Beatrice Lang arrived at our studio with wet hair and a thermos of tea. She had been in the Atlantic before seven that morning, as she is most mornings from November through April, and she still had the pink cheeks to prove it. Within five minutes she was drawing the floor plan of a changing hut on the back of our producer's notepad.
That hut is the scene of the crime in The Undertow Club, Lang's debut mystery, in which the founder of a century-old winter swim club in the seaside town of Gullhaven, Massachusetts, is found dead inside it, with the door bolted from within. In this episode of The RedSquibble Podcast, Lang talks about building a classic locked-room puzzle out of wool socks and seawater, the real swimmers who read her drafts, and why she refused to let a single character say the word "hypothermia" until chapter nineteen.
In This Episode
- 00:00 Tessa's cold open, and Beatrice explains the thermos
- 03:10 Why a changing hut is the perfect locked room
- 11:45 Building Gullhaven, a town that does not exist but feels like three that do
- 19:30 The wet towel clue and how Beatrice hid it in plain sight
- 29:15 Swim club members as first readers, and the note that changed the ending
- 40:05 Advice for debut mystery writers and what Beatrice is writing next
Highlights
These excerpts have been edited for length and clarity.
Tessa Quinn Most locked-room mysteries use a library or a study. Why a changing hut?
Beatrice Lang Because it is the most private room in a very public place. Everyone at a winter swim club sees you nearly naked on the beach, and then you go into this little wooden box and bolt the door, and for five minutes nobody can see you at all. That contrast was the whole book for me. Also, the huts are tiny. There are only about four places you can hide anything, and I liked the discipline of that.
Tessa Quinn You swim year-round yourself. How much of the club is real?
Beatrice Lang The feeling is real. The people are invented, I promise, and I say that partly for legal reasons and partly because my club would drown me. But the rituals are true. The way everyone stands at the waterline pretending they are not about to go in. The way nobody talks about the cold, ever, because talking about it makes it worse. I stole that silence and gave it to my suspects.
"Everyone at a winter swim club sees you nearly naked on the beach, and then you go into this little wooden box and bolt the door."
Tessa Quinn You had actual swimmers read the manuscript.
Beatrice Lang Six of them. One is a retired detective, which was useful, and one is a marine biologist, which was humbling. She sent me four pages of notes about tide tables. The biggest note came from an eighty-one-year-old woman who has swum every winter since 1968. She told me my victim would never have left his towel folded. Real winter swimmers throw the towel over the hook the second they walk in, because your hands stop working fast. That note changed my ending.
Tessa Quinn What would you tell someone writing their first mystery?
Beatrice Lang Play fair and then play fair again. Put every clue on the page where a reader could find it. Readers of this genre are the sharpest people in publishing. If you cheat, they will know, and they will tell everyone.
Mentioned in This Episode
- The Undertow Club by Beatrice Lang (Bellwether, 320 pages, $27.99)
- The fictional Gullhaven Winter Bathing Society, founded 1925, and its 101-year-old logbook
- Beatrice's list of "four places to hide something in a changing hut," which appears in the book's acknowledgments
- Episode 9 of The RedSquibble Podcast, featuring Priya Venkataraman on writing Low Tide Protocol
Lang is at work on a second Gullhaven novel, set during the town's first summer regatta in forty years. She says it will be warmer. She does not say it will be safer.
The Undertow Club by Beatrice Lang (Bellwether, 320 pages, $27.99) is out now.
Host and producer of The RedSquibble Podcast, where she talks with debut authors about the books behind the books.
