Maureen Johnson is no stranger to the mystery genre. In her latest standalone venture following her bestselling Truly Devious series, Death at Morning House, a gay teen investigates not one but two murders that have taken place at her eerie new place of work. Marlowe Wexler escapes from the aftermath of an embarrassing first date to Morning House, a mansion that previously housed the infamous Ralston family. While working there, Marlowe uncovers new revelations about the Ralston murder case while investigating the sudden death of her new boss. We spoke with Johnson about her writing process, grappling with the truth of the past, and the marriage of comedy and mystery in her work.
For the last few years, you’ve been expanding upon the Truly Devious universe. What made you want to step out of it for this new book?
Mysteries are generally one and done. There are mysteries that have a continuing detective. Stevie Bell [of the Truly Devious books] is a continuing detective, but in many mysteries, you get the case and that’s it. And then there’s the single mystery stories. It’s just natural to do a stand-alone mystery and it’s a big challenge.
What goes into crafting a good teen detective? What are some of the traits necessary and how did you incorporate them into Marlowe?
The traits are the same as an adult detective. What’s different are their limitations in society. Because they’re teens they haven’t started a career. They don’t have six ex-wives or ex-husbands. They don’t have a past. You just have to take into account that they don’t have certain job experience, life experience, or sometimes financial resources. They’re operating at a disadvantage, but an advantage is that they’re probably underestimated.
What is the process in crafting your stories?
I love a classic mystery, a puzzle. I always start at the central problem, with the case of what happened, because a murder mystery involves someone being killed. I start with the why and then I go to the how and the who. I always build a case file; I write out the entire set of circumstances that was behind what happened. And I may update that as I work. But I always say, “This is actually what happened, and this is why these other things happen.”
What was behind the decision to make this a dual timeline mystery? What did you want to explore through each investigation?
I think that mysteries are all about looking back. It may be back a couple of hours, or maybe back 100 years, it doesn’t really matter. It’s always about going back and figuring out how we got to where we are now. And I wanted to make something that talked about our American past: the stuff we don’t talk about that we need to talk about. [It’s about] building something that seems like a monument, an important house by an important family, and asking, “What was really going on inside of this house?”
This book plays with the idea of revisionist history, particularly with how people of the present day view the Ralston family in comparison to the realities of their lives. Why was that important to portray?
It’s based on absolutely everything that’s happening around us all the time. We are deliberately removing histories. If people try to talk about certain aspects of history, they get in trouble, or the books get removed. Or we take down a statue and everyone freaks out. The things that are in that book that the Ralston family espouses, like eugenics, weren’t fringe at all. It was commonplace. That was part of the culture. And we ignore all these things to our peril. It’s all about [how] we revere them because of a big expensive house. Like, they live in a big house, they must be right. We revere the house instead of [looking at] the lives of the people in it or around it.
A throughline in both mysteries is the difficulty of loving someone you may not particularly like all the time. Why was that an important theme for you to explore?
It happens to almost everyone. Certainly right now, we might have a lot of disagreements with people about stuff, even within our own families. And how do you resolve that? What do you do? That’s just a fact of life that you may have difficult relationships sometimes. You have to navigate having people in your family who have beliefs that are very different from yours. I feel like that is a real experience, and maybe one that’s in the forefront of a lot of our minds right now.
This story begins with Marlowe’s attempts to impress a girl, and throughout the novel we see Marlowe evolve through her approach to her romantic relationships. Why did you want to incorporate romance into this mystery?
I have a lot of writer friends, and we all get together and work and talk about story with each other. And I am frequently pursued by my friends who ask me, “How’s your romance plot going?” And I run away! Sometimes physically, because I’m like, I do not want to talk about it! I’m not a romance writer. I have written them, but I see myself as really kind of bad at it. So I said, why not embrace that feeling? Embrace the feeling of someone who’s wildly romantic and bad at it and make that your thing. I thought it was funny to create someone who is a romantic and is just not super good at it.
This mystery is filled with humor via Marlowe’s narration. Can you talk a bit about the relationship between mystery and comedy and striking that balance?
I just write in the way that I write. There are mysteries that are very deadly serious, and there are some that are more light. I think you can strike as many tones as you like, as long as you have a character [whose] moral and general worldview remains consistent. I think Marlowe finds herself. And I imagine it’d be quite frightening to find a dead body or to be like, “Oh, everyone around me is disappearing and dying.” And I’m like, this is how I would react. I would be cracking jokes left and right out of sheer terror. That’s my attitude towards life. Yeah, it might get you eventually, but just keep laughing.
What’s next for you?
Right now, I am working on the final draft of a dossier mystery. They used to make them in the ’30s. It’s where you get a letter saying they need your help with this case, and you get the full case documents and a sealed solution in the back. And there’s going to be two more Stevie Bell mysteries.
Death at Morning House by Maureen Johnson. HarperTeen, $19.99 Aug. 6 ISBN 978-0-06-325595-1.
