In my 1920s supernatural noir novel, The Talking Cure, Violet Humphrey, a young woman confined to the Elsass Institute, must claw her way back to reality by investigating a murder at the asylum. Under magical duress, Sean Joye, a frenemy from the first Sean Joye Investigations novel, The Big Cinch, steps in to help her. The Talking Cure will be available November 25th.
Over the next few weeks I’d love to share my journey into this bit of fiction with you. Sean recently sat down with me to discuss the new story as well as his life and thoughts in general.
An Interview with Sean Joye
Q: Well, here we are. Another story in the can.
Sean: A pretty good yarn, if I do say so myself.
Q: You share the spotlight in this one. How do you feel about that?
Sean: ‘Tis grand. You know I’m happy in the background. And it’s Violet’s story, now isn’t it?
Q: [Interviewer looks skeptical.] I agree it’s Violet’s story. But I’m not sure she could have told it without you.
Sean: You’re too kind.
Q: Our readers would like to know a little more about your background and family. You’re from Belfast, originally, yes?
Sean: Guilty as charged. Born in 1900 to a good Catholic family in a republican neighborhood. Falls Road, if that means anything to you. [Ed note: “Republican” refers to people in favor of an independent Irish Republic, which included violent factions.] My father owned the Belfast Bar, burned down by unionists when I was a teen. [Ed note: “Unionist” refers people in favor of retaining Ireland’s union with England, which also included violent factions.]
Q: Are we going to hear a bunch of politics in this story?
Sean: Not at all, not at all. Ain’t I left all that behind me? No, America was to be a fresh start, a peaceful life of hard work and family, atoning for my sins and crimes.
Q: But trouble always comes calling.
Sean: Don’t it now? And in such unexpected forms. Haunts and creatures out of legend.
Q: And the faeries.
Sean: Don’t even get me started about the “good people.”
Q: You’ve told me often enough they don’t like to be talked about, yet you seem to be a favorite of theirs.
Sean: ‘Twould be comic, if they weren’t so dangerous. I’ll admit I’ve strayed from the straight and narrow, but I’ve been lucky. Not everyone escapes so easily.
Q: So, The Talking Cure. How did you come to be in what you call “Violet’s Story?”
Sean: I recall you’re the one who first called it Violet’s Story. How indeed did I end up in Middle-of-Nowhere, Illinois, pulling Violet Arwald’s chestnuts out of the fire yet again?
Q: [Interviewer interrupts him.] So you do think the story is about you.
Sean: Let me finish my thought, can you? She called out to me for help. She’d hexed me back in September of 1924, and it seems we were still linked somehow. It took all night driving through an ice storm, but I got to her, only to find the supposedly sane people had latched onto the crazy idea that she’d murdered someone.
Q: What was the biggest challenge for you, sharing the investigation with Violet?
Sean: Well, I won’t deny I often find myself helping people out of a jam, generally a jam that weren’t no business of mine. Maybe I like it; makes me feel important. We’ll have to ask that fetching young doctor Ibrahim to give me a bit of talking cure on the topic sometime. But I could see working the case was Violet’s way out of her…state, whatever you call it. I made myself step back, as much as I could anyway.
Q: Sounds like the two of you resolved some personal issues.
Sean: Perhaps we did, only to create new ones.
Q: Intriguing. Care to elaborate?
Sean: Read The Talking Cure and find out, why don’t you?
If Sean and his story sparks your interest, here is a short selection from The Talking Cure. In this scene, while washing dishes at the family pub Sean notices a curious itching of his palm, the same palm that was the object of Violet’s past spell work.
An Excerpt From The Talking Cure
Eliza’s dig about “that pilot” reminded me of Kyffin, not that he was ever far from my mind. I hadn’t seen my aviator-turned-attorney lover in months. Thinking on him made me think on the person responsible for us ever meeting in the first place, Violet Arwald Humphrey. She’d been whispering at me from the back of my mind for the better part of an hour—since the itching started.
Violet was a witch of my acquaintance. Although it took a while for me to catch on to that fact; I can be a mite dim. For a while I just thought she was a loony, you know, a crazy person. And maybe she was a crazy person; she was parked at a fancy insane asylum out in Middle-Of-Nowhere, Illinois. But I knew a lot more about witches now that I was studying magic myself, and she was a witch.
I can tell you the moment she first witched me. Maybe not exactly—she always affected me—but the most important time. She traced a thing in my palm—a pattern. And from then on I’d been unusually protective of her. It didn’t feel so unusual to me, but looking at myself, I knew. People who teach themselves magic out of books spend a good amount of time looking at themselves.
Do you ever wonder what characters might say if let loose from the story plot? Comment on the blog. Navigate to my website, click the blog title, and complete the dialogue box that will open at the end of the post.
If you enjoyed this blog post, you might like to read about Character Creation Tools.
I started this blog thread on the gritty details of the writing process over on my Facebook Author page, @kbkathylbrown, but think I might be better served putting it over here. If you’re interest in following my writing process in an informal way, you’ll find a few posts on Facebook that might interest you. You can subscribe to the blog from the website landing page (scroll down).
Sean Joye Investigations, Book 2
Haunted woman claws her way back to reality by reconnecting with her magical powers in The Talking Cure, a supernatural Yuletide follow-up to The Big Cinch.
Committed to an insane asylum, Violet Humphrey is isolated on the Illinois prairie with only her own thoughts and a persistent new voice in her head for company. When she is accused of murder, Violet suspects her road to both freedom and recovery lies through confronting her painful past and solving the crime. Magically summoned, Sean Joye skids through an ice storm to help Violet, but can they catch the killer and defy an eldritch horror before Violet loses her tenuous grasp on reality?
“The Talking Cure is a marvelous story—an Agatha Christie-style murder mystery infused with a strong sense of the Weird… and a hearty dose of magic on the side. It’s ideal for all fans of the sinister, the surprising, and the strange.” —Cherie Priest, award-winning author of Boneshaker
And now is an excellent time to read the first Sean Joye Investigations novel, The Big Cinch from Montag Press. In this award-winning supernatural noir adventure by Kathy L. Brown, Sean Joye, a fae-touched young veteran of 1922’s Irish Civil War, aims to atone for his assassin past and make a clean, new life in America. Until he asks the wrong questions…
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Wolfhearted is also available as an Audible audiobook, here.
St. Louis Writers Guild just published Weird STL, an anthology celebrate the strange, spooky, and just plain wonderful stories of our hometown. This volume of short stories, poems, a play, and essays includes a Sean Joye universe short story, “Big Magick.” Joseph Arwald, one of the baddies from The Big Cinch, tells us what really happened to the Ferris Wheel from the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair.
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