Eva Jurczyk

Steve Thomas: Eva, thank you for joining me on the podcast today.

Eva Jurczyk: Hi Steve, thanks so much for having me.

Steve Thomas: Before we get started talking about the book, you’re unique in this summer of reading that you’re the librarian who is also an author. Can you tell me how you got started in the library profession in the first place?

Eva Jurczyk: Sure. I mean, I think that libraries are in my blood and that’s probably a little bit different from most people. My mom was a librarian back when I was a kid, a bibliographer, not a job that exists anymore, and when we moved to Canada, she also worked in a library as a library tech. So from the time I was a really little kid, if she had to work Saturdays and we didn’t have childcare, I just hung out in the library.

I always wanted to be a writer. I didn’t want to be a librarian like my mom. I wanted to be a writer, but as an immigrant, that’s just not a job. You need something that you can be guaranteed will pay your mortgage. So I thought I would be a journalist because that’s like a reputable type of writing, but I graduated right into the Great Recession when all the big magazines were folding and the New Yorker didn’t immediately offer me a job, which I thought was very rude of them.

But because of my mom’s background, I knew a lot of her librarians, especially young ones, because when I was a kid without childcare at the library, they were often really nice to me, so I knew people who had been to library school pretty recently, and I got to chatting with them about it, and it seemed like a really lovely profession, and the things that they were talking about that they learned were quite different from the job that I saw my mom doing, which I thought, “Well, I don’t know that I could do that forever.”

And it was just a really dynamic time for the profession too. I mean, it’s changed so much in the last 15, 20 years. So I went to library school because that is a real job that you can have that pays your mortgage, and I think I thought that I would end up in a public library just because that’s what I knew, but I got a part time job while I was in library school at the Rare Books Library at the University of Toronto, which is the biggest rare books collection in Canada, one of the most wonderful ones in the world. It has a lot of treasures, and it was a good enough job that I didn’t even have to bartend in grad school anymore. I was just able to do that, and it was the type of place that I never thought that I would find myself because everyone who worked there was so interesting and spoke so many languages and knew about so many things and it was really eye opening and I stayed in academic libraries. I’m not in rare books now. I’m a collections librarian, and I oversee humanities collections for the University of Toronto so I still I buy books for a living, which is… I mean, if you had told baby Eva, that’s what I would grow up to do, that seems really crazy. I mean, obviously for the library people listening, you know it’s a lot more complex than that, but if you had to simplify it and call it brass tacks, that’s what I do, which is pretty cool.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. It doesn’t get much better than that! You said you liked writing when you were a kid and you were thinking that’s what you wanted to do. What brought you back to it as something that you really wanted to push for with your novels now?

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah. So, when I dreamt about a life as a writer, I don’t think I ever thought fiction writer, but that was more because of that really pragmatic immigrant thing where again, that’s not a real job that people do, but when I finished library school, a thing that was really important to me was I was looking around and I thought, you know, you get to this point in your life where when you get your responsible professional job, it can be really easy to forget about your art, forget about the thing that you said was going to be important to you because life just takes over and you’re getting this paycheck and things can just start operating and then all of a sudden your kids are 20 years old and you’re like, “I was going to be a writer one day!”

So it was always really important to me to keep doing that, and then because I had the freedom to be writing in a way that was separated from the economics of it. That’s when I started thinking about fiction. I didn’t write a piece of fiction until, yeah, until I graduated and I had my first full time job, and when I started doing that the library setting became to me a pretty obvious place to explore. I had been so fascinated by the people that I met, by the objects, by the physical space, so that seemed like a great place to explore in a mystery setting, but while I had always been somebody who consumed a lot of fiction and knew I wanted to write, the idea that I am now a person who writes fiction that people all over the world have read is crazy to me because that, that particular space is not where I imagined myself.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, but it’s great because we talked a little bit before we started recording that readers love reading about library settings and librarian characters. For your first book, The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, where did the story come from for that?

Eva Jurczyk: That one really started with the characters for me. I found the people that I worked with, I felt almost out of my depth a little bit because everyone who worked there had worked there for a very long time and in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, the characters are older, most of them are at the ends of their careers, and they had these fascinating relationships with each other where there were old resentments, old relationships, but also as individuals, they were so interesting. Why do you speak these particular seven languages? Why are you an expert in this? Why have you collected books about this? Why is this something that you’re so passionate about? They were all so different from each other. And I just found them so interesting. So I just wanted to write about them.

So because I knew I was going to write about characters like that, characters with these old relationships and particularities and histories, and I knew I was going to set it in a library, that got the wheels turning. And a mystery set in the library, particularly around a rare book being missing, I eat that stuff up. We talked about the fact that people like books set in libraries, but what people, and by people, I mean me, also really love are stories about artifacts, books, things like that that are stolen or go missing. Once a year the New Yorker will like do a thing or GQ will put out a big story about an art heist or something like that. I love the Thomas Crown Affair, and I love the idea of something like that, that you steal just for the love of it and not really for any monetary value, so I loved wrapping up a story that way. Yeah.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, some of it’s like, “I’m the only one that can keep this safe, so I must have it!”

Eva Jurczyk: Yes. Yes, absolutely.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I worked briefly at a university. I didn’t work in the rare books section, but they had a rare books and special collections. It was always a weirder, different vibe up there on that floor. It’s a different kind of librarian that takes that kind of job, like, in the library field, we know there’s all these different kinds of people, like, “Oh, you’re going to be a cataloger, you’re going to be a rare books person” because just their personality goes different ways. And I think that also extends now into the new book too, because a lot of the characters there are also working with rare books and special collections as well, Davey certainly does.

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, Davey has that type of personality, but this book’s different in that the characters are in a totally different part of their lives. I’ve always said that I think the two most interesting, I guess, parts of a person’s life are when you’re very young, sort of between 15 to 25, when you have no history, you’re making terrible decisions, your emotions are so big, and everything feels catastrophic. I think that is a really interesting space to explore, or when you’re older and you have so much history and you understand the consequence of every decision that you’re going to make and everything’s wrapped up in so much history, I’ve always thought that those are the two most interesting parts of a life to explore. Sort of a phase of my life where I am right now, I just pick up my kid from school every day, not that much time for solving crimes or getting into trouble. So in my first book I explored that latter part of a person’s life, and in this book, we’re still in a rare books library, but with terrible decision makers because everyone’s quite young.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Can you give the elevator pitch for this new book? What is the concept behind That Night in the Library?

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, sure. That Night in the Library follows seven characters who are students who mostly work at a rare books library in the William E. Woodend library at Vermont university, and it’s the night before most of them are going to graduate from the university. That’s really exciting because it’s the start of their lives, but it also means they have to leave the library. These jobs, it means there’s a lot of uncertainty about their futures so they decide that they’re going to have a party in the basement of the library and they’re going to wrap it up in this Greek ritual that they’re going to do, which to some of them is a really important aspect of it. It’s going to help them get rid of all their fear about the future and to some of them is just an excuse to sneak into the library and do some drugs and get into trouble so they lock themselves down in there, the administrator leaves and almost as soon as the door locks behind them, one of them dies, and they realize that the killer has to be amongst them but now they’re locked in the library overnight and it’s a matter of staying alive until morning.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and you have the extra unreliable narrator part of it because they’re all, with an exception, on acid. Even though I’m hearing their thoughts, are they actually thinking that, there’s people who are seeing things and people who are feeling things, and one of the characters in particular is very sensory, so she’s smelling these things, and she’s seeing things….

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, and they’re reacting to it in different ways. Some of them are more experienced than others on this type of journey. So that is definitely a wrench that’s thrown into it, that you’re trying to keep yourself alive and figure out what’s going on around you, but you don’t have your wits about you. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a locked room mystery in the tradition of an Agatha Christie “And Then There Were None,” but very much modernized, I guess.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. One character that we see a lot of the story through, Faye, is the one who decides not to take acid. So she’s sort of the one that is sober, but she also makes her own terrible decisions. Can you talk a little bit about Faye and how you came to her? She starts as the classic massive introvert, like painfully introvert, but there’s more to her than that.

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, so Faye even, despite the fact that she didn’t take drugs like the rest of them, she would have been an outsider anyway. She is an outsider to this group. She has a science background, which is different from all these humanists that she’s among, whose work is very different from her own. And she is, she’s very introverted. She’s young. She’s an undergraduate student. She’s painfully shy. She’s very far from home, and I liked the idea of exploring her because it’s very different from the university experience that you think about where you go, you party, you make all these friends. She’s left home, done a really brave thing and really met no one, has been really unhappy and really lonely, and going to this event was a real push for her because she’s making an attempt to get herself out there, to make some friends, to do something, to have some sort of real college experience, what she considers it.

And I think that she is sober. So she’s almost able to take charge a little bit in the situation, sometimes to her own detriment, but she does see things at times a little bit more clearly than the rest of them. But sometimes the fact that she’s outside their circle can get her in trouble as well. I liked the idea of exploring my character as someone who’s lonely and someone for whom her sort of desperation to make friends is part of what gets her into trouble in this scenario.

Steve Thomas: Yes, absolutely. It does. And Faye is just kind of along, not because any of them are her friends, but they needed seven people, and “Oh, let’s get that little mousy girl that’s around all the time. She’ll come.” And she’s just kind of thrown in, and she doesn’t feel that, though. She kind of gets the, “Ooh, they invited me to a party! Yay!”

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, and it’s sort of heartbreaking to think about, I think as a very shy person myself, I was sort of maybe working out some of my feelings about high school and college in that part of the book, because. Yeah, there is a sort of desperation. “I want them to like me” about her, not really seeing or fully understanding the relationships that she has to these people and not really, I think, giving herself enough credit that she is an interesting, kind person, and maybe these aren’t the exact types of people that she should want to be friends with.

Steve Thomas: The library field is scattered with introverts, so I think a lot of people listening probably understand that and you get that sometimes because, as she’s looking through her texts at one point, thinking about other things, there were so many opportunities where people did reach out to her and did offer her opportunities to be their friend, but then she was just so, which I’ve felt before too, I think a lot of people have felt like just too “Oh, they couldn’t possibly be wanting me to go to that party. They’re inviting me because they’re inviting everybody, so I shouldn’t go,” and it’s like, that’s how people make friends, Faye!

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, and I hope for maybe the younger readers, if you’re feeling in that way, just saying yes to things. I mean, in this case, the one thing that Faye decided to say yes to, maybe she shouldn’t have. Maybe she just should have started saying yes to invitations on her first day of college, but her loneliness is a little bit self-inflicted, and I don’t think she understands that at the beginning of the book.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, definitely go to the roller skating party, not the Greek party in the basement in the middle of the night. And then Davey is almost the opposite of her in many ways that he’s much more outgoing, he’s cocky, full of himself. Like you said, they’re graduating and there’s one job available and he’s just absolutely certain that it’s his, but there’s several of them that are up for it. Yeah, tell me about Davey.

Eva Jurczyk: So you’re right, very much the opposite of her, Davey is the self-styled leader of the group. This group of students who work at the library are all very much peers with each other. There’s not a boss of the students, that’s not how it works, but I think that he considers himself in charge of the others. He’s very much the driver of this ritual, he’s the one who wants to do it, and he’s very much the traditionalist of the group. He likes an old fashioned rare books library; he likes the idea of things staying the way they are. He’s not really interested in this newfangled stuff that’s going on. Tradition is above all for Davey.

That could be pretty blinding too, and it is for Davey. It impacts his relationships that he has with others. It impacts his understanding of things that are happening in the library and perhaps priorities for the library that he should have been aware of, but wasn’t because he was so wrapped in the history. And frankly, it makes him not very nice sometimes. I do have a lot of sympathy for Davey, too.

With the exception of maybe one pretty obvious character, I don’t think there are bad characters in this book. I think there are characters who are not yet fully formed as people, and who don’t yet maybe understand their mistakes, and I think Davey would have figured it out in the end, in the long term, but he’s still at the point when you’re that young and this isn’t a shot towards people who are young right now. I was very stupid at Davey’s age, and I think had on the same sort of blinkers that he has, where your point of view or your perspective is certainly the best perspective because it’s what you understand deeply. And that’s where Davey is.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and when you are a very smart person and you get that arrogance of, “Well, I just can’t stand to be around people who aren’t as smart as me.” Like there was one point I think early on, so it’s not giving much away that Fay had said something when they first met that was a quote or something from a poem, and then she said she saw his face light up and then he realized that she didn’t know it was a quote and you’re like, ” People who know poetry off the top of their head, of course, they’re worth speaking to. But if you don’t…” And like you said, she’s this little undergrad, who’s a science major even, so she’s doing completely different work, actually working scientifically, taking samples off the books and analyzing them.

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, exactly, and for some of them that work is just lesser, it couldn’t matter, which is crazy to me because that type of work with rare books is so important and interesting too.

Steve Thomas: And there’s a couple of other characters who were up for the job that Davey thinks it’s his so much because there’s like, “They just talk about outreach and actually wanting to bring the library to other people and how dare they do that. Everybody should come to the library!” Like you said, that’s very traditionalist of like, “We just have the books here and people know that they’re here and they come.” Whereas one of them is a big, probably TikTok, Instagram star. I did think it was funny, and very much real life, that the one character Mary had created this great viral hit and it featured the administrator, and so, of course, the administrator is the one that goes to the conference to talk about it, but he didn’t create it. But that’s absolutely what would happen in an academic world of like the higher up person always is the one, just like all those papers, that first name is not the person who actually wrote the paper.

Eva Jurczyk: So he’s getting lauded for this brilliant outreach work that his library is doing, and it was literally someone who just, he happened to be opening a box and somebody else created all the apparatus, had the idea, put it out, but he’s the one, because he’s the face of the library, he’s the one being lauded. Although at least, I mean, to his credit, he certainly recognized the talent that was happening there and nurtured it.

Steve Thomas: Yes, and then you have some other characters who are not related to the library, mostly because number one, they needed somebody to bring drugs and none of them knew how to get them specifically, and then also just, they kept needing seven people for the ritual that they were doing. And so a couple other people had boyfriend, girlfriend and that messes up Davey’s original plans a little bit.

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, I think he had had an original idea that everyone who was involved in the ritual would treat it with the same level of seriousness, that they loved the Greeks, had always dreamt about doing this sort of thing, and some of them did but rounding out the group, we have a character named Soraya, who also works for the library, is a little bit less enamored with the whole thing than everyone else, but Davey’s all right to have her along with the ride.

And then there’s Umu, who’s an undergraduate student who knows another one of the characters, and she’s the one who’s approached to bring drugs. She’s also person of color, so it’s interesting that she’s the one who specifically is reached out to.

And then just a friend of hers, Ro, who’s very much separate from the whole academic experience, and is very suspicious of it, and when he hears that his friend, who he loves very deeply, his best friend, is being asked to come to this thing where she’s going to be locked overnight with a bunch of people she doesn’t know very well, and they wanted her to bring drugs, He’s very suspicious of the whole operation, so insists on coming along to take care of his friend.

Steve Thomas: And then Kip is the last of the group.

Eva Jurczyk: Kip is the last one. So Kip is a graduate student who spends a lot of time at the library, not in the least because his family money helped buy some of the library’s. collection. His girlfriend is the aforementioned Soraya who’s going to the ritual and he inserts himself as someone who of course should have to come to a ritual like this because Kip is a person who inserts himself and thinks he’s entitled to lots of stuff.

Steve Thomas: Yes, and he found out that there was going to probably be sex involved, and so I think that probably helped make him want to come as well.

Eva Jurczyk: It was a deciding factor.

Steve Thomas: But obviously it’s a mystery. It’s a suspense novel. Things don’t go as planned. We won’t go too much into that, because that’s the plot there, but how did this story start for you in general? Was it the characters again, or was it that Greek ritual…?

Eva Jurczyk: You know, it was a confluence of a few different things. Going back to being a grad student and working at the library, I spent a lot of time in the basement of the particular library, which is a lot like the basement in the book. It’s very unglamorous, just like rolling stacks arranged at weird angles, a giant space that feels very spooky, except you’re surrounded by treasures. I spent a lot of time down there.

I loved the idea of that as a setting for a locked room mystery. I had been saying to friends who are writers, “What if you wrote a locked room mystery set in a rare books library?” I wanted someone to do it because I just really liked the idea of being locked down there because I had spent so much time down there. So I was pushing people to write it. No one was writing it.

And then a few things happened at once. I went on a vacation to Greece and to hype my son up for it, I bought him, like, a National Geographic book of Greek myths that we were reading a lot on this trip. And so those were sort of rolling around in my head, including the Persephone myth, which is one that becomes important in the book, still not thinking that I was going to write the book. I did start putting the pieces together in my head about, “Oh, what would this look like?” And I was thinking about the science angle and exploring the science of rare books. We are doing a project at work, (“We?” I’m not involved with at all), very smart people are doing a project at work looking at scanning old books and bindings of books along the Silk Road. I thought it would be something like that. And then I can’t really go into too much detail about this because it’s very much a spoiler for the book, but a friend sent me a link to an article from National Geographic about the science of rare books that… read the book, get to the end, look at the acknowledgements. In the acknowledgements, you’ll see.

And when I read that, it wasn’t a full academic paper, just a blurb in National Geographic, I thought, “Oh my goodness, this is what it’s going to be!” And that really was a click because that article gave me the manner of death and knowing the manner of death, everything just unrolled backwards and I thought how fun it could be.

So I’ve had the setting in mind for a long time. The Greek myth part I think was just in my mind because I had been reading those stories to my son, but it was really that article from National Geographic where as soon as I read that I knew that I had to write it, and I started writing almost immediately.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and I’m sure there are a lot of librarians, especially people who work in rare books, who might listen or read the book and get to the parts where, at some point, somebody’s dead, we’ve heard that already. And there’s blood and somebody starts taking books off the shelf and starts trying to blot up the blood. That’s the horror part of the book when they’re tearing books apart to stem the blood. But Davey felt that as well. He’s kind of like, “Oh, no, no, not that not that don’t take that book!”

Once you’re at the point when people are dying, at least one person dies, we’ll see as it goes along if more do, don’t want to spoil anything, how do you keep that suspense going, and was the fact that they’re all on drugs make it easier for you to write, or harder for you to write, that kind of stuff?

Eva Jurczyk: You know, in some senses I think, at times it can make it a little too easy because then you’re removing real human motivation, and I scaled it back a lot from what it was. At first it was all a lot wilder, but it did need to be a little bit more rooted in human motivation, which I think it is in the end, for the most part.

So they’re making decisions that are obscured by drugs, but they are still being guided by the real things that they’re thinking and feeling. And I think that the way I keep the stakes high is by trying to make the characters sympathetic, as much as possible, so even though they’re sort of off their heads and are doing silly things, they’re still people. They’re still young people who had their futures ahead of them, and without going into spoilers about what happens to who, I hope that every character gets their moment to shine and that the readers are able to separate these characters from the strange moment that they find themselves in and care about them as people and be invested in whether this person’s going to survive, and what are the interests of everyone.

I hope that worked for the reader because I cared about, not all, because there’s the one, but I cared about most of these characters a great deal, and I didn’t want, among the ones who are sort of struggling to stay alive after that first death, I didn’t like the idea of there being a clear bad guy. I think there are just people who are in the situation, and they’re not necessarily communicating very well with each other. I think a lot of what causes trouble in this book is that everyone’s really locked into their own way of seeing, and they’re not able to see from each other’s perspectives, and if they would just share information a little bit better, a little bit earlier, then a lot of what happened could have been avoided, but everyone’s just locked into the things that only they can see.

Steve Thomas: You said you were reading the myths and everything. Did you have to do some more research into those myths and that ritual? That is an actual ritual I assume that you got from history? Did you have to do a lot of research into that for the book?

Eva Jurczyk: There were a couple of books that I read. One’s called the Eleusinian Mysteries, which was mostly, it was published in the 50s or 60s, I think it’s Princeton University Press, and it is mostly about like a physical archaeological site but had one chapter where they went into what they thought this ritual was. And one of the problems with this ritual is that no one really knows how it went. It was very, very, very secretive. What people know is that there was real mass participation, that lots of different types of people participated, so men and women were participating together. They think they know geographically where this ritual would happen, but in terms of what actually happened on the day, really no one knows because there’s no record of it and that’s quite purposeful. It was always meant to be secretive. So this one book, The Eleusinian Mysteries, was great because it described the site and then in describing the site, it talked about what they thought happened.

And then another book, which I’m embarrassed I can’t remember the title of, although I think it’s in the acknowledgements, really went in on the hallucinogenic properties of this concoction, this drink that was consumed at the beginning of the ritual, and that was really interesting too, because I think, when we think about the Greeks and we think about the bacchanal and all the wine, but the fact that like they were taking drugs to do this. They were taking drugs and they were having hallucinations and they were having these spiritual experiences where really, they were just high. They’re not any different than those of us who go to Burning Man. Do you know what I mean? So that was really interesting talking about and again, most of the book was about the scientific proof about this is how we know, and a lot of it was over my head when they dug into how they thought it worked on the day in these particular rituals.

I think piecing together those two books was as close as I could get to what that ritual would have looked like and that’s probably the same amount of information that someone like a Davey would have had access to and would have been building his version because their version of the ritual in the basement is very different from the real ritual, but they’re just trying to piece it together based on the little bits of information that they have. So it was fun going back and reading those, as much fun as it can be to read an academic monograph from the 1950s.

Steve Thomas: Right, but like back then they didn’t have LSD but they were taking LSD here and so they’re trying to approximate it for the modern world as much as they can, and the whole ritual is to banish fear basically, which is a good offset of the fact that they’re in a very fearful situation when you, maybe you should be scared right now because there’s a killer!

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, exactly.

Steve Thomas: Is this the kind of book that you generally read? Are you a mystery reader? Or is this just kind of the thing that came to your head that you wanted to write?

Eva Jurczyk: I read pretty widely. So sometimes this is the type of book that I read and sometimes it isn’t. I think that I really love a good fast paced mystery or horror novel as much as I love literary fiction and essay and spy novels and things like that. I try to have a really a really well balanced diet in terms of reading. Because I think that, yeah, I’m not the type of person who will get lost in a particular series or a particular genre. My preference is to read really widely. I think that when my brain isn’t particularly occupied, like when life isn’t stressful, I go more towards literary fiction because I have the capacity to do that. When things are a little bit more chaotic, I might lean on genre fiction because I just like the act of reading but need something easier. So I do try to keep a pretty diverse diet.

Steve Thomas: You’ve got another book coming out next year, and it’s not going to be the same type of thing. Can you give any hints as to what that next project will be?

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, it is called tentatively, perhaps finally, I’m not sure, publishing being what it is. It’s called “6:40 to Montreal” and it is set on the train between Toronto and Montreal. It was inspired because I heard there’s a Canadian children’s author. He’s like “Canada famous,” I don’t know. It’s hard for me to tell. His name is Kenneth Oppel, and I heard that he did this thing where once a month he takes the train from Toronto to Montreal, it’s about six hours, and then takes it back the same day and he uses it as a self-styled writers retreat. So I decided to do the same thing. I thought that was brilliant. I had a deadline. But a couple of days before I planned to go, there was a huge snowstorm and the train from Toronto to Montreal got stuck on the tracks and people were stuck on this train for 12 hours in the snow in the middle of the woods. And it was anarchy, as you can imagine.

So I got inspired to write a story where folks are taking a train from Toronto to Montreal. They get stuck in the snow, and it’s another locked room mystery, but this time it’s set on a train, so it’s in that confined space. And that’s all I can say about it for now, but it’s a fun one.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s very, that sounds very good. That’s Murder on the Orient Express-ish there.

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, exactly.

Steve Thomas: I like that. I like locked room mysteries because they’re fun. I imagine they’re fun to figure out for the writer as well because you have to figure out, how can I do this, but I have the locked room so it’s got to be somebody in there. So just like the construction of it, I’m sure is fun.

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah. With both of them, I’d say what was quite different for many other writing experiences, I had to keep a diagram of the spaces. So both a timeline which I don’t think I had done in another book, but I could see how you do it in another book, but a diagram of the physical spaces because you are confined to the physical space. Having to keep clear about who is where, and where is everyone in relation to everyone else, and what can this character see, and what’s hidden from the other characters. Beat by beat, I did often, both of my notebooks, for both these books, when I was writing the first draft, I just sketched out a very ugly physical diagram, and I would often have to flip to it and say to myself, “Okay, does this make sense? Is this character Where I need them to be right now, or do I need to move them for this to make sense?” So that’s, I think, a really fun part of constructing a locked room mystery is you actually need a diagram of the space in order to make sure that it’s working.

Steve Thomas: So with all these interviews I’m doing authors this summer, I’m asking two questions. The first one is, what was your first favorite book? As a kid, do you remember what one of your favorite first books was?

Eva Jurczyk: Oh, probably Anne of Green Gables, what a Canadian answer. But I mean that spunky orphan, all young girls love books about orphans. I don’t know why, but she really spoke to my heart. I loved her then and I love her still. So Anne of Green Gables.

Steve Thomas: The other one is building a summer reading list getting recommendations, so what would be a book that you would want to add to a summer reading list?

Eva Jurczyk: Ooh, good question. So this is a sort of timely, but I just finished Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year, which is an essay collection about basketball. And because it’s about basketball, it’s sort of like sweaty and physical and makes me think of summer, even though the basketball season’s wrapping up. I picked it up because I was in Columbus, Ohio, and he’s sort of the patron saint of Columbus, and it was really wonderful. So it is one where you need a little bit more brain capacity, but he’s a poet as well as an essayist. It’s a real treat and because it’s essays, it can be sort of ingested in small bites, which is useful in the summer.

Steve Thomas: Great. So we’ll, we’ll add that to the list.

And the one thing I was going to mention is, I’ve worked at academic libraries, so I know it’s true where they talked about at the end of the semester, they have to work one night a week and they’re like, “Oh, it’s like those public librarians and their book clubs!” I was like, yep. I knew those people when I worked at academic libraries.

Eva Jurczyk: Yeah, we’re spoiled. I don’t know what to tell you.

Steve Thomas: All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I appreciate it.

Eva Jurczyk: Thank you so much for having me. Have a great one.

Steve Thomas: You too.

***

Rebecca Vnuk: Welcome back to The Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk from Library Reads.

Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat from NoveList.

Rebecca Vnuk: And on this episode, Steve was chatting with author Eva Jurczyk’s with That Night in the Library, and that is a Library Reads pick, as a matter of fact. Both of her books have made the Library Reads list, and if I’m not mistaken, this was on our June 2024 Library Reads list. So very easy for me to find read-alikes on this one in the Library Reads list because as we chatted about a few episodes ago, books that feature libraries and that feature readers, bookstores, etc., they have a good chance of making it onto the library reads list. So right away, all kinds of things popped into my head, and the book that I selected also again, takes place in a library. But before I get into that one, I wanted to point out another aspect of both of Jurczyk’s books, actually, is that dark academia subgenre, which I happen to adore. I’ve loved it ever since Donna Tartt’s Secret History came out back when I was in college myself, and enamored of all of that, you know, the new romantic literature, etc, etc, right? So I have a penchant for dark academia, and I think a lot of folks do. We have a lot of movies out with that, with a lot of books, so I selected, I decided to go the route of looking for a matching mystery in a library book, but just know that you could also look for anything that’s got dark academia and devious college students in it.

So the Library Reads pick for this one is The Woman in the Library by Solari Gentile, and that was on our June 2022 list, and the blurb on that is, “Freddie is at the Boston Public Library when a murder occurs. While waiting for the police, she strikes up a conversation with others at her table. The four become friends, but could one of them be the murderer? Much misdirection and an unreliable narrator make for a tight little thriller that will have you sure you know whodunit until you don’t.” And that’s from Kimberly McGee, one of our power users, from Lake Travex Community Library in Austin, Texas.

So yeah, Yaika, what did you come up with over there at NoveList?

Yaika Sabat: Yeah, this one was fun to find matches for because it’s got that very recognizable, it’s in a library, it’s in a university but it’s also a locked room mystery. You know, they are trapped in one area and that is actually such a prominent theme in mysteries. You know, it’s a classic. It’s Agatha Christie. You know, you’re all trapped together, and you’ve got to figure it out.

So the first one is actually one that one of our advisors matched it with, and it’s The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley, and I love the reasoning for this. This is by our advisor, Andrienne Cruz. “In these atmospheric locked room mysteries with multiple narrators, someone ends up dead in the aftermath of a Greek ritual in That Night in the Library and a Bacchanalian festivity in The Midnight Feast. And it’s just such a fun, fun idea, the Bacchanal of it all, because part of That Night in the Library is also sort of the madness that starts to occur as they’re trying to figure out who killed someone which is always, I think, an interesting aspect of a locked room mystery.

The next one that I would recommend is The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji, and this again is university students. In this case, it’s the members of a university book club who go to an island to investigate a murder that took place, I think it’s the year before or a few years before. And then a fresh murder occurs and they’re being picked off one by one, so they’ve got to put those skills to use. And so it’s another university students trapped somewhere trying to survive and figure out who’s killing them, except in this case, it’s an island, which could be maybe a little more fun than being trapped in a library. Depends on how you feel.

And then the last one I have is, I think has a lot of similar elements, but isn’t an exact match. For one thing, this is not university students, and it’s also not an academic setting. So my last suggestion is The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. This does have the library element, however. In this case, it takes place in the map division of the New York Public Library and it has a woman who’s not in college, she’s a professional, she has a career, who discovers a map that her father was hiding is very valuable. Her father is found dead. The map seems worthless at first, turns out it’s not. And they’re sort of trying to deal with an ominous collector who’s willing to destroy the map and anyone who tries to stop them. So this does have a dark academia feel. It’s also got the murder and the mystery and the intricate plotting that you’re going to find in That Night in the Library. So it’s a little different, I think, a little different to keep it interesting, but has a lot of the same feel of it.

Rebecca Vnuk: I think this is a good example of a book where you do have all of these different appeal factors, and yet there are lots of things to choose from that match those appeal factors, right? Like, we’ve identified libraries, bibliophiles. We’ve identified dark academia, college students. We’ve identified locked room mysteries. And there’s lots of those to be found. I could see a whole bookmark with different titles, a whole flyer for your library, a whole display that you could do of books like this.

And I also want to say, right, I love a good locked room mystery. I’m a big fan of unreliable narrators. That probably doesn’t say a lot for my personality, but I love it. And yeah, like the more lying, the better. So it’s always fun to figure out.

Yaika Sabat: The thing I like about themes… so, in NoveList, Locked Room Mysteries and Dark Academia are both themes, and the thing I love about them is that if you love a theme, it’s an immediate core element that you can use when helping that reader. So if they’re like, I’ll read any Locked Room Mystery, it gives you such freedom because you can actually have them try new things with that common element. So I love a good theme. Yeah. Locked Room Mysteries, having grown up reading Agatha Christie, it’s just something very classic to that theme for me, and I’m always down for a good one.

Rebecca Vnuk: Absolutely. All right. Well, we will check you out next time at The Circ Desk!