Lauren Muñoz is a writer, lawyer, and former teacher living in Southern California. Here, Muñoz discusses her love of classic detective fiction and bringing an authentic Latinx voice to the mystery genre in her debut YA novel, Suddenly a Murder.
I read my first Agatha Christie book when I was in high school. It was a battered paperback of Murder on the Orient Express, plucked from my dad’s bookshelves, and I devoured it in a single sitting. Thus began my love affair with the Golden Age of British detective fiction—mysteries written during the 1920s and 1930s, between World War I and World War II. Though many authors from the era aren’t read much anymore, others have defied the passage of time, especially the Queens of Crime: Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and of course, the Queen of Queens, Agatha Christie.
Christie is best known for the mysteries she wrote featuring Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer who takes refuge in England during World War I. Although Christie ended up disliking her most famous creation, I’ve always loved Poirot’s egotistical brilliance and his dainty personal habits. But it’s his outsider status as an immigrant that inspired the detective in my young adult debut, Suddenly a Murder, where seven teenagers throw a 1920s graduation party at a glamorous manor until one of them turns up dead. The lead investigator is Pilar de León, a Mexican PI who dresses like a steampunk witch and has the sparkling weirdness of a Golden Age detective. The teens don’t know what to make of her, and it’s only the other outsider in the group—Izzy Morales, a scholarship kid in a sea of wealthy friends—who immediately recognizes the risk that Pilar de León poses to the killer.
Christie cast Poirot as a Belgian refugee in part so that few of her suspects would take him seriously. To them, he was a strange little foreigner they often mistook for a Frenchman, a stereotype he leaned into so he could further disarm their suspicions. Other Golden Age authors used a similar narrative device to characterize their investigators; if a detective seemed like a bumbler or a silly ass (I’m looking at you, Lord Wimsey), it explained why suspects were so willing to participate in interrogations and so naïve as to allow the detective to poke around their homes. In my debut, Pilar de León adopts a breezy sanguinity and peppers her speech with Spanish and sympathy in order to hide her hawk-like focus on solving the murder. These contradictions take an otherwise supremely capable person and turn her into an underdog, giving readers someone to root for in the race to catch the killer.
One unsurprising feature of Golden Age detective fiction (given it was written a hundred years ago) is its lack of diverse detectives. Despite many of the popular authors of the era being women—and several, including Sayers, writing feminist mysteries—most of their detectives are white men. And I love them! But it was important to me that my detective be a clever Latina as bold as Poirot so that both Izzy and readers could recognize themselves in her.
I also want my young readers to recognize themselves in me. According to a recent study, about 6% of people in traditional publishing are Latinx. In a country with a Latinx population of over 60 million, that number paints a disheartening picture of our outsider status in the profession. This, of course, is not a problem unique to publishing (the percentage of Latinx lawyers in America is also around 6%), but it’s vital to continue improving representation in the industry that’s responsible for producing children’s literature. Before I went to law school, I taught public school in Texas, and while it’s true that my bilingual students liked to see themselves in characters, they cared even more about relating to the real people around them who were doing things they dreamed about for their own lives. When I told them I wanted to be an author, they said they did too, and many began showing enthusiasm for their creative writing assignments. Writers beget writers, so the more often publishers support the careers of Latinx authors, the more investment they’ll be making in younger generations.
As for me, I’m excited to continue writing about bright and driven Latina girls, who I hope will see themselves in my stories—and then write the next ones.
Suddenly a Murder by Lauren Muñoz. Putnam, $18.99 Sept. ISBN 978-0-5936-1753-3
