BH: I like mysteries. Most of the books I write are puzzle stories, because I find that kind of story interesting. Without a puzzle to solve, my characters would pretty much sit around for 300 pages, talking. I’ve read that type of book and they don’t interest me much on the whole.
Formal murder mysteries generally consist of two interwoven stories: the story of what actually happened, and the story of Our Heroes figuring out what actually happened. Sometimes these two stories are separated by weeks, sometimes by years or centuries. Frequently there’s somebody trying to keep Our Heroes from figuring out what actually happened, so they have to sleuth around in the past while watching their backs in the present.
I’m a historian. I like sleuthing-around-in-the-past stories.
Generally I structure a mystery like a hand of mah jongg: you have information that’s uncovered and visible to the reader, and information that’s covered. The progression of the story is governed by the order in which you uncover information. Each uncovering triggers reactions in Our Heroes, or in the people who’re trying to keep Our Heroes from doing their job; each uncovering should also trigger clues to the next uncovering.
SRM: For me, the central mystery of your bibliography as a whole is this: many of your seemingly separate series are connected to one another (and to our reality) through a medium called the Abyss. What prompted you to weave it all into a single tapestry? Somehow I don’t foresee any comic book-style crossovers, although the idea of Crisis on Infinite Hamblies is amusing.
BH: If you enjoy cross-universe stories—and want to write more than one of them—you’ve pretty much got to invent whatever it is that separates the universes. I found the Void a useful trope both in the Darwath Series and the Windrose Chronicles; I’m far from the only writer who’s used it. I played with the idea a little in Sun-Cross (the Magic Nazis books) and I accept it as a given in both the Sun Wolf and Winterlands universes, without making the stories be about it. Lovecraft gets pretty tedious when he gratuitously lugs in references to shuggoths and Nyarlathotep in tales that can perfectly well do without them. One thing I try to do is keep the circle of viewpoint characters—the actual heroes of the story—as small as possible, because that permits an emotional depth that is harder to achieve with seventeen viewpoint characters.
Also, I find “let’s have Superman meet Thor!” tales not to my taste most of the time. (It’s like, “Let’s bring back the same villain twenty-three times!”) I admit, I do have assorted characters from other serieses [sic] walk through the Star Trek novel Ishmael and you get a flying glimpse of the Ghostbusters in one of my Beauty and the Beast novelizations, but that’s just keeping myself amused.
