A Conversation With Amulya Malladi on the Research Before Your Research (Killer Writers)
Until you begin researching, you never know how a story, or even your career, or even an author interview is going to play out. I read Amulya Malladi’s new book A Death in Denmark, a novel so full of details and complicated plots that I knew I had to talk with her. Though she’s an international bestselling author already, it’s her first mystery, which intrigues me, and the first Gabriel Præst novel. She’s created a multi-layered whodunit/whydunit set in multiple countries, multiple locations, different cultures, different times in history, different perspectives on history, different investigative organizations, and—upon reading—I thought, “How much research does someone have to do for a book of this scope?”
(A Conversation With David Baldacci.)
Amulya and her husband have lived all over the world, including Memphis, Tennessee, close to me. Today she lives in Los Angeles, my old, young-adult stomping ground. As usual, we have much to talk about, but what surprises me by the end of the first part of this interview is how, upon researching how she does research, a whole new area of research opened up before the research itself that I didn’t even know we were going to be talking about. And this, I believe, is why she’s an international bestselling author already.
I speak with her from her living room in downtown Los Angeles and I can’t help but have my eyes drawn to one of the paintings behind her. “I love that painting. You didn’t paint that, did you?”
“This one?” She points. “I did.”
“That’s beautiful.” An amateur painter myself, I think it amazing how much one does not know about others, even those we think we know. And that’s the trap, I soon discover: thinking we know what we do not know. “I love the book. You’ve got characters in Denmark and Germany. You’ve got references to other countries. You’ve got a police procedural going on. References to World War II, though this is a contemporary novel. There just seems to be a huge amount of research that had to go on behind this to make it believable. Everything you write is so specific. So let me ask you a couple of questions about research, because research is one of the hardest things for writers on multiple positive and negative levels. You’ve lived all over. Seen many different, should I say, cultures.”
“I was born and raised in India, and then I lived in Memphis, as you know, and then I lived in Silicon Valley. Then I lived in Utah for a moment, and then back to Silicon Valley. And then Denmark, and then to Orange County, and now I’m here in downtown L.A.”
“I can’t speak for India and Denmark, but I do know, speaking truly, that though we are all in the U.S., Memphis, Utah, Silicon Valley, and downtown Los Angeles are all completely different cultures, and there are cultures within those cultures. And that’s part of what I want to explore here. Getting the cultures right as you did in this book. Living in so many places has had to have informed you, even as subconscious research, on the cultures and places you write about. Before we get started, though, something that intrigued me in the acknowledgements is you writing that this book has been in the making for many years. How many years are we talking? Because you’ve been publishing other books.”
“About a decade, I think.”
“Ten years?”
“I don’t write mysteries. This is my first mystery. It’s my ninth book, but my first mystery, and I always wanted to write a mystery.”
“So, why the change in direction? Why decide to write a mystery?”
“I wanted to write this private investigator book. I’m a big fan of Philip Marlowe, Spencer, and Easy Rawlins, and I always wanted to write a mystery, but I thought, ‘Well, it’ll be so repetitive. I’m just going to write the same story.’”
“Which is why I always tell writers at Killer Nashville that you must read, read, read, so you know what’s been written and you don’t write it again.”
“Exactly. So my husband and I started to talk about this character, and we started to cook him up. We decided he was going to live in these houses called Kartoffelrækkernes, potato townhouses. And that he’d be a constant renovator. I’m a big fan of Nordic Noir, but they’re all so bloody. You read these books like nobody should go to the countryside because everybody gets murdered out there. It’s like Scandinavia has serial killers everywhere. But it’s not.”
“So you’re looking at a different angle?”
“Whenever you read these books, they’re all so dark and dreary. You watch the TV shows like The Bridge or The Killing. The women don’t know how to dress. The men don’t know how to dress. Somebody has trauma, another alcoholism, someone raped as a child, drug addictions, but when you meet Danes, they’re happy, well-adjusted people, they dress really well, and they bicycle everywhere.”
“So through your research you found an unexplored niche.”
“I wanted to write a detective who was well-adjusted, had his own issues, but was more or less functional in society. So, my husband and I started to build him up.”
“And then you had it.”
“Well, I knew who he was, but I honestly didn’t know how to write it because I didn’t know how to plot.”
“What?” I laugh, as does she.
“I still don’t know how to plot. You can’t not plot mystery.”
“No. Sort of difficult. At least not to have a general idea.”
“In a normal book, I can say, ‘Oh, let’s go. Let’s see where it takes me.’”
“In a mystery, you sort of need to have an idea of who did it and why, even if it eventually changes.”
“You don’t want to come to the end and say, ‘I forgot to put the butler in, and he was going to be the killer.’”
“So now, you have more research: how to plot. We’re starting to talk about a lot of research before the actual research. And we’re talking over a ten-year period. Kind of like trying to learn to write afresh.”
“It’s never that easy with mysteries and you need to know what you’re doing. So I had to go back and forth, and it was a lot of work.”
“We haven’t even gotten into what attracted me to the book, but I think this is important. It should be a checklist for writers. Looking at my notes, if I’m following what we’re saying here, we need to know the characters and do the research, which includes thinking on who those characters are. We need to research what we want to write—what we’ve always wanted to write, what we’d love to write, in your case a mystery—using our experience as a guide. If we’re going to write a mystery, we have to learn how to plot one. Before we ever start writing, we need to read heavily in the genre that we want to write in as you did because you’ve cited characters that inspired you, so we know how to avoid stereotypes and overused tropes and discover ways to differentiate ourselves. And, I guess, we need to learn how to plot. This paragraph is full of bullet points.”
“Yes, and yes. And this became a topic of discussion in our home as well, because we would all sit at the dinner table, and I would tell them what was happening in my story.”
“So, during these ten years, what was your agent thinking?”
“I didn’t even tell my agent.”
“What?”
“I wrote A Death in Denmark and then I called my agent and said, ‘Hey, guess what? I wrote a private investigative book,’ and she’s like, ‘Oh, okay.’”
“How’d she take it?”
“She’d never sold a mystery. I’d never written a mystery. So we were a great pair trying to make this one work.”
“So now research for her, as well. Oh, this is funny.”
“Honestly!”
“You guys had to research new markets.”
“And I got two offers for this book! I’ve never gotten two offers from two publishing houses.”
“Because you’ve researched what you want to write, how you want to write it, how you want to make it different. And, maybe, most importantly because you were writing what you really loved, or what you had always wanted to do, but for whatever reason had not. That makes all the difference, doesn’t it? Which explains why you’re an international bestselling author. You did the pre-work, like any author—beginning or changing directions—even if it takes ten years. I think maybe all writers might want to look at the list we just enumerated and take it into consideration before they ever start writing the first word. With mysteries, I think you’ve found your niche.”
“And we haven’t even started talking about the research for the book yet.”
“No. But what a groundwork we’ve laid before we start discussing that.”
“So, for me, it is story first…”
And then she gave me much to think about for a future column. But until then, take a look at what we talked about above. Amulya gave us some great gold nuggets. It made me think of the ten-thousand-hour rule I read about in Malcom Gladwell’s bestseller Outliers. If I remember right, he said ten years was about the time it took to get in those ten-thousand-hours. And thus, A Death in Denmark, a truly wonderful book, was born.
Research the craft.
Give it ten-thousand-hours or ten years.
And you may have yourself an international bestseller.
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Amulya Malladi is the bestselling author of eight novels. Her books have been translated into several languages. She won a screenwriting award for her work on Ø (Island), a Danish series that aired on Amazon Prime Global and Studio Canal+. https://www.amulyamalladi.com/