For READERS

Discussion Guides A Conversation with Marlowe Benn

Relative Fortunes Discussion Guide

1. In 1924, the first world war still cast a long shadow over those who, like Julia, came of age during its carnage. How does that war shape Julia’s notions of the future? What does she mean when she mourns “all that was lost” on those bloody battlefields?
2. Both Julia and Glennis must make critical decisions about their future. Compare their struggles: What does each aspire to and why? What obstacles do they face? How do they respond? How do you judge their chances for future happiness?
3. How does social class shape the choices and opportunities available to Julia, Glennis, Naomi, and Alice? Discuss Julia’s growing awareness of the role that wealth and its privileges—or their loss—play in determining her future.
4. Edward Winterjay claims that both Naomi and Vivian are “great champions of women,” yet they were staunch political opponents, especially on the issue of suffrage. Compare their views about the best way to promote women’s interests and well-being. What values do they share, and how are they different?
5. Reports of Naomi’s death in the newspapers are “spun” in various ways according to attitudes toward her feminism. Consider how we often interpret events to support our own values.
6. Julia’s keenest interests center around books, yet she admits she’s not an avid reader. What lies at the heart of her passion for books? How do you think she would like today’s e-book culture? Can beautifully hand-crafted books and digital publishing coexist?
7. This story takes place nearly a hundred years ago. What aspects of Julia’s daily life strike you as most different from your own? In what ways does life today seem not to have changed very much?
8. Many women consider the decision to become a mother or not vital and defining. Compare how the women in the novel (Julia, Glennis, Naomi, Vivian, Nolda, Alice, Aunt Lillian) view motherhood—its privileges and its responsibilities, its rewards and its costs.
9. Alice harbors several secrets. Why? Do her motives justify her deceptions?
10. Naomi’s ambitions for women’s rights went far beyond suffrage. She dreamed of full equality in every realm of life—political, economic, social, personal, sexual—yet Julia fears society won’t soon accept such “radical” notions. If Naomi were alive today, what aspects of modern life would she celebrate? Which would she find disappointing? Be baffled by?
11. Naomi is portrayed as a generous saint, a difficult troublemaker, a selfless visionary, and a wicked schemer. What do you think accounts for the wide range of opinions, often directly contradictory, about her character?
12. Consider how Julia and Glennis’s friendship grows. What do they each come to value about the other?
13. Much as Julia faults Philip as a brother, she admits she is no model sister. In what ways is she not fair to him? How and why does their relationship change over the course of the novel? Do you see a truce in the future?

Passing Fancies Discussion Guide

1. Julia cares deeply about Christophine, yet they are neither family nor friends in the conventional sense. Why is their relationship complicated, and how does it evolve?
2. Pablo Duveen proclaims himself a champion of black people, eagerly promoting Harlem’s lively nightclub culture and emerging writers. How do Eva, Logan, and Jerome feel about his patronage, and why? How does it help them, and how does it hinder them?
3. Scholars talk about “the gaze” and the power relationship between those who are looked at and those who look. What undercurrents—psychological and historical—did you sense on the several occasions when black characters perform for white audiences?
4. What does Julia mean when she remarks that everyone passes in some way? Do you agree? Why does racial passing in particular often provoke volatile reactions?
5. Paul Duveen delights in defying conventions of gender as well as race. Social historians have noted that many artists and writers of the 20s were gay, though few were openly so. What drives, and enables, Duveen to behave with such defiant, even egregious boldness?
6. Julia observes that American society renders black people largely invisible to whites. What made this possible in the 1920s? In what ways have things changed, or not?
7. What motivates Julia to find the truth of Timson’s murder? How does race complicate her decision as well as her undertaking?
8. Logan Lanier resents being labeled a black poet. Similarly, Julia chafes at the term lady printer. What are the merits—and hazards—of highlighting race, gender, and other aspects of identity?
9. Consider the various kinds of power and will exercised in the final confrontation involving Eva, Jerome, and Wallace. How does race affect their respective options and choices?
10. Julia declares confidence in her ability to judge men’s characters. In her dealings with Philip, Wallace, Jerome, and Logan, how accurate does her assertion prove to be?
11. Throughout the novel Julia becomes aware, sometimes painfully, of her cultural blind spots. What does she come to learn about herself?

A Conversation with Marlowe Benn

Q: What inspired you to write the Julia Kydd historical mysteries?

A: I grew up to the jaunty sound of my dad’s old 1920s records, and the Jazz Age has always fascinated me. As a child I love the hugely popular mysteries from the era written by S. S. Van Dine (pen name of Willard Huntington Wright). Wright’s urbane sleuth, Philo Vance, both intrigued and irritated me. As an adult I began to imagine ways I’d like to “revise” him and his elegant world. By a happy quirk of luck, those old novels are now being reissued in new editions, so readers can consider for themselves how my Philip Vancill Kydd might have been transformed into Philo Vance by an ill-humored writer. At first my Philip was more like Van Dine’s Philo, but neither Julia nor I could bear spending much time with him! So now Philip shares mostly superficial and circumstantial features with Philo. I hope the differences can be credited to the malicious mind of my fictional version of Mr. Wright.

Q: Why did you choose the suffrage movement as the backdrop for Relative Fortunes?

A: In many ways the 1920s was a more radical decade, especially for women, than many realize. Beyond finally achieving the right to vote, women enjoyed at least the possibility of heady new social freedoms: emerging access to birth control, fashions that defied old notions of modesty, and the opportunity to live as independent, self-sufficient adults. Not everyone embraced these new freedoms, or even condoned them, but the old restrictive conventions had been challenged, if not breached.

Q: In the afterword, you nod to the ways you borrowed from actual history to weave together your stories. Can you tell us about your research?

A: It was important to me to anchor the novel accurately in its time and place. I spent a lot of time with magazines and novels of the era, absorbing details of everyday life (what one took for a headache, the price of a coffee, what books people were talking about) and how people talked. Learning the slang was great fun!

I tried to blend real characters and details with fictional ones. I spent months in university archives studying the craze in the 1920s for beautiful hand-crafted books of the sort Julia publishes. Her Capriole Press is fictional, but most of the printers, publishers, and collectors she meets are real people. Similarly, the Grolier Club was in fact the nation’s premier private club for bibliophiles, and as Julia complains, it was not only exclusive but firmly men-only—until the 1970s.

Q: Wealth and status are not always symbols of goodness in Relative Fortunes. Why did you choose to expose the dysfunctions of the rich and powerful? What did you want to say about wealth and its relationship to virtue?

A: While there’s no shortage of aphorisms equating worldly riches with moral poverty, wealth per se isn’t inherently good or evil. The problem arises because the rich often view their wealth as natural and benign—invisible—while the poor see and feel sharply the injustices and exploitation that wealth usually relies on and perpetuates. That blindness can skew a rich person’s way of seeing the world: at first, they simply don’t notice others’ suffering, which translates into indifference. Julia truly understands the privileges of wealth only when she faces losing them. Of course, eventually the rich do notice—hence the centuries of rationales to justify and reinforce their class advantages. I hope that Julia’s reversal of fortunes, which opens her eyes to these issues, also helps readers see them better.

Q: For much of Relative Fortunes, there’s a sort of cold war going on between men and women. But there are some characters who cross the picket lines—literal and figurative—to advocate for women’s rights. Why was it important to you to show different kinds of men working as advocates for and as obstacles to women’s equality?

A: All the men and women in the book illustrate the gender realities of the time. It’s important to separate the overarching and pervasive nature of patriarchy from the attitudes of individual men—who can be cruel and exploitive toward women, or fair-minded and respectful. The system is one thing; individual behavior is another. For example, both Philip and Chester depict how society defaulted financial authority to men, but they use their privileges in different ways. How individuals embrace or challenge society’s larger conventions is what gives them dimension and interest as characters.

Q: Not all of the women in Relative Fortunes agree with each other on issues like abortion, suffrage, and financial independence. Did you try to reflect a generational divide between younger feminists and older feminists, or married versus unmarried women? Why was this something you wanted to explore in this book?

A: I wanted to portray a spectrum of values among the women in the book without correlating attitudes or beliefs with any particular age, education, social class, marital status, and so on.  The youngest woman in the book, Julia, for example, ultimately has more in common with the values of the oldest woman, Aunt Lillian, than with those of Vivian Winterjay, who is much closer to her in age and social class. I think it’s important to resist stereotyping according to such categories because then we stop listening to and respecting each other, and a dangerous polarization can set in. Our present-day world is a cautionary tale of the damage that can result.

Q: Julia is a character brimming with professional ambition and a desire for independence. This aspect sets the book apart from others set in the same time. What inspired you to veer away from the more traditional narrative of a marriage plot, where a woman is desperately seeking a husband?

A: Julia’s central problem is economic, which she quickly realizes is a far more powerful factor in marriage than romance. Even today girls can’t escape the pervasive fairy tale that tells her pure and complete happiness comes from attracting, and being chosen by, a man who will thereafter take care of her. Perhaps because of what Julia’s witnessed, particularly in her parents’ marriage, she’s wary of that myth. Fortunately, she lives in one of the first modern eras when a woman could assert her right to enjoy love and relationships outside of marriage—as long as she had the means to support herself. Less fortunately, women’s opportunities to earn a sufficient livelihood were not yet plentiful. Hence her choices—like those of so many other women throughout history—are painfully few.

Q: What do you love most about writing historical fiction?

A: For years I happily wrote nothing but carefully researched and argued cultural history. Now with fiction I can begin where the archives end. It’s like turning old black and white photos into a full-color video. Research reveals the past; fiction puts it in motion. And once history comes to life, it’s clear that people then wrestled with troubles a lot like our own.

I love writing mysteries because they’re ultimately about justice, and what’s more complicated than guilt and innocence? I especially relish writing about crimes that pit the law against my characters’ moral code. In the end justice is often about power, and the struggle over who gets to decide what’s right or wrong makes for great stories in any genre. Historical mysteries are a great way into the life’s most meaty stuff.

Q: What authors do you most enjoy reading?

A: This list is a long one, and it’s always getting longer. Kate Atkinson is firmly at the top. Other authors who’ve rarely let me down are Alice Munro, Meg Wolitzer, Amor Towles, Siri Hustvedt, Jesmyn Ward, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Barbara Neely, and Amanda Cross. On a different day, you might get a different list.

Q: Have you made any good literary “discoveries” lately?

A: Absolutely! Terrific books published in the past few years that deserve to be better known include Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing With Feathers,Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday,Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First,and Jess Kidd’s Himself. Under-appreciated older books include Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes,Muriel Sparks’s A Far Cry from Kensington, and Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam. I could go on and on.

 Q: Tell us about your writing process. When and where do you typically write, and how often?

A: I love routines, which means I lead a very boring writing life. I’m fortunate to have a study that overlooks Puget Sound and Mt. Rainier. (I know, I know.) The view can be a distraction, but it also keeps me at my keyboard most days from morning until mid-afternoon, when my brain is tired and my muscles want their turn. Then I head outside to work in the garden or go for a walk, or I catch up with errands, email, and everything else that gets bumped to later because I’d—almost always—rather be writing.

Q: What author would you most like to meet?

A: That’s easy—Kate Atkinson, though I’d probably just gush about how much I admire her prose and genre-be-damned imagination. If there’s an afterlife I’d seek out Carolyn Heilbrun, the trail-blazing feminist scholar. As Amanda Cross she wrote feminist mysteries starting in the early sixties, back when misogyny and sexual harassment were seriously risky to talk about, even with a pseudonym.

Q: We have to ask—what are you working on next? Any teasers for readers who are looking forward to your next book?

A: The second Julia Kydd novel, Passing Fancies, launches on June 2, 2020. It’s set in May 1925 and Julia is back in New York. Eager to launch her Capriole Press, she quickly makes friends in the publishing world—authors, editors, illustrators, publishers. Soon she’s caught up in murder and the theft of a new novel manuscript promising to reveal explosive truths about the Harlem cabaret scene. Julia’s drawn into the exhilarating yet treacherous world beneath the Harlem Renaissance, where notions of race, sexuality, and power are slippery, and identities can be deceptively fluid.