There aren't many husband and wife writing teams.
Writing together can be hard on a marriage . . . how dare you change my prose! . . . but the scene you wrote was dull, just dreadfully dull!
You can picture it.
But Michael Hinden and Betsy Draine have made it work.
Retired college profs write a mystery
"It's a lot of fun to kill off someone," Betsy Draine tells an audience at a book signing.
Her husband, Michael Hinden, agrees. "We weren't permitted to do that when we worked for the University of Wisconsin."
They worked a career there, both as English profs, teaching the great literature of the world.
Five years ago, they hung it up—retired—and found themselves with a lot of time that they hadn't had before. What to do with it all?
"We had become avid mystery readers since retirement," Draine says, "and we wrote a memoir together—A Castle in the Backyard—so we thought why not write a mystery?"
They had an ideal setting for the book that would become Murder in Lascaux.
Hinden and Draine had owned a summer home in southwestern France for 20 years, in the Dordogne valley, more specifically in the village of Castlenaud-la-Chapelle.
And there indeed was a castle in the backyard.
Well, up the hill from their house.
More importantly, there were the caves of Lascaux, little known when the two first got to France, now world famous for the prehistorical paintings on their walls.
The caves evoke a feeling of mystery.
Hinden and Draine found they had a lot there to work with—prehistoric art; the Cathars, a religious cult that settled in the area in the 13th century and whose ancestors are still there; the German Nazis who stashed valuable stuff in the caves, and the French underground who harassed the Nazis during their occupation of the area during World War II.
The two writers worked all of these things into their book.
True to any good mystery, there is a murder—it's even in the title of the book—a crime . . . so there has to be someone who can solve it.
Hinden and Draine had no interest in writing a police procedural, so they created a pair of amateur sleuths—a husband and wife team.
Americans who live in the area.
Toby and Nora Barnes, art historians and antique dealers.
The Barneses become suspects in the murder—someone is murdered in the cave while Toby and Nora are down there in the bowels, touring the place—so they have to clear their names.
The Barneses are witty, urbane, upbeat, in the style of Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles.
It took two years to write the book.
The University of Wisconsin Press, Hinden's and Draine's publisher, has asked for a sequel.
"We've started," Hinden says. "We're done with France"—they've sold that home—"so we may set the story in Sonoma County in northern California where we now rent a house."
That's where Toby and Nora Barnes will continue their sleuthing.
© Jerry Peterson.
