TSM: To start off, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? What might our readers know you from?
LK: I’m Canadian, born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, and educated in the humanities (English, History) and natural sciences (zoology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, paleontology) at universities in Montreal, Alberta, Kansas, and Texas. As a paleontologist, I’ve been fortunate to have led and worked on expeditions throughout the fossil-rich badlands of western Canada and the US, Patagonia, Europe, China, Kenya and Ethiopia, excavating and studying the past life and cultures of the planet. I’ve held academic positions at: the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh; the University of Pittsburgh; the National Science Foundation, Washington, DC; and The University of Kansas, Lawrence. Readers might have had a Google/Time Magazine hit on my discovery with colleagues of a spectacular cache of fossil mammals, 55 million years old, in the badlands of the Wind River Basin, Wyoming. Readers might also have encountered my irreverent essays in natural history in Carnegie Magazine, collected and published in Dinosaur Plots (William Morrow). Finally, readers might have caught my op-ed pieces, and my appearances in PBS documentaries and news shows, countering the creationist movements that seek to dump on Darwin and deny biological evolution in our schools and museums and science policies. Friends joke that I’m Google-famous for two quips during a debate with an “intelligent design” creationist at the University Kansas, Lawrence: “Touring a natural history museum to prove creationism is like touring a hospital maternity ward to prove the stork theory of sex”; and “Intelligent Design is nothing more than creationism in a cheap tuxedo.” But both are too long for the gravestone.
TSM: It’s clear to see that your love of paleontology has influenced your work heavily. What made you passionate about paleontology? What are some of the most interesting finds you have had while researching?
LK:Two passions made me a paleontologist. First was the passion of ideas. Paleontology asks ultimate questions: What triggered the myriad explosions and extinctions of the life of the planet during the past 3.5 billion years. Hundreds of millions of species came and went on land and in the waters––from tiny, one-celled algae to monstrous denizens of ancient seas to the acknowledged king of beasts that kidnaps the imagination of every child, Tyrannosaurus rex. Basal to the answers is life’s ultimate genealogy. We’re tasked with deducing the enormous evolutionary tree of all species on Earth, living and extinct. That’s millions of ancestors and descendants, from ferns and flowering plants to beetles, ants, ammonites, sharks, frogs, crocodiles, dinosaurs, birds, mastodons and humans. The answers to the ultimate questions also teach the lessons of life––the consequences of continental drift, climate change, volcanic eruptions, and massive glaciations. In the end, for me, the lesson from paleontology is that the meaning of life is change. Paleontology’s second passion, for me, is the passion of place––the badlands. Their rocks preserve and erode out the answers to these ultimate questions. The badlands are primeval, canyons stark and rubble-strewn, the buttes rising in stacked red swaths as if the earth had cut itself and bled. As a city kid, when I first saw the badlands, I was seduced by a beauty so terrible it hurt the heart. So, it was my great fortune that I would get to work in the badlands, prospecting for and plucking the bones, teeth, shells, and impressions of plants and animals out of deep time. One memorable find was as a graduate student in the Red Deer River badlands of southern Alberta––the complete skull of a horned dinosaur, Centrosaurus, now on display at the museum at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. At the 55-millon-year-old site in the Wind River Basin, Wyoming, we found the skulls of a goggle-eyed, tarsier-like primate, and bones and teeth of lemur-like primates, ancestral horses and tapirs, shrew-like and hedgehog-like insect eaters, opossum-like marsupials, and a host of others, all now extinct. It tells the story of a Wyoming that was then a wet, tropical forest teeming with an exotic wildlife, much like Borneo today.
TSM: How did you transition from paleontology to writing? Has writing been a lifelong interest for you, or did your interest in writing stem from your paleontology background? Is there a specific experience that you had that sparked your interest in writing?
LK: I was raised in a home in which the most important currency was “the word”––prose, poetry, literature of every kind. So, writing, like a tick, entered the bloodstream early. My careers then ran in parallel: professional paleontologist and author/novelist, the writing often crossing freely between the two. As a research paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum, I seized on the opportunity to write a bi-monthly popular column for Carnegie Magazine about the fabulous intrigues of nature. It freed me to, as they say, “write what you know”, to re-script esoteric, complex science, such as dinosaur extinction, into an entertaining “whodunit.” Ditto, op-ed pieces countering the anti- science movement in K–12 and higher education.
TSM: What challenges came to you when writing the Harry Przewalski series? It seems that all of the books deal with different, isolated cases, so are any overarching themes or narratives that connect the novels?
LK: Good question. Each of the four Przewalski novels, each “case,” has a scientific intrigue––dinosaurs, prehistoric cave art, anthropology’s origin as a racialist science, the earliest peopling of the Americas. Each is wrapped inside a human intrigue, the dirty underbelly of people’s lives, the treachery, betrayal, fraud, and murder buried beneath the science of shards, skin and bones. As such, the Przewalski series presented two challenges. One, and foremost, is the challenge common to the novel––plot, characters, voice, tension, narrative drive. There is no better or more enjoyable primer for this art than reading and re-reading the best writers in the genre, many of which are featured in Strand Magazine. One also learns what to avoid, for example, the “hard-boiled” PI becoming increasingly maudlin and self-pitying, as Lew Archer does in the Ross MacDonald series. My second challenge was weaving the scientific threads into the plot, characters, and narrative, so that the reader is as immersed in the science mystery as they are in the murder mystery. Both the science and murder “whodunits” must be indistinguishable–– equally compelling, equally “page-turning.”
The Przewalski series does have overarching themes. A major one is the excavating the layers and fault lines in the human condition. So, The Bone Field investigates dinosaur life and death 66 million years ago, and a paleontologist murdered for scientific glory, for fame––one of those fault lines: “The rage for fame infects great and small; better be damned than mentioned not at all.” John Wolcot, a Scottish satirist, 1700s.
Death Spoke digs into the archeology of prehistoric cave art: Who painted the spectacular bison and deer and mammoths and horses in the caves of France 12,000 years ago. Who were the artists? Why didn’t they paint the trees, or sky, or clouds, or mountains, or streams outside the caves? Amid the venal scientific strife surrounding these questions, there is the poison of vendetta, of long-hate, and of murder. The Camel Driver uncovers scientific sin and human redemption––a bombshell Neanderthal discovery worth killing for; and how anthropology, at its origin, birthed, blessed, and broadcast its canon of racial superiority. “Exhibits display the bigotry of their time,” a museum curator tells Harry, referring to the taxidermy of indigenous people for museum displays, and the kidnapping of “exotic” natives for human zoos and world fairs. Finally, Native Blood (Dec. 6 release) unravels the cutthroat war between geneticists and archeologists over the earliest peopling of the Americas at least 15,000 years ago. Did the first Americans trek across the North Pacific from Asia, or the North Atlantic from Europe? Amid violent protests over the genetic research and the revelations of horrific brutality at Indian Residential Schools, a genomic anthropologist is found bludgeoned in his laboratory. His head is lying in a pool of DNA he’d extracted from indigenous peoples.
The Przewalski novels have a companion theme: how nature––its fluxes, its forces, its temperaments, its historical contingencies––can be a metaphor for the human condition. Quoting from The Bone Field about the badlands: “Weathering was ceaseless, this endless war of attrition between earth and sun and wind and rain, the land trying to stay in equilibrium with the elements––and failing. It was like the geology of a love affair, Harry thought, the silent abrasion of its intimate contours to a flat, monochromatic terrain.” And, quoting from The Camel Driver: “The rhinoceros horn and elephant ivory had been stolen from the museum. Likely, by now, they’d been ground to powder, cut with baking soda, and shipped to Asian market stalls as a male erector. Elephants and rhinos were harder to poach than old museum specimens. It was ironic, Harry thought, organs of species on the brink of extinction being harvested for procreative purposes.”
TSM: You also have experience writing in historical fiction with your novel The Body on the Bed, which is about a murder trial in the post-Civil War Era. When writing historical fiction, how did you decide when to stick close to history and facts and when to change things around to fit the narrative? More specifically, how do you balance creative liberties and historical accuracy? How do you go about incorporating facts and research into your other novels as well?
LK: Indeed, writing historical fiction is a highwire act of intellectual honesty. My tenets are: be true to the essential, documented history; within that stricture, take the creative liberty to dress and dramatize the historic stage, the characters, the costumes, the settings, the language, the dialogue, the encounters. The writer lives on that stage, breathing in the air and odors and sights and sensibilities of the time and place. Altering the essential, documented historical facts for drama is, in my book, intellectual fraud, in which the writer becomes a huckster, grifting the reader with a cheap trick. As such, the historical events in The Body on the Bed––the murder, the trial of the century, the verdict, the aftermath––took place during 1871–1872 in Kansas. The facts were derived from newspaper accounts and historical and legal documents, including the transcript of the trial (1051 handwritten pages). Excerpts were used verbatim, or rephrased and expanded for dramatic effect. Although the principal characters were real, literary license sculpted their individual personas, dialogue, and appearance. The Kansas settings––streets, houses, jails, courtrooms, interiors––reflect historic town plats and building records. The language is faithful to the expressions, grammar, and spelling of the time, a good deal of which is now considered either incorrect or antiquated. Of course, there were inventions––incidents and characters––“extras”––that slip on and off stage to populate and reveal the social tensions, movements, dynamics, and mannerisms of the time. I had one disappointment. I could not identify a specific brand of bourbon whiskey that the heroine would have sipped in Kansas at that time. I chose one that was popular then in Missouri, next door.
TSM: Who are some of your favorite mystery writers that have inspired your work? On a similar note, what are some of your favorite mystery novels that you would recommend to our readers? How have these authors/novels influenced your writing style or storytelling techniques?
LK: For me, the best works in the mystery genre explore the same fault lines in the human condition as do classics in literature: The Book of Job; Shakespeare’s Hamlet; Toni Morrison’s Beloved; Chinua Akebe’s Things Fall Apart; Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, and many others. The characters in the mystery novels are just as heroic and flawed, the relationships just as conflicted, the seven deadly sins just as deadly, the gritty underbelly of place and people just as gritty, and the writing just as evocative. I grew up on Rex Stout, rereading the Nero Wolfe series every few years, in which Archie’s breezy, sardonic narration is offset by Wolfe’s pompous, Johnsonian speeches. The stories are entertaining, almost mannered, but what stayed with me was Stout’s craft as a writer, as a storyteller. Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Cain introduced me to the streetwise, hard-boiled private eye, the simple, short, declarative sentence, the wisecrack, and how the gritty alleys of place fester the strands of human rot. I continued with their successors: Ross MacDonald, Dorothy Hughes, and James Crumley, whose prose is unmatched. I’ve paid homage to him in The Bone Field––the sheriff of Shoshoni, Wyoming is Bert Crumley. Elmore Leonard is the master of dialogue. He paints his characters––their plots, their emotions, their psyches––with their words, their expressions, their phrasing, their syncopation. When I read these authors, I find myself envious: “that’s a sentence I wish I’d written.” Same holds for current writers in the genre: Ian Rankin, Lawrence Block, James Lee Burke, Sara Paretsky, James Elroy, Megan Abbott. Readers can’t go wrong here. Start with James Crumley’s A Kiss Before Dying.
TSM: You also have a non-fiction book called Dinosaur Plots & Other Intrigues in Natural History, which is a collection of popular essays on nature and science. How did you go about curating this collection of essays? What challenges did you face and what was the selection process like?
LK: The essays were originally published in the Carnegie Museum’s bi-monthly Carnegie Magazine. The challenge, as I said earlier, in both writing the essays and in editing them for the collection, was to transform the arcane, the jargon-ridden scientific concepts and controversies, into an enthralling story for readers. For me, they are akin to what Graham Greene called “entertainments”, mini-detective stories, with scientific plots, clues, heroes, villains, and bad blood. About two-thirds of the magazine pieces made it into Dinosaur Plots. Most, predictably, feature paleontology, the intrigues left by a vanished world imperfectly preserved. They autopsy the controversies engendered by petrified skeletons, sediments, and ancient ecological plots. Many are science’s version of the good, the bad, and the ugly, how paleontology fashions its own culture and characters, how bonehunters have zigzagged from howlers to brilliant deductions, from ingenious science to disingenuous charlatans. A few of the pieces target grift: rank pseudoscience, such as a soothsayer claiming to channel wisdom from a Pleistocene spirit; outright hoaxes, such as Piltdown Man; and creationist claims that the known skeletons of Archaeopteryx, the iconic Jurassic bird, were fake. Finally, a group of essays untangle the twisting back alleys of evolution, how its produce of animals and plants have revolutionized humanity’s view of the universe and themselves. This, perhaps, is the theme of Dinosaur Plots. Nature is not as simple as its observers. And evolution is humbling––astronomically, geologically, genetically. We now know we are not at the center of anything––not the solar system, not life on Earth, and not in the spectrum that is humankind.
TSM: From my knowledge, we can use paleontology as a tool to not only discover secrets about history but also secrets about the human race. In your view, can we also use writing as a method to discover secrets about history and the past?
LK: Yes, discoveries in paleontology, paleoanthropology and paleogenomics (ancient DNA) keep sprouting the ever-dense bush of human evolution during the past four million years, almost all in Africa, Australasia, and Europe. They tell us much about the human condition. The overriding “secret” is the biological unity of Homo sapiens. It has finally demolished anthropology’s founding, its full-blown theory of race and racial superiority, which, through literature, art, film, theater, magazines, and museums, suffused our culture for the next 200 years. It is in this arena where “writing” can help right that culture. Another “secret” is that humans seek the slightest excuse to form a tribe––a genetic tendency coded by our deep evolution roots in social primates. It is the reason why the line between ethnic pride and ethnic cleansing is very thin and drawn in blood. Literary genres that reach vast numbers of readers, such as the mystery, can sew a powerful thread through these traits of the human condition and into the story. Similarly, the 4.5 billion-year-“secrets” of Earth, the life of the planet, and human history, can illuminate and help sustain the one blue marble in the universe we know as our own. I’ve tried to do both in each of the Przewalski novels.
TSM: Because you have written in many different genres, say the detective genre with the Harry Przewalski series and nonfiction with Dinosaur Plots & Other Intruiges in Natural History, how does your experience writing in one genre influence your writing in other genres?
LK: It’s complementary. Both genres require deep research into people, place, ideas, events. And both require the art of fashioning the narrative, into holding the reader captive. What each genre teaches the other is balance, achieving that golden mean between storyline and pell-mell expeditions down side alleys. For example, for me, it is easy for the science to become a runaway horse, both in the essays and in the mystery genre. Both have taught me when to pull the reins taut. And there is vigorous hybridization between the genres, leading to a richer interplay about humankind, about how much our past and Earth history have forged the human condition.
TSM: Do you have any advice for any beginning writers out there? What was a valuable piece of advice that you received when you were a beginning writer?
LK: Take chances. Art and science are subversive story-telling. They’re the risky search for uncomfortable truth. Writing a novel isn’t meant to be comfortable. As Orwell said, “Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.” The novel is an unbridled horse. Let it take you down unexpected, unexplored alleys. Let it violate the storyboard, if you fashion one––I don’t. Those alleys are among the most rewarding moments of writing. As other authors have advised, let the “voice” emerge, unforced, without worrying about being off-key. Be smart and scrupulously forthright. I remember Steinbeck’s tenet: “The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty.” Write what you know; if you don’t know it, immerse yourself in the research. Finally, make readers want to pause throughout your novel to mutter, “Damn, I wish I’d written that.” Each elegant sentence is, for me, a novel’s literary heaven. Because, otherwise, as William Styron quipped, “… writing is hell.”