher, Leech, mention that “I once had eight Judys in one class. Now that name, thank God, is beginning to die out,” he is not intending to offer the twenty-first-century
reader a telling detail about the popularity of certain names in 1955, but simply having Leech say the thing he would be likely to say. When we learn that a character has no phone and must go to the corner store to make a call, MacDonald is not thinking how quaint this will seem to a reader decades later. James M. Cain has his protagonist, Huff, tell us “I pitched my hat on the sofa,” and later has him smoke on an observation platform at the end of a train, but he was not including these details because he divined that a time would come when few men would wear hats, there would be no observation cars, and smoking would be illegal anywhere on a train. Patricia Highsmith was not thinking of how readers now might yearn for the kind of train service where, like Bruno in Strangers on a Train, we could order “a delicious lunch of lamb chops, french fries and salad and peach pie washed down with two scotch and sodas.” When Latimer in The Mask of Dimitrios buys a “pneumatique letter card . . . and drop[s] it down the chute,” it is merely plot detail for Eric Ambler, not an opportunity to point out a curiosity of the Paris postal system.
It is in the accumulation of all these little gems—a fashion reference, the cost of a hotel room, the time of a train, an unusual piece of slang—that the world of these stories takes shape and comes alive. What I find intoxicating about these books is that instead of admiring a modern writer’s brilliance in re-creating a particular period, I get to know it as if walked through it by a native guide. Beyond the considerable pleasure of the gripping yarn, these classic thrillers just feel genuine. The reader is connected directly to a voice out of the past, not remembering the past as a grandparent might, nor reconstructing it as the writer of period fiction does. These books are a primary source, alive and immediate. Imagine how our contemporary thrillers will read in 2080?
In Strangers on a Train, Highsmith has the killer, Bruno, ride a merry-go-round observing his prey, munching a hot dog as Sousa’s “The Washington Post” march plays. It is a marvelous moment of tension (irresistible to Hitchcock when he made the film version) but is wrought from the most mundane elements of a 1950 amusement park. Highsmith probably strolled around one, enjoying her wicked imaginings.
Reading contemporary thrillers out of the past is a special experience. One to treasure.
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PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF GERARD STEMBRIDGE:
What She Saw
“Gerard Stembridge had me by the lapels; he’s found an entirely new way to drop a civilian into the middle of a delectable and elaborate conspiracy. Even better, the civilian in this case is the resourceful, unreasonably-elated, and hard-to-anticipate Lana Turner. What She Saw is a book for anyone who loves Paris, hates bullies, and sometimes misses her meds.”
—David Shafer, author of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
The Effect of Her
“Extraordinarily vivid, knowing, and satisfyingly irreverent.”
—John Banville
Unspoken
“One of the most interesting writing minds this country has produced in recent decades . . . Stembridge is a man of formidable talent.”
—Irish Independent
“What great literature (or one kind of it, at least) should be, a marriage of the personal with the political and social . . . one of my books of the year, if not the book of the year.”
—Daily Mail
Counting Down
“A white-knuckle ride.”
—Metro
“Skillfully ratchets up the suspense. . . . A compelling twenty-first century morality tale.”
—Irish Times
CREDITS
Cover design by Joanne O’Neill
Cover photographs: © Athena Plichta/Offset (Paris); © PhotoAlto/Michael Mohr/Getty Images (street); © picturegarden/Getty Images (car)
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WHAT SHE SAW. Copyright © 2017 by Gerard Stembridge. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
P.S.TM is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
FIRST EDITION
Film strip illustration © Sharapanovochka / Shutterstock
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stembridge, Gerard, 1958- author.
Title: What she saw / Gerard Stembridge.
Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : HarperPerennial, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016035894| ISBN 9780062568984 (paperback) | ISBN 9780062569004 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6069.T419 W47 2017 | DDC 823/.914--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035894
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EPub Edition May 2017 ISBN 9780062569004
ISBN 978-0-06-256898-4 (pbk.)
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