In Jason Overstreet's debut mystery, The Striver's Row Spy, the FBI's first African-American agent has a secret agenda. Sidney Temple's assignment is to move to Harlem, New York, in order to infiltrate “dangerously radical” Marcus Garvey's inner circle and report any incriminating activity to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. But Sidney is secretly working to thwart the FBI's investigation while aiding black leader W.E.B. Du Bois. As Sidney and his spirited wife, Loretta, rise in Harlem Renaissance society, his mission becomes far more dangerous than he ever imagined. We asked Overstreet a few questions about his new novel.

This is your debut novel, and it’s such a unique view into Harlem Renaissance-era New York, as well as the beginnings of the FBI. What inspired you to write this book?
A film entitled The Lives of Others, which won the Academy Award for best foreign film, inspired me. I wanted my novel to feel like that film felt in terms of pace and suspense. I loved the intimacy of the story and how it presented a spy who had feelings about his subjects. Everything wasn’t simply black and white to him, you know, good guy versus bad. It was complex, and he was conflicted with his assignment, the politics involved. I began trying to imagine a man of color being assigned to spy for a government entity. I looked up who the first African-American FBI agent was and found the name James Wormley Jones. He had been assigned to spy on Marcus Garvey. I imagined a man who might take such a job for a different reason than Jones. I imagined a man who was a W.E.B. Du Bois loyalist, as Garvey and Du Bois were rivals. And that’s when Sidney Temple was born.

I imagine that this novel took a lot of research about topics ranging from 1920s New York to the history of the FBI and its surveillance of Garvey and Du Bois. What was the most surprising thing you discovered in your research?
I was surprised to learn that Marcus Garvey was dead serious about finding a way to return all African Americans to Africa. It wasn’t some pipe dream. I was also surprised to learn how young J. Edgar Hoover was when he was first put in charge of the FBI’s General Intelligence Division. He was only 24.

After spying on Du Bois and Garvey, Hoover used the FBI to monitor Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and groups such as the Black Panther Party. How do you think the monitoring of citizens has continued today?
I really couldn’t say. I’d like to think they’ve evolved, at least past thinking of every black leader as a communist threat.

How do you think Sidney Temple, a—secretly—ardent supporter of W.E.B. Du Bois, would feel about the current climate of race relations in America?
I think he would be so proud that Barack Obama was elected the first African-American President. And I believe he would feel that we’re on the right track and have made tremendous strides. But I think he’d be bothered by the mass incarceration of black men and the seemingly systematic and routine way they are targeted by many police officers. But in terms of voting rights, housing rights and integration as a whole, he’d be ecstatic. He’d be so happy to simply have the right to raise his voice anywhere in the country without the fear of being lynched, as was often the case during the 1920s in the South.

What do you admire most about Sidney Temple?
I admire his idealistic nature, tenacity, love of family and his hopeful spirit.

What was the most difficult aspect of writing this novel?
Doing loads of research and making sure that each character’s voice was not only unique, but was befitting the time period. It was also a fun challenge to write fiction around lots of actual history. The book is full of true events. I also tried to talk about racism without hitting people over the head with it. There is a fine line if you really want to make your point.

Have you always been a fan of espionage or did learning about the history of the Bureau get you interested?
The latter.

Did any authors or musicians from the Harlem Renaissance inspire you while writing this novel?
The African-American poet Claude McKay inspired me. He traveled a lot, spent time in the Soviet Union, London, Morocco. He was willing to do anything to keep his writing dream alive, doing various odd jobs, etcetera, all while encountering extreme racism. He was brave and unwilling to settle for being treated as a second-class citizen. He could seamlessly mingle with upscale whites, and genuinely befriended many prominent ones, all the while trying to prove his worth as a colored writer against insurmountable odds. But no matter how much rejection he encountered, he seemed to hold on to his charismatic and positive personality. He was a true artist.

What’s next for you? Will we be seeing more of Sidney Temple and Loretta?
The sequel to The Strivers’ Row Spy is almost complete.  

Author photo by Wendy D.

Having taken Sherlock Holmes and his stalwart companion Dr. Watson to the darkest reaches of the uncanny and the supernatural in his Cthulhu Casebooks series, James Lovegrove now gives the Great Detective a much more traditional, even cozy sort of case. Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon finds the sleuth investigating mysterious goings-on at an isolated manor, where someone may be trying to make heiress Eve Allerthorpe go mad. We talked to Lovegrove about Holmesian tropes, holiday traditions and more.

When first starting work on Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon, did you look at any Holmes tales in particular for inspiration?
More than anything I drew inspiration from The Hound of Baskervilles. It’s the most Gothic and ghostly of all the canonical tales (even though, of course, there’s nothing actually supernatural in it). The mood of the novel and its powerful sense of place—Dartmoor at its bleakest and most forbidding—were what I most hoped to replicate in Christmas Demon.

Do any of the original stories strike you as particularly festive? If you had to make a Christmas reading suggestion (after readers finish your own book, of course), which Doyle story would you pick?
Conan Doyle wrote only one Holmes tale that’s explicitly Christmassy, “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.” It’s not the greatest of them all but it’s sprightly and fun, with Holmes even pardoning the culprit at the end in a gesture that might well be regarded as appropriate (time of charity, season of goodwill and so on).

You’ve written several other Holmes stories and novels over the years. Has anything gotten easier about slipping into Conan Doyle’s world and voice? Has anything gotten harder?
What’s become easier is getting the relationship between Holmes and Watson right. For me, that lies at the heart of the original stories, and it’s as important for any Holmes pasticheur to handle well as offering deductions, mysteries and the rest. The trick lies in striking a balance between Holmes’s arch cerebralness and Watson’s abiding decency. The two balance each other out, and if you get the balance wrong, making Holmes too curt and irascible and Watson too passive and baffled, the whole thing falls apart.

What’s become harder for me is, simply, coming up with new ideas for plots, new variations on the old themes, new challenges for our heroic duo. But then the challenge is fun.

What would Holmes love about the modern world? What would he hate? How would Watson deal with the 21st century?
Holmes would doubtless find the Internet an unbeatable detection tool. He uses newspapers, encyclopedias and almanacs constantly in his profession. The Internet would give him everything he needs to know, and more, right at his fingertips. He’d probably hate the Internet’s more fatuous and unsavoury elements, though: cat videos, memes, “influencers,” trolls, bots, the lot.

Watson, I feel, would embrace modern-day advances in medicine. He’s very proactive as a doctor—at least, that’s how I portray him in my tales.

Where did the idea to do a Holmes Christmas story come from?
My wife. I was umming and aahing about what sort of Holmes book to do next, and she said, “Why not a Christmas one? People love Christmas books, and you’re such a grump about Christmas. It’d do you good.”

Holmes’s famous ability to find and discern clues from footprints is vitally important in this book. How on earth do you go about working that out as an author? Do you imitate it yourself? Are there books one can read on the art of reading footprints?
No great trick to it. I just sat down and thought it through. Holmes often finds footprints useful in his investigations, and there are few mediums that record footprints better than snow. A book on the art of reading footprints is a nice idea, though!

Speaking of Sherlock Holmes tropes, do you have any favorites? Any that you dislike?
The trope I’m not fond of writing, myself, is the scene where Holmes infers huge amounts of detail from a person’s appearance or from some inanimate object. It’s hard to do well. Yet it’s a necessary component. I’m also not a fan of him being privy to information the reader doesn’t have. Conan Doyle did that a lot, bless him, but I don’t feel that that is playing fair. I want the reader to have a chance, at least, of working out the solution before Holmes reveals all.

How do you plan to celebrate the holidays? Are there any Christmas traditions you particularly enjoy?
My birthday falls on Christmas Eve—like Eve Allerthorpe’s does in Christmas Demon—so for me the holidays are kind of a double-edged sword. I get presents, but so does everybody else, and that makes my birthday feel a little less special. My wife goes a bit crazy in our house, with decorations on every floor and no less than three Christmas trees (one in the hallway, one in the kitchen and one in the area where she has her yoga studio). She gets very excited about the whole thing, and I’m happy to go along with that, although left to my own devices I think I’d take a rather more Scrooge-like approach.

Where would you like to take Holmes next?
I’ve recently completed The Beast of the Stapletons, a sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles. That will be published in late 2020. I also have a collection of Holmes short stories out in January, which includes a tale set in my Cthulhu Casebooks universe. After that, I have no plans. I’ve written more words of Holmes by now than Conan Doyle himself did. It may be that the time has come to take a break.

This interview was conducted by BookPage and sponsored by Titan Books. All editorial views are those of BookPage alone and reflect our policy of editorial independence and impartiality.

A dead body is “a brilliant jumping-off point,” remarks British novelist Stuart Turton, speaking by phone from his home in Hertfordshire, England. “I can’t think of a more freeing starting point for a novel.”

Case in point is Turton’s second novel, The Devil and the Dark Water, which begins with both a body and a bang. As passengers board a trade ship in the Dutch East Indies in 1634, a person with leprosy wrapped in bloody bandages appears, curses the voyage and then bursts into flames. A demon named Old Tom may be responsible for this person’s death. To bring himself up to speed on such matters, Turton took an online course on demons. “If you’ve got a few hours,” he says, “they teach you how to identify and banish demons, which is just bizarre. I don’t believe in any of this, but it was fantastic.”

An unexpected layover back in 2003 led Turton to the inspiration for this gripping mystery. After missing a flight to Singapore, the author, who readily admits that he is “terrible at sticking to plans,” found himself stranded in Perth, Australia. To kill time, he visited a maritime museum, where he learned about the 1629 shipwreck of the Batavia. Years later, he decided to fictionalize the ship’s saga. The actual story is apparently so horrible that “it wouldn’t have been fun to read,” Turton says.

“I felt like I was my own little ship sailing in between these different lighthouses and trying to get my characters to safety . . .”

Before writing this book, he returned to Perth, visited Indonesia (where his fictional ship, the Saardam, leaves port) and studied records in the British Museum and the British Library. He scoured passenger manifests from the 1600s, borrowing names for many of his characters. “Research is my favorite part of writing,” he says. “It’s just an excuse to travel and go to great places.”

The Devil and the Dark Water is filled with realistic details about life aboard the Saardam, including characters who bathe with buckets of seawater and must lean overboard to go to the bathroom. When asked how people survived such miserable voyages, Turton curtly replies that they “mostly didn’t.” He is hardly married to the minutiae of history, however. “The moment it interferes with my plot, I throw it away,” he admits.

History isn’t the only thing this author gets rid of. Upon the publication of his blockbuster mystery The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018), he burned his notes in a backyard bonfire. An exquisite combination of Agatha Christie and Groundhog Day, Turton’s first book stars a detective who inhabits the bodies of eight different witnesses in an attempt to solve and prevent a murder. Editing Evelyn’s necessarily precise timeline nearly drove Turton mad, however, so the bonfire felt like a symbolic way to free himself to write something completely different.

Turton plotted his latest novel using a method he calls, appropriately enough, “lighthousing.” He explains: “I felt like I was my own little ship sailing in between these different lighthouses and trying to get my characters to safety at the end of the book. It sounds weird to say, but I almost left it up to them to find their way through.”

As for this book’s dead body, Turton created a trio of Dutch women to investigate. There’s “fiercely intelligent” Sara, who is planning to escape her greedy, abusive husband, Jan; her genius young daughter, Lia; and Creesjie, Jan’s mistress and Sara’s friend. Although Turton read about the daily lives of women at that time, he admits to taking some liberties. “I made mine totally Charlie’s Angels,” he says. “I wanted them having witty banter, being really engaging characters and not being meek and dour, constantly humiliated by the men in their lives.”

Also on board is a Sherlock Holmes-type detective named Samuel Pipps, who could quickly get to the bottom of these bizarre events if he weren’t imprisoned, being transported to Amsterdam to await execution for an unknown crime. That leaves Pipps’ detective work to his devoted bodyguard, Arent Hayes, a hulking figure with an enigmatic past.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Devil and the Dark Water.

Despite this Sherlockian setup, Turton says he’s not a huge fan of the beloved character. “The miracles of Holmes’ talents always seem to happen within the first two pages of the story; then he spends the next 15 pages never using those talents again.” Instead, Turton has been an Agatha Christie enthusiast since reading her work at age 8, when he realized that Christie’s books were board games to be played against the author. Turton wants his own readers to feel the same invitation. “All the clues are there in front of you,” he says. “Just get out a notepad and start making notes. This is something we should be enjoying together.”

How about Turton’s own detective skills? Has he ever tried an escape room?

No, he says with a laugh. “Everyone expects me to be great at Scrabble because I’m a writer. I’m terrible at Scrabble, and I think I’d be terrible at escape rooms. Pure pride has prevented me from going into one.”

Author photo by Charlotte Graham.