527. Killers of a Certain Age with Deanna Raybourn

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hello there! Thank you for inviting me into your eardrums. I’m Sarah Wendell, and this is episode number 527 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. Every time the number gets higher I get a little bit more excited. This week my guest is Deanna Raybourn. I have been talking about Killers of a Certain Age for weeks, and now I get to talk to the author! Deanna is going to talk about, obviously, her new book and the power of being underestimated and the painfulness of being expected to disappear as you age. So please join us for a very casual discussion of hypothetical and actual murder, misogyny, destroying the patriarchy, and how aging’s kind of awesome.

I have a compliment! It’s my favorite thing!

Hello Midnight Reader! People who went to elementary school with you remember how fun and talented and joyful you are and remember you with great fondness, and your present-day friends? They think the same thing!

If you would like to have a compliment of your very own, or if you would like to support the show, have a look at our Patreon! And if you have supported the show, thank you, thank you, thank you! A very special hello to Qualisign, who joined us in this past week. Welcome! Welcome to the show! If you would like to join our Patreon, it would be most awesome if you did, especially because we have nifty things planned for this fall, including a Discord server for the Patreon community, quarterly gatherings of crafting and books, and, you know, more silliness and mayhem. So have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches if you would like to join, and thank you as always, deeply, for all of your support.

Hello, Patreon community. You are fabulous.

This episode is brought to you in part by my favorite comfortable, washable shoes, Rothy’s. I have never been anyone who gets obsessed about shoes. I get obsessed about food, get obsessed about romance novels, but shoes, not as much. Until I found Rothy’s! They are comfortable right out of the box, which is a new experience for me in my lifetime. They have incredible styles and options. It’s actually dangerous for me to go to the Rothy’s website because I see all of the styles and all the colors and I want all of them, and third, as you’ve heard me say, they’re washable, which is amazing to me. I recently returned from a two-week vacation, and yes, I brought two pair of Rothy’s with me. One, my blue Points, because if I need to look dressed up they are the go-to, and they weigh nothing, so it’s no big deal to pack them. But the pair I wore the most were my Lace Up Sneakers. They’re wonderful: they stretch, they’re comfortable, and they’re washable, and I was running around through volcanic dust, sand, and airports, and wow, did they need a little visit with the washing machine. Now they look brand new! I tend to pack using a packing list, and more often than not I build my outfits around what pair of Rothy’s I can wear with them. Step up your shoes and accessories this summer and get ready to be asked, are those Rothy’s? Plus get twenty dollars off your first purchase at rothys.com/SARAH. That’s R-O-T-H-Y-S dot com slash SARAH.

This podcast episode is brought to you by Ritual, a vegan-friendly multivitamin that is delivered to your door! I’m very much a set-and-forget-it kind of person. I like solutions that are easy, that I can trust, and that I don’t have to think about because what, what is time anyway? I have no idea. And I like Ritual because it is simple: I never have to remember to order more, and I know what each ingredient is. Ritual has a first-of-its-kind traceable supply chain, so I can see where all of the key ingredients come from and why they’re in there. They don’t just say, take our word for it; they show me the proof. Their multivitamin has USP verification and a peer-reviewed and published clinical study. All their products are vegan and non-GMO and third-party tested, so I know I can trust them. I can see where each labeled ingredient comes from down to its supplier, whether it’s a vitamin D from the UK or omega-3 DHA from microalgae in Canada. I like my nerdy vitamin. I also love how easy it is with Ritual: they’re delivered to my door, free shipping; I can start, snooze, and cancel my subscription anytime. Start a vitamin ritual that you can trust. To get started, visit ritual.com/SARAH today and get ten percent off your first three orders. That’s ritual.com/SARAH to start your new Ritual today.

All right, are we ready to get started with this conversation, Aging is Awesome, Let’s Destroy the Patriarchy? On with my conversation with Deanna Raybourn.

[music]

Deanna Raybourn: My name is Deanna Raybourn, and I am the author of the Veronica Speedwell Victorian mystery series. We’re on book, I’m writing book eight right now; we’re under contract for book nine, so there’s lots more to come from Victor-, or from Veronica. But right now I think the reason you want to talk to me is for something completely different –

Sarah: Quite.

Deanna: – and that is, that is my contemporary release, my very first contemporary, called Killers of a Certain Age.

Sarah: Eee! Congratulations!

Deanna: [Laughs] Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m just stonking excited about this book.

Sarah: Okay, so I owe you a really big apology, because –

Deanna: Oh, why? What’d you do? What’d you do?

Sarah: – well, so I know that writing a book takes some time.

Deanna: Uh-huh?

Sarah: It takes a few days?

Deanna: Mm.

Sarah: Couple hours.

Deanna: I mean, you know, in a, in a bad week, yeah, a couple days.

Sarah: Yeah, it takes a couple hours, you know, ‘cause all these people on television –

Deanna: [Laughs]

Sarah: – will tell you, like, ohhh, those books! I could bang one out in a weekend; maybe I’ll try to write one someday; and, you know, it, it, it takes a little bit of time to write a book. I’ve done it. It takes some time.

Deanna: A skosh.

Sarah: I fucking inhaled Killers of a Certain Age in one. Damn. Day.

Deanna: [Laughs]

Sarah: I was like, everyone needs to leave me alone. I’m not available. And then I finished it, and I was like –

Deanna: That is, that is not anything you should apologize for; that delights me.

Sarah: Absolutely it is.

Deanna: If your children went hungry and your husband was ignored and the cat didn’t get fed, like, I, I love that. I am eating that for lunch; thank you very much.

Sarah: Seriously, I was outside, and the dogs were snoring, and my kids are teenagers; they can feed themselves.

Deanna: [Laughs]

Sarah: I inhaled this book. Like, I was like, oh, okay, this is fun, and then it was like, nope, no one talk to me. I just devoured it. Holy crap, is this book fun. What will readers find inside Killers of a Certain Age?

Deanna: They hopefully are going to find exactly what you did: some fun escapism about four sixty-year-old female assassins who are there to, you know, kick ass and take names, and they are just not in the mood for the bullshit. And –

Sarah: Yes!

Deanna: – I had so much fun writing this book, and a lot of tears. Like, I cried a lot, because this book was so far – like, you’ve seen my earlier stuff; you see the other stuff that I publish right now; you know how far outside my comfort zone this was. And so I, I, it was a difficult book to write in that regard because I had to just kind of go out on that – anybody who’s seen my business cards knows that there’s an image of a Victorian girl walking a tightrope, and I chose that for a reason: it’s because I like to scare the bejesus out of myself in my work. I like to do things that terrify me? This terrified me way beyond anything I’ve ever done. And it was, but it was a good terror? It’s just everyone, like, you know, when you turn in a draft and you know it’s not quite where you want, there’s the moment where you just, you know, sob into the, the dog’s fur and, and kind of use them as a consolation toy. But it, yeah. Yeah, it was hard. It was hard, but it was just bonkers fun. So much fun to write. And when I got done with it and I showed it to my husband he said, wow! This reads like your Twitter feed. And I went –

Sarah: Oh!

Deanna: – oh, oh, if I had known that was how to write this book, like, that would have saved me, you know, two and a half years of anguish. [Laughs]

Sarah: So it took, it took two years to write this one.

Deanna: It was closer to three, I think.

Sarah: Wow!

Deanna: Was it? Nonono! Nonono. Sorry, doing the math: it was, it was two and a half, yeah, it was two and a half.

Sarah: Wow.

Deanna: But from the time that the idea first cropped up and got discussed with my publishing company to the time when I turned the last draft in and I knew I had finally nailed that book I was, that was two and a half years, and that last weekend I was working on the book because it was the final go-round before it had to go to the copy-, like, this was my last chance to get it, and it finally clicked. Like, it was that last minute, and I spent the ninety-six hours before my deadline in literally the same clothes. This is gross; I shouldn’t be telling you this. I, I rolled out of bed, wrote, fed myself, slept some more. Rolled out of bed, and I literally re-, just – I would say, lather, rinse, repeat, ma’am, but there was no lathering and rinsing. I was feral for the last ninety-six hours. I was home alone, my husband was on a business trip, and the dogs don’t judge, so I was like, this is, this is how it’s going to be: it’s just book and me. And then, you know, when I, when I absolutely have to be fed or take rest I will, but I, I finally, when the book clicks like that and you know, oh God, it’s here; I’ve got it; it finally did, and it all fell into place at the absolute zero hour, and I was like, oh, you know what? Fine. It’s all been worth it. All been worth it. And then, you know, you get the, the semi-hysterical phone call from the editor going, holy shit, this is it; you did it. And you’re like – [tearfully] – thank you! Thank you so much! Yeah.

Sarah: I need to sleep for three days now. Bye. [Laughs]

Deanna: Oh my God, I ugly cried on the phone with her so much when she called me and told me how thrilled she was and how proud she was, and I was like, yeah, I’ve ugly cried a lot over people’s reactions to this book.

Sarah: Aw!

Deanna: So. It’s a book of the heart, Sarah!

Sarah: I understand.

Deanna: It’s a book of my heart. [Laughs]

Sarah: I, I, I wrote one of those; I understand what that’s like. What changed for you when it, when it clicked? Where, what were you going from, and what were you going to?

Deanna: I wish I could tell you exactly what it was. There are certain parts of the creative process that are just alchemy.

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: You, you don’t know?

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: There is just this mysterious witchcraft that happens when you’re not looking sometimes.

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: I know the formula is you work, and you know when to rest, and you know when to walk away from it, and you know when to come back, and you just – I have done everything my entire career by my instincts, and so –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – that, that’s what guided me. You know, the, the, the problem is I had to write my way into this one. So there were versions of it where they did things that didn’t quite work, or it didn’t make it to the final version, or it was just too convoluted, and it wasn’t enough about – you know, I think once I keyed into the relationships amongst the four of them is when it really hit home –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – and everything kind of just unlocked, because that really is the driving thing: it’s, it’s, you know, the, the, the idea of these four assassins having to band together to take out the organization they work for is, you know, that’s a, that’s, that’s your straight little pitch, you know. That’s, that’s, that tells you what the plot is. It doesn’t tell you what the heart is –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – and the heart is the relationship amongst these four women –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – and, you know, how they end up being kind of found family for each other because, because their work is so strange –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – and, you know, because you can’t exactly be open about what you do for a living with people, and so you’re always, even if you make friendships, even if you have romantic relationships, there’s going to be that wall there because you can never be completely honest, and if you can’t be totally authentic about who you are, then you’re not a hundred percent in that relationship.

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: And neither is the person you’re having a relationship with –

Sarah: No.

Deanna: – because they don’t get to know the full you, so, you know, the idea that these four only really know each other –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – and, and only really trust each other, but at the same time they’ve been friends for forty years, so no one can irritate them as much as one of the other three. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes.

Deanna: So, yeah.

Sarah: They can push each others’ buttons ‘cause they had a hand in installing all of them.

Deanna: Exactly!

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: Exactly. They, they wrote the owner’s manuals –

Sarah: Yes.

Deanna: – so they know exactly how to shortcut everything.

Sarah: And it’s funny because I have a lot of neighbors – ‘cause, you know, you and I both live in sort of the, the, the DC area – I have –

Deanna: The ‘burbs. [Laughs]

Sarah: In the ‘burbs, right. I have a lot of neighbors who have jobs they’re not allowed to talk about.

Deanna: Mm-mm.

Sarah: You know, and so if we have, like, a neighborhood barbecue –

Deanna: For sure.

Sarah: – there are neighbors who are like, oh yeah, I work for this place, and then they very casually change the subject, and I’m like, I, I see that.

Deanna: [Laughs]

Sarah: But I also know, like, there’s a certain part of their jobs that they –

Deanna: Sarah, you’re the nosy neighbor who would, who would have to get killed for your own good. [Laughs]

Sarah: I am – yes. Yes, I am. Absolutely, I am.

Deanna: You’re a national security threat now.

Sarah: I’m a national security threat, oh yes. Yes, I am. Because I, like, I notice; like, oh! Okay. All right. ‘Cause I notice what people don’t talk about as much as what people do talk about –

Deanna: For sure.

Sarah: – and so I know that in those relationships, in a lot of cases, there’s a certain point that they can talk about their work? And then after that –

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – that’s classified; it is not talkable.

Deanna: Right.

Sarah: With these four women –

Deanna: Right.

Sarah: – zero of what they do can be talked about, except –

Deanna: Right.

Sarah: – with these other women. There’s no, like, boundary –

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – it’s all, no, we can’t talk about this at all.

Deanna: No! They have cover identities. You know –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – you, you think that, that Helen’s just doing her DC area housewife thing and, you know, not really knowing what she’s got going on the rest of the time.

Sarah: Oh yes.

Deanna: And, you know, Billie translates textbooks and, you know. So these are, these, the whole idea is that they would live their entire lives kind of under the radar and, and not noticed except when they need to be noticed.

Sarah: Yeah. And the thing that I really liked about the book – again, no spoilers – is that during the course of the story, they have to rely on a lot of stereotypes about women, about older women.

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: They rely on –

Deanna: For sure.

Sarah: – sexism. They use misogyny as camouflage –

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and I found that entirely delicious, especially because, for them –

Deanna: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and I don’t think this is a spoiler to say – they are in their sixties, or they’re reaching sixty, and –

Deanna: Yes.

Sarah: – they’re far beyond their last fuckable day. Now they’re in, like, completely useless person territory: they aren’t reproducing –

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – they aren’t raising children, they are, they are of no purpose in society according to society. It is time for them to –

Deanna: According to our society, yes.

Sarah: Yes, according to our society –

Deanna: Absolutely.

Sarah: – it is time for them to just disappear, or they are –

Deanna: Uh-huh!

Sarah: – absolutely of no import. And that was delicious. They use all of that to –

Deanna: They – yeah!

Sarah: – hide what they’re doing in plain sight!

Deanna: Yeah, they absolutely do, and, you know, because – that, that was a conversation that my editor and I had very early on, the fact that when you are a woman of a certain age, that invisibility becomes your potential superpower –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Deanna: – if you know how to wield it, because, you know, there was, there was a case decades ago, back when the, the, the Iron Curtain was a thing, where in Germany, across the street from our embassy, there was an apartment building, and a little old lady used to sit on her balcony with her beautiful window boxes, and she would just sit there all day long knitting, and nobody thought a thing about it. Well, for years she managed to surveil every last person going in and out of our diplomatic enclave there. She recorded all of it! But nobody looked at her, nobody suspected her, nobody thought a damn thing about her because she was a woman of a certain age.

Sarah: Of course.

Deanna: And, you know, the – and also, you know, there, there’s a very interesting shift, I think, happening too with regard to how we look at women in that age group, because –

Sarah: Yes.

Deanna: – I am fifty-four this year, so I am a Gen X teen, and when I was a teen in the ‘80s and The Golden Girls was happening, fifty-four looked like Dorothy in Golden Girls.

Sarah: Yes, thank you! Oh my gosh. I am approaching the age –

Deanna: But now –

Sarah: – of the Golden Girls, and I’m like, I love the fashion, but that’s not actually me! [Laughs]

Deanna: Exactly! Exactly! And then when you look at, like, all of the women when we were going to the movies who we looked at like Jamie Lee Curtis, Diane Lane, Angela Bassett, Michelle Pfeiffer, they’re all turning sixty right now. Well, look at them.

Sarah: Yeah!

Deanna: They are stunning still!

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: They don’t look like twenty-year-old women; they look like gorgeous, powerful, incredible women who are embracing their age and still getting cool shit done! And I was like –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Deanna: – yeah, that’s something that I want to look at is you’re in this interesting, really interesting liminal space where you can kind of be that woman who is underground and unnoticed and, and, you know, pretend to be a little bit more wallpaper than you actually are, or you can turn it on. But anytime you do that there’s going to be ramifications because you’re not twenty years old anymore. You’re going to feel the aches and the creaks and the, oh God, why, you know, why do my knees hurt? Why can I not – [laughs] –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – why can I not do this anymore? Because that, that is the reality: you are aging. You inhabit your body differently.

Sarah: You do.

Deanna: You know, having gone fully through menopause, I can tell you this is a whole different thing than it used to be. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; in fact, like, from my perspective, ninety-five percent of menopause has been awesome. Like, it’s great and it’s powerful and it’s, there’s so much – I mean, you know full well, because I think the last time you and I saw each other literally face to face we had dinner in New Orleans, and I told you then my give-a-shitter was well and truly broken.

Sarah: Yep!

Deanna: And that was even before I hit full menopause. I was like, oh girl, I can feel the wheels coming off.

Sarah: Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Deanna: And it, it, it just, it puts you in this completely different space, and I thought, you know, these, these are not women who have arrived at that destination yet. They are very much women in transition. There’re some awesome cozy mystery series that are doing sleuths who are in their late seventies and in their eighties, and I love that we’re getting those stories. I just wanted to tell the story that was pitched in between those things.

Sarah: Yes.

Deanna: Because I, I don’t think we see enough of that.

Sarah: Yes. We don’t see that portrayal. I remember there was a meme going around after Wonder Woman the first came out and after the Star Wars trilogy with Carrie, Carrie Fisher came out that we of our generation, we are, we have grown up to see the women who were princesses become generals. Yes!

Deanna: Yes.

Sarah: And we, and –

Deanna: I love that meme. Like, I swear to God, I almost cried when I saw that meme. I was like, yes!

Sarah: Yes!

Deanna: These are women who have aged, and let me, I mean, we all know that Carrie Fisher struggled with issues with addiction and mental health.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Deanna: These are women with battle scars.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Deanna: These are women who’ve had difficult relationships, and yet, and yet there was triumph. There, you know, there, there’s joy, there’s creativity, there’s power, and I, I think that especially the Gen Zs and the, and the Millennials, I think they need to see those role models, and they need to see those women in those spaces who are saying, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re aging but we’re owning it, and we can still get some shit done.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely.

Deanna: So don’t be afraid to become us –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – because you’re going to take it even further than we are, just like we’re taking it further than the generation before us. Don’t be scared of the, of the, the aging and don’t be scared of what comes with it, because it does bring benefits, and it does bring –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Deanna: – compensations, and it brings a whole new set of joys.

Sarah: And as I’ve said, I love aging. It’s such a privilege.

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I like aging –

Deanna: It is.

Sarah: – not only because I get to put down a lot of the things that I used to carry around and worry about. Like, I just, I can let this go; it doesn’t matter? But I watch –

Deanna: Yes.

Sarah: – people younger than me move through their, the decades and I’m like, you remember all this stuff you were convinced you had to know the answers to in your twenties? You –

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – really, really don’t. You can figure that stuff out in your forties and you’re not behind. You’re not doing anything wrong.

Deanna: Or the stuff that you thought you had to care about.

Sarah: Oh yes! [Laughs]

Deanna: I mean, the, the first time I watched the end of a football game and turned off the TV and went, oh, my team lost and I really don’t have to care about – [laughs]

Sarah: I don’t care.

Deanna: The first time you just let some things go that –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – you’re like, you know what? In the entire span of my life, I have perspective, and I see that this is not going to matter at all!

Sarah: Nope.

Deanna: I don’t have to take the mood away from this, and, I mean, it’s just, it’s been, it’s been, it’s incredibly liberating is what it is.

Sarah: Yeah! Now, in the, in the book, the characters use misogyny as camouflage.

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: What was the development process for some of the, the elements in this book that use misogyny as camouflage. Like, did you spot things out in the wild and, like, make a note and be like, I fucking hate this; it’s going in the book?

Deanna: Girl, we live these things. I mean –

Sarah: Yes, we do. [Laughs]

Deanna: – you know, I’m, I’m very active on Twitter, and so, Twitter is very educational. If you are looking to understand what it’s like to be a woman online, Twitter’s a great place to find out! Because you get the best of everything and you get the worst of everything. I mean, I’ve had tweets go viral and, you know, people, like, the threats that have come out of the woodwork have just been appalling, and I’m not even going to tell you what they were. But at the same time, there is so much compassion and connection and uplift and joy and everything else that you could ask for, which is great when you’re a writer because, you know, that’s your virtual water cooler and, you know, like, getting to talk to you, I’m practically giddy; it’s like having three espressos ‘cause I’m like, oh my God, there’s a person in my study! I get to talk to another human! It’s so awesome! I think there’s a lot of what we just observe moving as women through the online space, through the real-life space, and what we experience! I mean, because we’ve ex- – and, you know, the thing is too, there are a lot of things that I think those of us who are of a certain age internalized and did not realize were misogyny –

Sarah: Yes!

Deanna: – and, you know, were acts of misogyny until we got enough away from them that we went, holy crap! That was not cool!

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: Why did I, why did I just think that it was okay to be treated like that? Or why did I think that’s just how it was?

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: And why did I accept that?

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Deanna: You know. And, and, and it’s difficult to undo conditioning and undo societal training and realize when those things are happening directed at you, when, when, you know, you, you feel like you would be making such a big deal of it if you said, don’t tell that joke, or don’t, you know, that remark is not cool, or –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – you know, why, why do I have to do this job at work when, you know, Ted from next door is not doing it? You know, why, why, why? And, and so I think we’re conditioned, especially those of us who are over a certain age, we’re absolutely conditioned by the workplace, by school, to, to kind of dampen that stuff down and say, oh, well, you know, boys will be boys, or that’s just how it is, or – and a lot of it you just, you don’t even necessarily think to question because it’s so present.

Sarah: Yep. It’s –

Deanna: All the time in everything, and so, and when you do question it, there’s so much backlash that sometimes it’s, it’s exhausting you to the point where you just kind of go, oh God. I can’t with this one.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Deanna: I’m just going to let this one slide because I don’t have the, the bandwidth to deal with it right now.

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: And so as you get older and as you get more aware of what these things are and as you get less concerned about what people think of you and more willing to say, hey, that’s some bullshit and I’m going to point out to you that this is your bullshit –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – and I need you to own it.

Sarah: Yeah. That’s hot garbage; how ‘bout we don’t?

Deanna: Yeah!

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: Exactly, exactly.

Sarah: At one point, and I’m, I always stan Millennials and Gen Z, partially ‘cause I’m raising two people in Gen Z, but recently I was using goofy euphemisms for having my period –

Deanna: [Laughs]

Sarah: – and my older child looked at me and was like, Mom! Don’t period shame! Just say you have your period! And I was, like, thunderstruck.

Deanna: Isn’t that amazing?

Sarah: I was just –

Deanna: God, I love the youngs.

Sarah: Yes!

Deanna: I love the youngs!

Sarah: Yes! I was like –

Deanna: They, they speak so frankly about so many things –

Sarah: Oh, I’m in awe. I’m in awe.

Deanna: – that they refuse – they are so, they’re just, they’re amazing and they’re brave and they’re gorgeous and I love them because they’re – and, and this is what I think is so great about when you do have intergenerational relationships, whether it’s with people that you’ve met online or whether it’s with, you know, people you, you gave birth to or –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Deanna: – you know, people, people who are your found family. If you have intergenerational relationships you learn things, because sometimes you’re still carrying around limitations that you didn’t even realize were there –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Deanna: – until somebody says, hey, can I, can I help you see this a little more clearly? And you’re like, wooow!

Sarah: Oh yeah. So with this book, where did you start with what you were writing? Did you start with murder? Did you start with characters? Did you start with characters committing murder? There’s a lot of murder in this book.

Deanna: Oh my God, there’s so much murder.

Sarah: It was really nice to see –

Deanna: They were fun murders, though.

Sarah: Oh, so clever! I mean, if old ladies are making sun tea, I’m now very, very suspicious.

Deanna: Oh my God, you should be. You should be so scared. You know, it’s a, it, it was a combination of things?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Deanna: There were, as the characters were developing, I was also kind of independently looking for kind of interesting and cool ways to bump people off, and, and –

Sarah: As you do.

Deanna: – you know, part of the limitation for this, and, and again, I don’t think this is going to be much of a spoiler is, I did not want to go heavy into using firearms.

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: I did not want to go heavy into using tech. I, part of the underestimating women, women being in the background is, what can we use that people wouldn’t necessarily even think is potentially lethal or is scary or wouldn’t, you know, they wouldn’t blink twice. You know, what are we able to do? It was the, the wildest thing then, because it was months after I turned this book that, that I read where little old women in Ukraine had taken out a number of Russian soldiers by baking rhubarb pies and putting the leaves in the pies and just poisoned the crap out of these Russian – like, killed a couple of them!

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: Because you can’t eat the rhubarb leaf. It’s –

Sarah: Nope.

Deanna: – it’s lethal, and yet the Russian soldiers were just like, oh, look, look! Somebody’s grandma made us pie! This is great! And they were eating the pie, and I thought, God, can you just imagine these little old Ukrainian women saying, yeah, not on my watch?

Sarah: Mm-mm.

Deanna: And baking up – and using their own knowledge of something they had right there. Nobody’s going to think there’s anything suspicious –

Sarah: Nope.

Deanna: – of, you know, somebody’s grandma hanging out in her garden, cutting stalks of rhubarb, and then just quietly forgetting to take the leaves off and baking it up! And I thought, and, and it was just so funny to me to read that because I thought, that is exactly what I did in the book! Not with rhubarb, there are no poison pies, but the idea of taking something that looks innocuous and saying, okay, I’m going to use all my skill, I’m going to use all of my experience, and I’m going to mess you up so bad. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh yeah. One of my favorite podcast interviews that I did, I think it was last year, was with Mikki Kendall about poison clusters.

Deanna: Mmm!

Sarah: Poison clusters in the ‘30s and –

Deanna: Oh my God!

Sarah: – and after the Civil War, where –

Deanna: I adore her! She is amazing!

Sarah: It was incredible. It was such –

Deanna: Yeah.

Sarah: – such a fun conversation, but basically there were all of these people coming back from war. Some of them –

Deanna: Mm.

Sarah: – were not nice before they left and were not nice when they got back, and they came with pensions –

Deanna: Ah.

Sarah: – and they moved, moved back into homes where the family had gotten on perfectly fine without them, and –

Deanna: Yeah.

Sarah: – you can find in the death records, you know, a whole bunch of guys just happening to die of stomach ailments or a fever –

Deanna: Stomach ailments, air quotes. [Laughs]

Sarah: – or a heart attack. And meanwhile they’re all cultivating –

Deanna: Yeah, I don’t know what happened! Joseph got dead! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, and it, and it was a perfect combination of opportunity, who would suspect the loving wife –

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – who happens to have a garden full of poison –

Deanna: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: – and then also really poor food oversight and really bad food safety laws. Like, bad beer could kill you –

Deanna: Yeah.

Sarah: – and so could your wife, either/or. That –

Deanna: We don’t know! We don’t know which it was!

Sarah: We, we have no idea! And the way in which the women in the book use what’s available to them and then hide what they’re doing by things that are socially taboo –

Deanna: Mm-hmm!

Sarah: – adds another layer of security to –

Deanna: Yeah.

Sarah: – to what they’re doing.

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Super great.

Deanna: Yeah, it, it, and, and you know, some of that came out of, as I developed the, the killers’ natural talents and interests –

Sarah: Yes.

Deanna: – it kind of informed what would they would be likely to be doing, how they would be most likely – one of them is much more physically involved in her murders –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – another one wants nothing to do with getting anywhere close to anybody. Some, you know, another one is much more interested in the, the, the chemical applications of, of poisons and, you know, things that look innocuous and, and how you can kill with those. And so, you know, I, so much of it was just born out of the fact that I wanted to have kind of the normal limitations that would be on women who were in this – you know, they don’t have the resources of Q’s lab behind them being able to outfit them with all these gadgets and, you know –

Sarah: Here’s a lipstick; it’s a gun.

Deanna: Yeah! Exactly! They had to go fairly bare bones with their stuff, and, and I wanted it to be very old school because they, they started their training in 1979 –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – so these are women who would have learned how to do some stuff that was old school, you know, because so much of the, the, the reason that they were recruited and trained in the first place is, we want people who can get into places that men can’t naturally go, because women have always been able to get into certain spaces much more easily than men or mixed-gender groups can go.

Sarah: Yep, absolutely.

Deanna: Or because someone who presents as male presents more of a perceived societal threat, whereas someone who presents as female is innocuous and overlooked a lot of times. That’s why, you know, your, your, your maids in Victorian households were the ones who knew everything, because you talked in front of them like they were furniture. You know, they were the ones who washed the sheets, so they knew if you’d been having sex, they knew if you had a missed carriage, a, a miscarriage. They knew if you had a missed period.

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: They knew all sorts of, of details, and so people always end up revealing things that they don’t necessarily intend to in front of a woman. And bearing in mind, I don’t think any of this is biologically driven; I think every particle of this is, is down to societal conditioning. It’s, it’s –

Sarah: Absolutely.

Deanna: – if you are perceived as female, there is an idea that you are going to be more nurturing, or you are going to be less threatening, or you are going to be somehow not as, as much of a, of a factor that we need to be concerned about.

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: You are not as worthy a potential adversary –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – as someone who can be hugely physical and kick my ass, and that’s not to say that someone who presents as female cannot absolutely kick your ass; we’ve all seen that –

Sarah: Oh yes.

Deanna: – but there is always that thing in your head that a man or someone presenting male is likely, likelier to be a predator, who is likelier to harm you, is likelier to present as an enemy. And so women can just get away with more.

Sarah: The number of times I’ve had to say, just because someone thinks they’re entitled to my time, they are not.

Deanna: Yeah.

Sarah: I’m under no obligation to anyone except for like four whole humans.

Deanna: [Laughs] Some of whom you made!

Sarah: Yeah, some of whom I am responsible for and have half my genetic code.

Deanna: There you go.

Sarah: Yep. I –

Deanna: Well, but that’s why on social media I’ve gotten to the point now where if, if someone’s first interaction with me is, is demanding of my time in a way that’s –

Sarah: Mm-mm.

Deanna: – that’s impolite or that is gross or that – I don’t give the benefit of the doubt to any of those folks anymore. I just block and move on. I don’t engage; I don’t try to go figure out –

Sarah: No.

Deanna: – oh, are they being – you know what? It’s, it’s not worth my time.

Sarah: Nope!

Deanna: It just is not, and it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s been revelatory, being on social media.

Sarah: It’s like the idea that the job of an email is to convince you that a response is needed?

Deanna: [Laughs]

Sarah: Just because someone has emailed me does not obligate me to email them back. That has saved me so much time. So much!

Deanna: And you know what? I feel truly honored because you email me back when I email you.

Sarah: Absolutely!

Deanna: And that’s a thing of, that’s a thing of beauty. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh, absolutely! The other thing I love about this book – and this is not a spoiler – is that you mentioned earlier, there are physical ramifications to the strenuous activity that the characters go through, and I will never look –

Deanna: Absolutely.

Sarah: – at action movies the same way again.

Deanna: [Laughs]

Sarah: I’m like, you know you pulled your hamstring, sir; don’t lie. What other elements of honest aging did you really want to include? I particularly like the, the fact that the, the lead character, Billie, she has to do a lot of yoga and stretching to compensate for the amount of physical effort she went through the day before.

Deanna: Right, right.

Sarah: Like, there’s a consequence to the activity that rest is needed, and they have to predict when they need to disappear to rest because they’re going to be doing something –

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – so strenuous.

Deanna: Yeah! You know, that is drawn a hundred percent from life. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh yes. Oh, oh, oh yes.

Deanna: Because that is one of the things I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older is, you know, if I don’t keep up with the yoga, everything just starts to, to lock up, and you’re like, oh, I suddenly complete relate to the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Deanna: Like, I get it. I need to oil these joints; I need to move around. And, and I, I, while I feel like this book has a little bit of a heightened reality to it, and I feel like all action films have some heightened reality to them –

Sarah: Absolutely.

Deanna: – I also wanted there to be a more realistic element that you can’t just do this stuff. You know, you can’t take a, a swan dive off a thirty-story building and bounce off a couple awnings and land on your feet –

Sarah: Nope!

Deanna: – and shake it off. Like, that’s not realistic. And, and I tried to go for just a little bit more realism in the idea that if you have to exert a crap-ton of mental and physical energy to do something, then it is going to take something out of you. You are going to have to kind of withdraw –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – nurse your wounds, rest up, and then even if you were not injured, you’re going to have to kind of marshal your strength for the next go-round. You’re going to have to, you know, I’ve got, we see one of the characters having a hot flash; we see, another one has to take her, her hormone replacement; and, you know, they’ve got, they’ve got, one of them has, has her calcium pills and, you know; because these are all realistic things for sixty-year-old women.

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: You’ve got to figure out, you know, because there’s some sixty – it was so interesting, ‘cause I was on a call recently, I had a meeting with someone who is fifty-one – not even in perimenopause, and by the time I was fifty I was fully menopausal. So the, the journey, it has so many variations to it –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – and I really wanted to show that with these women, that there are, you know, some of them just kind of sailed through, dancing along lightly, and, and don’t have a ton of ramifications of, of, of aging yet, except, you know, maybe the boobs are sagging, but then a couple of the others are feeling it a lot more strongly because that’s the reality, is our –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – experiences are just so variable –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – depending on a lot of factors. And, you know, one of them has been dealing with grief, which has, has had physical repercussions for her.

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna:  You know, she’s, she’s kind of, kind of, you know how grief is, the way it locks you up –

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: – and, and she’s trying to emerge from that. And, and that takes its toll as well!

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Deanna: So it’s, it’s a lifetime of experiences that they are holding in these sixty-year-old bodies, for better or worse, and, you know, a lot of what they’ve done throughout their lives has kind of been on the level of professional athletes. I don’t know a single professional athlete who can get out of bed at sixty going, yeah, I feel great!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Deanna: Without having to manage the, the, the aches and pains and the – I’m, I’m shifting around in my chair; it’s squeaking like hell. I’m sorry; I just realized I needed to oil it. [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh no, you’re fine; you’re fine. I remember saying to one of my husband’s cousins’ wives a couple of years ago after her mother died that she was just, she was grieving, and I said, I’m so sorry, ‘cause I know grieving is just exhausting, and she just sort of looked at me, and she’s like, you’re, you’re right! I’m so –

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – tired all the time.

Deanna: Yep.

Sarah: I’m just so tired. I’m like, well, yeah!

Deanna: Yeah!

Sarah: Big feelings –

Deanna: Yeah, it is –

Sarah: Big feelings make you tired!

Deanna: It is; it’s absolutely exhausting. And I think, too, the fact that these four women are having to deal with ending their careers –

Sarah: Yes.

Deanna: – which for them means a complete change in identity, because they’re so strongly –

Sarah: Everything.

Deanna: – allied with what they do that, that, you know, that forms so much a part of who they are –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Deanna: – that I think there’s, there’s a very natural question of, okay, well, who am I if I’m not this?

Sarah: Yep. Who am I –

Deanna: What am I if I’m not this?

Sarah: – if I’m not doing this work? Yeah.

Deanna: Yeah! And was I doing this work for the right reason? You know, because the fact that they are recruited when they’re twenty years old, you know, did they go into it – you know, that’s one of the things, too: we see now so many people are absolutely buried under student loans, and one of the things they have in common is, I signed some papers when I was eighteen! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yes!

Deanna: And did not realize exactly the, the full, lifelong, you know, repercussions of this, and I thought, you know, we’ve got these, these women who are twenty who are partway through college –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – who, who, you know, they’re making this commitment to do this for the rest of their lives –

Sarah: Yeah!

Deanna: – and they do carry it out for the rest of their lives, but could they really have made fully informed decisions at that age to, to understand what this is going to mean?

Sarah: Yeah! Absolutely! And that the work that they’re doing makes – a lot of what happens in the book made me think of, this is the worst case scenario of Tressie McMillan Cottom’s often-repeated line: the institution cannot love you back.

Deanna: [Laughs]

Sarah: Your job does not love you, and the institution cannot love –

Deanna: Yep!

Sarah: – and in this case, the institution is actively trying to kill them, and –

Deanna: Yes!

Sarah: – the thing that they relied on for not only their identity but also protection and safety is now –

Deanna: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – trying to destroy everything they have.

Deanna: Right! And you know, for a lot of their missions –

Sarah: The institution’s trying to kill you.

[Laughter]

Deanna: – for a lot of their missions, they either worked solo or they worked with one partner, so the idea of all four of them working together, it’s not something they’d done a lot in the past.

Sarah: No, and it’s uncomfortable.

Deanna: They did, you know, they, they, they started off that way, you know, while they, they were doing training. We see a couple of missions where they’ve worked together, but it’s, it’s not a thing that they have done for a very long time –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Deanna: – because once they kind of established themselves they were allowed to go off and do things in, in other, you know, either solo missions or with other assassins, and so the idea of the four of them having to band together, this is, this is a dynamic that they really have not had to do in a long time.

Sarah: No.

Deanna: And so it’s, it, it brings up – because you notice this with families: when you go home for the holidays –

Sarah: Oh.

Deanna: – sometimes you regress –

Sarah: Everyone regresses.

Deanna: – [laughs] – into the dynamic you had, you know, when, the, the, the last time everybody lived under that roof together –

Sarah: Yep!

Deanna: – and so that, that, to me, was an interesting thing to play with, because I felt like these four women would probably in a lot of ways go back to the dynamic that they had when they were, when they were twenty, when they were twenty-two, which is sometimes, you know, I love you like my bones, and other times I, I want to shove you under a train.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Deanna: So.

Sarah: So did you have a soundtrack for this book?

Deanna: Yeah, I did. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, are you going to release it? You going to make it part of the book promo?

Deanna: Yes, absolutely. I will, I will.

Sarah: I hope so.

Deanna: I will, I will make sure that that is a, a bonus extra that’s available for folks who want to listen to it, because there was some great stuff that I listened to: a lot of, because of when they were recruited, there’s a lot of ‘70s rock on there.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Deanna: And there’s some music that we make reference to in the book –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – that they talk about, and those songs are on the playlist, and so yeah, there’s definitely a Killers of a Certain Age playlist.

Sarah: I remember speaking with you to do an interview, and I think it might have been the last Veronica book, that you were working on this book, and you were seated sort of in front of the, the vision board of these characters, and it was very ‘60s, ‘70s travel glam. I think I remember –

Deanna: Yeah!

Sarah: – some of, like, the old air stewardess advertisements for Pan Am –

Deanna: Yes!

Sarah: – things like that –

Deanna: Yeah!

Sarah: – I remember seeing that over your shoulder – not that I’m a stalker; I swear I’m not. [Laughs]

Deanna: No, but now you see where the –

Sarah: Now I see where it goes.

Deanna: – vibe for the first chapter came from.

Sarah: Yep, I absolutely do!

Deanna: Uh-huh. [Laughs]

Sarah: So I do have a question.

Deanna: Yeah. Mm-hmm?

Sarah: What happens to the dog in the opening scene who parachutes out of the plane?

Deanna: I will never kill a dog.

Sarah: I didn’t think you would.

Deanna: The dog is fine. [Laughs]

Sarah: I did not think you would.

Deanna: That was one thing I kept getting from my editor is, oh my God, the dog has to survive!

Sarah: I was like, does one of them have a dog now? ‘Cause that’s awesome. But then the dog would tie them to the terrible guy they just killed, so what happens to the dog?

Deanna: Yeah.

Sarah: Hope the dog’s okay.

Deanna: Plus that, that scene is forty years ago, so –

Sarah: Yeah. The dog –

Deanna: – like, the dog, the dog is long gone.

Sarah: The dog is definitely long –

Deanna: But the dog, the dog survives its peril –

Sarah: Yes.

Deanna: – so don’t worry about that. I will –

Sarah: Thank goodness.

Deanna:  That is why, in my Veronica series now, I have, my, my main characters have got five dogs between them.

Sarah: I am aware. [Laughs]

Deanna: Because I can never kill off the dogs, of course; that’s not going to happen; but I keep writing dogs into each book; and, like, their owners get murdered or –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – are murderers –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – or have to go off and get educated, and so –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – the dogs need a home, and so they just glom onto Stoker and Veronica, and so now – I, I counted at the beginning of the book I’m writing now, and I’m like, okay, we’ve got five dogs. This is getting out of hand.

Sarah: Lot of dogs.

Deanna: We’ve got five dogs and a Galapagos tortoise and –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – I’ve got to slow this down.

Sarah: Yeah.

Deanna: And, you know, I, I, I really do, I really do, before I get started on things like, you know, a stray hippopotamus wandering through the garden.

Sarah: That would actually be pretty great.

Deanna: Wouldn’t it be awesome?

Sarah: That’d be amazing.

Deanna: Except they’re super lethal.

Sarah: Yeah, they really want you dead. What books are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Deanna: Okay, so I just finished Jesse Q. Sutanto’s Four Aunties and a Wedding, which is a follow-up to last year’s –

Sarah: Yep!

Deanna: – Dial A for Aunties, which I absolutely loved. It’s a, it’s a mystery series, and it is about a young woman with a Singaporean Chinese family, and it is one of the most hilarious series I have ever read. I need her to write like seventy books a year on these people? I am super excited that there’s apparently a television series, a, a, a Netflix series in development, because –

Sarah: I know!

Deanna: – I need that immediately; it’s hilarious.

And then I’ve got two that I’m actually saving, because as we speak I am revising my next Veronica, and so there is not, like, reading for pleasure happening right now?

Sarah: Nope.

Deanna: These are my carrots at the end of the stick that I get to read when I’m done. The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas, which I’m super excited about because it is, I am, like old school Gothic? I looove the old Gothic novels, and this is old school Gothic from what I see, and, but it’s set in Mexico –

Sarah: Yep.

Deanna: – which I think is a setting that just has not been nearly explored enough –

Sarah: No.

Deanna: – so I’m super thrilled about that.

And then The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill. I just got my hands on it, and I’m super excited, and it just dropped the week that you and I are speaking, so I’m very excited to read those two.

Sarah: Awesome!

Deanna: Yeah.

Sarah: Well, where can people find you on the internet, should they wish to do so?

Deanna: On the interwebs, they can find me at deannaraybourn.com. I am on Instagram; I am on the Twitter.

Sarah: On the Twittah? [Laughs]

Deanna: Yeah, and I have, I have a monthly newsletter that goes out; it goes out the fifth of every month, and there are, a lot of times, little bonus things that we’re putting into the newsletters that are just for newsletter subscribers only.

Sarah: Oooh!

Deanna: So, yeah, super exciting stuff!

Sarah: Super cool!

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you to Deanna for hanging out with me, and congrats on the release of Killers of a Certain Age. It is now if you want to go and borrow or buy or casually acquire a copy? I think you totally should ‘cause I really liked this book, and I reviewed it this week. I will link to my review and all of the books we talked about in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

As always, I end with a bad joke! Are you ready? This joke is terrible; I love it.

Why does a fork have four prongs?

Why does a fork have four prongs?

Because if it had less it would be called a threek.

[Laughs] Threek! When I was growing up, my parents had, like, formal silverware that they brought out at, like, the holidays, and the forks only had three prongs, and I thought they were so strange looking; I thought they looked like alien hands. [Laughs again] Threek! Thank you to / theriddler1976 for that joke. That completely made my week. Threek!

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you back here next week!

Smart Podcast, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at frolic.media/podcasts.

[end of music]