The romance fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review made her name writing The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics and other queer historicals. In Murder by Memory (Tordotcom, Mar.), which PW’s starred review called an “ebullient first foray into speculative fiction,” the ship’s detective of an interstellar luxury liner wakes up in a new body, with a copy of her memory safe in the ship’s library and a murderer on the loose. Waite spoke with PW about the novella, which launches a Golden Age–style mystery series in space.
What’s the appeal of cozy mysteries?
There’s an appetite for murder out there. We’ve seen a true crime boom, wave after wave of high-budget TV shows and movies about serial killers, and dark, gritty reboots of classic mystery shows. You have people who want that intense crime experience, and then you have those who want the other side—the cozy mystery, where when bad people do things they’ll be caught, the truth will always be discovered, and there’s always hope.
How does the Library, a sentient character, figure into your story?
A library evokes coziness for obvious reasons: people who love books often love reading books about books, and writers love writing them. This library holds an external copy of each person’s memory. It’s not a perfect system; some people don’t back up as often as they should, and sabotage happens. But nothing you experience will ever be lost, and even if your body wears out you get to keep living.
What was it like to shift from romance to speculative fiction?
I’ve been reading both genres equally since I was a child. I would steal my mom’s romance novels and steal science fiction from my aunts and uncles. Pivoting into a different genre is a question of balance: if I wanted to write a science fictional or paranormal romance, the romance arc resolves in one volume, while the mystery might spool out over several. In this new series, the romance goes for several books, but the mystery completes in each book.
For a book about murder, there’s a lot of warmth and humor. Why is that?
When I’m writing queer science fiction and mystery, I want to say, nobody’s here to hurt anybody. A lot of marginalized people are so used to everyone like them getting killed in stories. Romance has to have a happy ending, and comedy wants things to feel settled at the end—not because humans are weak and need comfort, but because we need to know that the world is not on the brink of destruction. The key question that comedy is asking is, how do we live in a society?
In what way does your experience as a reviewer inform your writing?
The never-ending pressure has been really fruitful. Having to express the experience of reading the book makes me a better reader and writer; when I started reviewing I saw the quality of my own writing jump. Writers hate talking about their own work, because it’s hard to put in words something you’re doing by instinct. When you look critically at what makes a book successful or unsuccessful, you get a much sharper sense of craft. As a reader I’ve always been an overthinker, and now I’m capitalizing on something I’d already be doing. My brain likes to tear things apart.
