F. Scott Fitzgerald famously signals social class in The Great Gatsby merely by naming Daisy Buchanon and Mytle Wilson. And William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and Charles Dickens broadcast the attributes and destiny of Dolly Tearsheet, Willie Loehman, and Miss Haversham as soon as their names appear.
The fiction writer has a zillion names to choose from: names that foreshadow fate, whisper secrets, provide clues and context—a nifty shorthand for the author and an insight guide for the reader. But recently, I forgot all that.
The truth is that sometimes when we mystery writers stumble upon an exciting plot, we want to get on with it: murder the poor slob, steal his mistress, forge the check, and escape to Mexico while inspiration lasts, and not waste too much sweat on names.
I was confronted with this literary lapse when analyzing the editorial choices I had made in the first two pages of my short story “Levitas” for a mystery blog.
“Levitas” is part of Where Murder Never Sleeps, an anthology by the New York/tristate chapter of Sisters-in-Crime, and the challenge was to set a crime in a New York City landmark. I chose the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park, and the plot grabbed hold of me as soon as I set foot inside. But I was brought up short when I attempted to explain why I had chosen Anabell for the name of my protagonist, an artist and model who had lived and worked there.
With chagrin, I realized that I had chosen her name first and foremost because I knew absolutely nobody with that name. I was still smarting from complaints by family members that I had transformed them into serial killers in my previous fiction.
But Anabell: the name seemed to arrive in my mind magically devoid of the usual ethnic and racial connotations. She served her purpose, and I never would have given Anabell another thought, except for Bessie Popkin, whom I happened to meet in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “The Key.”
Bessie Popkin! A whole universe opened up in my mind with the mention of that name.
I know Bessie Popkin! She lived next door to me in Brooklyn, where I grew up. There were hundreds of Bessie Popkins roaming the streets of Brooklyn like golems, dragging their tattered shopping bags filled with shattered dreams, faded photos, lists of enemies, and often half-eaten egg sandwiches, even through they gave them heartburn.
I also knew her husband, Sammy Popkin, who died before her. All the Sammys who started with sewing machines on their backs and grew rich in the garment trade but died young due to overwork and a diet with enough chicken fat to grease the wheels of eternity. Oh, the power of the right name!
What chance did my poor Anabell have to stimulate the imagination of my readers? And suddenly I wondered, how did she “magically “ appear in my work in the first place?
Maybe—just maybe—there was more to my choice of Anabell than mere chance. Like Bessie Popkin, my Anabell was an elderly Jewish woman, but a second-generation Jew: a real American whose dreams were not of survival but of freedom to pursue her individual destiny.
The more I thought about the name, the more associations came to mind. There was the beautiful Annabel Lee, who captured the heart and soul of Edgar Allan Poe; Annie, the feisty, independent frontier woman in the musical Annie Get Your Gun; there was little orphan Annie; and indeed, my Anabell, too, who was now all alone in the world, with no friends or family. And Henry James’s Isabel Archer, who had to triumph over sexual deceptions. And there was bella, the Italian word for beautiful—once embodied by the youthful Anabell but now a distant memory.
The real magic in a work of fiction is what happens in the space between the mind of the author and the words finally written down. Bubbles of insight from the unconscious, a linking of feelings, ideas, and personal experience that tell us something about ourselves as well as our characters. It’s what makes fiction as surprising and exciting for the writer as for the reader.
Roz Siegel is the director of acquisitions at MJF Books and the author of the mysteries Goodie One Shoes and Well-Heeled.
