AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
In a new murder mystery, a young woman, Olivia Blunt, is eager to impress her new boss, the no-nonsense detective Aubrey Merritt. They have a big case hours away in Vermont. Merritt doesn't drive. Blunt does. The vehicle - a rattle trap of a Jeep with 200,000 miles on it.
LIZA TULLY: (Reading) At exactly 8 o'clock, Merritt emerged from the building. She was always punctual and abhorred people who weren't. Her disapproval extended to early birds as well as latecomers, which was why I hadn't gone to her door when I'd arrived 15 minutes ahead of schedule. I watched as she paused on the arched portico, and I clearly registered the exact moment when, looking up the street, she caught sight of me sitting behind the wheel of my ancient rusted vehicle. Her standard resting face, never free from a pinch of suspicion, was overcome by a surge of horror, which curled into snobbish disgust, which subsided into resignation. I gave an awkward little wave.
RASCOE: "The World's Greatest Detective And Her Just Okay Assistant" is the new novel from Liza Tully. That's the pen name of Elisabeth Brinks (ph), who also writes under the pen name Elisabeth Elo. Liza Tully, thanks for joining us.
TULLY: Thank you for inviting me.
RASCOE: OK, so tell us about this OK assistant, Olivia Blunt. Who is she, and why does she want to work for Aubrey Merritt?
TULLY: Well, Olivia Blunt is a 25-year-old fact checker for an online media business, and she has always had a love of detective fiction. And when she realizes there's an opening for an assistant to a really nationally renowned private investigator, she really wants to get that job. So she interviews for it, and in fact, she does get it, even though the interview was kind of a disaster on many levels, but her fact-checking skills really impressed the detective, Aubrey Merritt.
RASCOE: So Merritt - she's an older woman, very sophisticated, but she doesn't, you know, suffer fools or hapless assistants. In a way, you can look at her as this regal kind of almost Angela Lansbury, almost "Murder, She Wrote," but she's no JB Fletcher 'cause she's not very warm and nice. She's prickly (laughter). What drives Merritt?
TULLY: Well, Merritt is a detective who - you know, she doesn't have special skills like Sherlock Holmes or even Poirot. She's a woman who has worked for 30 years to build her business, and she has done it the hard way, and she's got a lot of experience and a lot of smarts. And she does her detecting through three things - observation, logic and psychology. And she believes that these are things that she can teach to anyone, even Olivia Blunt. But she's also spent 30 years of her life thinking about murder and about really, like, bad people doing bad things to each other. So she's kind of weary, and she's not really down with, you know, having too much empathy for her subjects.
RASCOE: The pairing - when you think about it, it's kind of like that TV comedy "Hacks." You have this older, established woman who's a bit jaded, and then you have the younger, often kind of impulsive woman, maybe a little more idealistic. What made you want to write a book with this dynamic and especially in this genre of murder mystery?
TULLY: Well, murder mysteries are kind of famous for having detective duos.
RASCOE: Yeah.
TULLY: But a lot of times, the assistant isn't as smart as the detective, and I always thought of that as kind of a wasted opportunity. So in Olivia's case, she is smart, and she is capable of being a great detective herself someday. But there's a temperamental difference and an experiential difference.
RASCOE: The death that they're investigating - it's kind of, you know, delectable murder mystery stuff. You have this older rich widow who police say jumped off her balcony at her resort at Lake Champlain, and then there's this strange suicide note. But there's something wrong with that picture. I mean, I didn't like the whole jumping off the balcony thing. That just already seemed a little off to me, for an older woman jumping off the balcony. What was wrong with this picture? Don't tell us. Don't spoil us. But you know what I mean (laughter).
TULLY: Well, absolutely. And actually, one of - the victim's name is Victoria. And actually, one of her friends says, that's not like Vicki at all. There's a lot that's wrong with it. And also, her daughter - Victoria's daughter, Haley - she says, my mother was a very fun-loving person who was really generous and warm and kind and gave a lot to other people. So it was not somebody you would expect to have taken their own life.
RASCOE: One thing that I also found very fascinating was that the way Merritt - when she was interrogating people, she would talk to them very differently, kind of based on their position. Can you explain how that worked? - 'cause Olivia seemed a little bit taken aback by it.
TULLY: Yes, and there's one scene in which Merritt interviews a housekeeper, and she's pretty harsh with her. And Olivia feels very sympathetic to her and actually scolds Merritt a little bit afterwards and says, you know, you didn't have to be too hard on her. And Merritt says, look, we're here to find a murderer. We're not social workers. And that was kind of a slap in Olivia's face, but Olivia is going to hang on to the way she sees the world and the way she sees people. And that's one of the tensions between the two women.
RASCOE: But then Merritt's very nice to the rich people, but she's, like, buttering them up.
TULLY: She's very good at manipulating people. So when somebody is, for example, a mansplainer, well, she'll flatter him. So she's very good at understanding how to get people to talk to her.
RASCOE: How do you figure out how to lay out the stories and then dribble the clues in and all of that?
TULLY: Well, I work a lot in a notebook before I even start a draft. I kind of get a feel for what has a certain sparkle to me and what I want to write about. And then I just kind of wing it. I think in this case, you know, it's hard to plant a clue ahead of time because it depends so much on where the person is standing. There's a scene in this book that I - and I'm not giving anything away by saying - one of the clues is a light that's going down a road on a very dark night. That clue is seen by a character who's standing on a porch on this night. I don't know how to plan for that, so that's something that happened as I was writing.
RASCOE: But did you know that - so as you were writing, that came up. Did you know exactly who had that light when you wrote it?
TULLY: I didn't know. I had an idea.
RASCOE: You didn't know. Oh, OK.
TULLY: No, I don't know exactly, but I know that that's going to be a clue, and I know it's going to be an important clue. And then, a lot of times, I'm going back all the time.
RASCOE: Yeah.
TULLY: So there's a lot of going back and rewriting to make that clue actually mean something in the book.
RASCOE: Why do you think so many people are fascinated by murder mysteries? Like, what do we get out of reading these?
TULLY: The thing that people always say is, well, we want - there's disorder, and the detective comes along and creates order, and that makes everybody feel good.
RASCOE: Yeah, yeah.
TULLY: But I think there's another reason, too, and that is that, especially in this kind of murder mystery where it's not a psychopath, it's not a serial killer, the person who does the killing is actually an average sort of person. If you look at the suspects, you can't tell which one actually did the murder. Underneath everything else, it becomes a story about motive. And then it also becomes a story about someone having some emotion - whether it's greed or anger or lust or something like that - that just crosses a line into their being willing to do something really horrendous. And that, to me, is the fascination of it. Most of us can stop before we do something terrible, and so this is generally a story about somebody who couldn't stop, and they went on to do the terrible thing. So it's about human nature.
RASCOE: That's Liza Tully. Her new book is "The World's Greatest Detective And Her Just Okay Assistant." Thank you so much for talking with us.
TULLY: Well, thank you for inviting me.
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