Staying Fit
Book cover: Minotaur Books; Illustration of author: Thomas Fuchs; background: Katherine Lam
The publication of The Mountains Wild marks approximately 13 years since author Sarah Stewart Taylor released a mystery novel. While fans of the genre and of Taylor’s books are, no doubt, celebrating the release, there may be no one more excited than the author herself.
“I’m a huge mystery reader, and I just love the form. Over the last few years, I just was itching to get back to it,” says Taylor, who spent those intervening years raising a family and writing a series of kids-adventure books. “I missed the complexity of plots and just really tackling some darker subject matter.”
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Taylor, best known for the Sweeney St. George mystery series that features a young art historian who specializes in gravestone and funerary art, begins a new crime fiction series with The Mountains Wild. Set in Dublin and Long Island, New York, the book introduces readers to homicide detective Maggie D’arcy, who returns to a cold case that has changed the course of her life. In 1993, Maggie’s cousin Erin went missing in Ireland. Maggie traveled from New York to Dublin to aid in the investigation, but to no avail. Erin was never found. More than 20 years later, Maggie is now a homicide detective, and the Dublin police are calling again: Erin’s scarf has been found, and another young woman has gone missing.
“I started thinking about disappearances and what it must be like for the family of people who disappear and aren’t found,” Taylor says about developing the Maggie character. “How would that shape you if you were the family member of someone who disappeared and you never got answers to all those questions that you had? And so she came out of that.” That lack of closure is what also prompted Taylor to make her main character a homicide detective — Maggie is compelled to find answers for others because she has been unable to find them for her own family.
Taylor says the “incredibly pressure-intensive situation” of a mystery novel allows her to dissect what makes human beings tick and all the contradictory ways in which human beings act. “Human character is revealed under that pressure,” she observes. “That’s what I love most about writing mysteries is you just have this opportunity to explore character in a really deep way.” That includes delving into those dark places that hold the secrets we keep and the lies we tell. “We think we know the people we love, but we don’t really know them.”
Mixed up in this world of secrets and lies is the often fallible, always personal concept of memory — what we remember, what we forget, what we forget and then remember, and how memory can change with time. “So often the memories that people tell us are somehow incorrect. They’re missing a piece, or you misremembered something, or you’re lying, and so you’re not telling the whole memory,” Taylor says. “And we use memory to try to understand them and to put together a picture of them that makes sense.”
The author’s own memories played a vital role in the telling of The Mountains Wild. She grew up on Long Island and studied Irish literature at Trinity College in Dublin, where she lived for a few years in the mid-’90s. She called upon those experiences — from the feel of the breeze on the Long Island Sound to the tastes of the pints and smell of the peat fires in Ireland — to infuse the novel with its rich, atmospheric details.
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