Thomas Kaplan-Maxfield is a Professor of English at Boston College, where he teaches detective fiction, science fiction, gothic fiction, and creative nonfiction writing. A beloved professor, he is in the process of writing the third novel of An Adventure on the Heights, a series influenced by the Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code. His publications include Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter and Hide and Seek: A Murder Mystery.
TSM: Can you tell readers about yourself and your background as a writer?
TKM: In 5th grade I started writing stories. The overwhelming feeling that I had, and still have, is that writing stories, being inside a story, feels like home to me. I don’t know exactly what that means. Does that mean I’m a character? Or does it mean I just prefer to be writing stories than to be living life? I’m not sure I actually feel that. I enjoy life a lot, and I found the love of my life when I was very young. And so that part has been wonderful, it’s just that I’ve always been accompanied by this feeling that being in the world of stories is where I really belong, and where I’m really at home. It’s the world of metaphor, and paradox, and image. And I think it’s a real lesson to listen to young people because I had this conviction in the deepest part of me.
TSM: Was there a specific writer that inspired you to write?
TKM: One day a friend and I were talking and he knew that I was struggling to become a writer. He said, “Have you ever read this guy Lawrence Durrell?” And I said, “No, I’ve heard of him, but I intend to read him.” My friend practically shouted, “You call yourself a writer, and you’ve never read Lawrence Durrell!” He came home from work with a copy of Justine, the first book of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. I started reading Durrell and I felt like I had come home.
When I was a very young writer, I would read someone and I would always feel like my writing afterwards sounded just like that person. Like any other writer, I was serving my apprenticeship. As you get older, you find out who are the thinkers and writers you most admire and want to be like and feel kinship with. And so that’s a kind of home, right? Well Durrell was that to an extreme. He, as far as I’m concerned, should be considered one of the major writers of the 20th century.
TSM: Was there a specific moment that shaped your writing career?
TKM: One of the most important events in my life as a writer came when I was about 30 years old. This is just by coincidence, a friend of a friend and I were talking and she said, “Oh Durrell, I’ve been corresponding with him.” She said she had his snail address (this is before computers). So she did, and I had his address for a year. And then when I was reading The Avignon Quintet, I started panicking. So, I sat down and wrote Durrell a letter. I thought first of all, this probably isn’t his real address. Two: if it is his address, he won’t get it. Three: if he gets it, he never will respond. This was a letter sent to the South of France, a little town. I sent it there never expecting an answer. Within two weeks, I got a letter in the mail from Durrell. I open the letter, it says basically, “This is an amazing letter that you wrote, I’m waiting for you.”
TSM: As in, to go visit Durrell?
TKM: Yes, it’s a very long story which I actually had published in Poets & Writers some years after Durrell died. It’s called, “My Short Life with Lawrence Durrell.” Three weeks later, I was on a plane to France and I ended up hanging out with him, and it was like I was sitting there with my god of writing.
It was a very weird experience, and so what did I learn from this? Advice to young people: if you’ve got a hero out there, write to them. Because you never know what is going to happen. I would never have predicted that Durrell would have written back to me and we would have become friends.
TSM: What made your friendship so special?
TKM: When I was a student and with friends, I always told stories. People would say to me, “Wait a minute, is this made up or is this real?” It would always be frustrating to me. Well something happened with Durrell, where he never cared whether I was making stuff up or not. The standard was not a realistic one. It was: is it interesting? Is it fun? Is it insightful? That really made me feel at home as well. I thought, okay I’m not in a story and yet I’m in a story because the standards for determining reality are, “so you had this strange adventure, what about that?” That’s almost like a version of being in a story out here in life.
I think just going to meet Durrell and seeing someone who had lived his life as a writer was first-hand experience at seeing it could be done. I had originally thought, “I’m either going to be an artist or I’m going to get a job. One or the other.” I suffered under the romanticized notions, that either or split, for years until I went to see Durrell and I thought, “Here’s the guy who actually did it!”
TSM: You’ve written many mysteries. What is your process for writing?
TKM: I’ve taught detective fiction for many years. I taught last semester, and we read Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, and I kind of half got inspired by his detective who is just this guy in LA, an everyday man who stumbles into becoming a detective.
Lots of writers say you have to write the stories backwards; you have to know the ending and work towards it. When I’m writing mysteries, I don’t try to figure out the end of it. I’ll let the story go wherever it’s going to go. I have a general sense of the plotting and try to get the characters to follow. I let them go their own way to see what they come up with, and then I get to the end. Once I get to the end, I plant the clues when they need to be planted. You kind of have to do that with detective fiction.
I have this book, Hide and Seek, which I should have called Seek and Hide, because I had this idea of writing a detective novel where you know the identity of the guilty person but you don’t know the identity of the detective. Talk about impossible to plot. I have this guy who killed his girlfriend in a jealous rage and is hiding it. He is narrating the book. Well, he’s invited to a Murder Mystery Weekend, where everybody is playing detective. The goal would be for our guilty person to find out who the real detective is. I had to plant clues in there enough, so he knows someone is the real detective and that they are after the murderer of this woman. That was what was so hard to get into the plot. It makes for an upside-down murder mystery.
I have a bulletin board, and when I’m writing it’s covered with pinned up papers for character and plot and setting, because that’s the way I work. I have to put everything on a piece of paper. For that book, I had to do drawings of the plot and figure out a visual representation of this plot. I couldn’t figure it out. I’ll think I know who the guilty person is, but then I’ll get to the denouement and it will be someone else. I wrote this book! So then I have to go back to the beginning, and say I see it now. Then I think if I didn’t see it and I was writing it, maybe the mystery is okay and will keep people interested.
TSM: As a Massachusetts resident, you write many Massachusetts-based stories. Do you prefer to write about familiar places? Does location shape your writing?
TKM: I would say, absolutely it’s true, you have to write what you know. What does that mean though for science fiction writers? Or mystery writers you have never been a detective? Dashiell Hammett actually did work as a detective. But, many of them didn’t. Raymond Chandler, who wrote the Philip Marlowe stories, was an executive at an oil company. Write what you know? Yes, but these rules should not be presented as hard and fast rules. They should be taken metaphorically. Instead of writing what you know, sink into yourself, because that is who you are and where you are.
Memoirs of a Shape-Shifter takes place in Gloucester, MA. It’s so rich in history, and such an unusual place and I thought I’m going to put this in a story somehow. So I went and visited and walked around a lot. That was helpful in writing descriptions, because it’s always harder to describe something you’ve never actually seen. It’s always something slightly different when you’ve actually experienced it on some level or is it of central importance to you.
I have a series called The Mysterium Series which takes place on the Boston College campus. I mean it looks like Hogwarts here. My students were saying to me, “You should read the Harry Potter books.” So I read that, and then the Dan Brown book, The Da Vinci Code. I thought, “The Grail story has been around for a long time. What if I set the Grail at BC and have students finding it?” The idea was to write a story that brings out the romance in BC. I had fun with that, plus it was from the student’s point of view. My whole trip with teaching has been to try to remember as much as possible what it felt like to be a student and not to lose touch with my student personality.
TSM: Can you tell readers more about your upcoming works?
TKM: I’m working on the third book in The Mysterium Series right now, Tempus Mysterium, which is about time travel. I also have a series of detective novels that is not out yet. I’m a licensed building contractor and have been licensed for about 30 to 40 years. During the pandemic, I thought, I haven’t read anybody who has come up with a detective who was a building contractor. The hero of this story isn’t a detective, it’s just that his business partner gets killed on the job and it’s under suspicious circumstances. It’s called Mad Honey because I discovered that there is a variety of this plant that produces a flower that’s poisonous. Bees come and when they take the pollen they make honey, and the honey is poisonous. I thought, this is great, I can use this!