Take Five with Alex Bledsoe, Author, “Dark Jenny”

Alex Bledsoe is the contributor for this week’s Take Five, a regular series where we ask authors to share five facts about their latest books. His book, Dark Jenny, will be available on March 29:

For twenty-five gold pieces a day, plus expenses, Eddie LaCrosse will take on most any case. But the unexpected delivery of a coffin in the dead of winter forces LaCrosse to look back at a bygone chapter in his past—and the premeditated murder of a dream.

Ruled by the noble King Marcus Drake, the island kingdom of Grand Braun is an oasis of peace and justice in an imperfect world. At least until the beautiful Queen Jennifer is accused of adultery and murder. In the wrong castle at the wrong time, Eddie finds himself drafted at sword’s point to solve the mystery. With time running out, and powerful nobles all too eager to pin the murder on Eddie himself, he must untangle a tangled web of palace intrigues, buried secrets, and bewitching women—before the entire kingdom erupts into civil war.

Alex Bledsoe:

1) The coffin delivered in the first chapter is an homage to Django, a 1966 Spaghetti Western starring Franco Nero. In it, the anti-hero arrives dragging a coffin behind him; within it he carries a weird kind of Gatling gun. The same motif was also used in 2005’s Death Trance, in which the coffin contains the Goddess of Destruction. In both cases, it is unclear who or what is in the coffin until later in the story (well, unless you read the spoiler-y liner notes on the Death Trance DVD. Or this list.)

2) Although all the Eddie LaCrosse novels are standalone adventures, in the previous novel Burn Me Deadly Eddie mentions that he first learned the trick of disguising himself by shaving off his beard on the island of Grand Bruan. That was a deliberate reference to the story of Dark Jenny, which I was then writing in first draft at the same time I was revising and editing Burn Me Deadly.

3) Eddie’s hand injury came from reading the story of filmmaker Howard Hawks punching Ernest Hemingway. As quoted in Hawks on Hawks (1982, University of California Press), Hawks said, “You ever hit anybody hard? Your finger goes out of joint, and somebody takes it and pulls it back into joint. I hit Hemingway and broke the whole back of my hand. I wish it had just gone out of joint.”

4) Dark Jenny deliberately echoes the Arthurian myth, but it didn’t feel right dropping Eddie into the story of the Holy Grail, the Fisher King or any other quasi-supernatural tale. I scoured Le Morte D’Arthur looking for an example of Arthurian crime to set the plot in motion, and found the episode of the poisoned apples, where Guinevere is convicted of murder and sentenced to burn. In the Vulgate Cycle I also found another plot twist that I won’t spoil here (although if you know the theme from The Patty Duke Show, you’ll get a clue).

5) The novel’s Merlin figure, Cameron Kern, is modeled on a particular musician of decades past also rumored (at least by his followers) to have magical powers. One particular physical attribute is a dead giveaway.