By: Melinda Wolfe
After a lifetime spent moving between literature, teaching, and the sea, novelist James Sulzer has arrived at a new creative harbor with All That Smolders: A Mystery. The book is his first foray into murder mystery fiction, yet it carries the confidence of a writer who has long explored character, history, and place. Sulzer was an Intensive English major at Yale, worked in television for several years, and then moved with his family year-round to Nantucket, Massachusetts, where he has lived for more than four decades. In his early years on the island, he labored as a commercial scalloper and even sang professionally in a barbershop quartet before teaching English for three decades. His earlier novels include The Voice at the Door, inspired by Emily Dickinson, Writ in Water, about John Keats, Nantucket Daybreak, and the middle-grade trilogy The Card People.
With All That Smolders, Sulzer turns to classic whodunit territory, specifically, to the tradition of Agatha Christie, while grounding the story deeply in the rhythms and tensions of island life. The decision to set the novel on an island was both aesthetic and personal. “I think an island is a perfect setting for a mystery,” Sulzer says. “My family and I have lived year-round on Nantucket Island for over 40 years, and I love island life. An island is a place where people think they know everything about each other, but are often ignorant of their deepest secrets—a situation which creates all sorts of interesting points of tension and intrigue for a mystery.” He adds, “There’s an ongoing tension between the interdependence we all feel on an island and our fierce strain of New England individualism—a tension I tried to harness in this mystery novel.” For Sulzer, the coastal landscape is more than a backdrop: “I love the New England coastal area. I feel a special affinity for salt water and the rhythm of the tides, which so closely follow the rise and fall of the moon and give me a sense of my place in the world.”
At the center of the novel is Peter Christie, a troubled journalist who is also a fictional great-great-nephew of Agatha Christie. Sulzer is unabashed about his admiration. “I am a big fan of Agatha Christie’s writing,” he says. In preparation, he “reread a baker’s dozen of her novels,” studying the mechanics behind her elegance. “I picked up some helpful guidelines: have 5 to 7 possible suspects, each with motives and opportunity; embed a few seemingly minor details that turn out, in retrospect, to be crucial to solving the murder; give the characters an edgy realism (that is, don’t sugar-coat them).” He also appreciates her style: “I appreciate Agatha Christie’s relatively simple, direct sentences. She lets her characters’ hidden motives lurk behind the sentences, creating a world with depth and complexity. Naturally, I tried to emulate all that in All That Smolders.”
Bringing Christie herself into the story through lineage was a playful and meaningful choice. “I was intrigued to bring Agatha into the story in some way,” Sulzer explains. “So I created a fictional great-great-nephew, Peter Christie, who also faced some of the challenges in his life that she faced. In particular, both of them were fleeing home at some point in their lives. And of course, both of them had something to do with solving crimes! It was fun to have Peter try to invoke his great-great-aunt’s sleuthing skills.”
Peter’s profession as a journalist becomes a crucial tool in the investigation. “As he works to solve the murder, Peter uses his journalistic skills in a number of ways,” Sulzer says. “For one thing, his profession sometimes gives him a cover.” It also shapes his questioning and analysis: “As a journalist, he has also learned ways of asking questions that tend to make characters slip up and reveal information they hadn’t planned to give. And his investigative skills come in handy as he analyses clues, trying and retrying to fit them into a coherent pattern.”
Kirkus Reviews has called the book a “suspenseful literary whodunit,” an apt description for a novel that leans into poetry, dialogue fragments, and literary allusions as part of its puzzle. “I love literary novels, and I think a literary sense is central to our lives, opening windows of understanding and beauty onto our world,” Sulzer says. “I was naturally drawn in the direction of literary clues such as poems and fragments of dialogue from other novels. They are a source of intrigue as well as a reminder of our shared cultural treasures.”
The book was years in the making. Sulzer spent “about a year reading and researching Agatha Christie’s novels,” then drafted the novel in “a little over half a year,” followed by “another full year reworking and improving on that draft” with the help of trusted readers. His process is patient and organic: “Starting a new novel is always touch and go for me; I put in an hour here, an hour there in actual writing and let the ideas begin to grow on their own… Then, once I’m ready to plunge in, I write from about 9:00 am to 3:00 pm each day.”
The turn to mystery writing is also deeply personal. “I wrote this mystery in honor of my mother, Katharine, who was a huge fan of Agatha Christie,” he says. “My mother is no longer with us, and I felt close to her memory in writing the kind of book that I think she might have loved.” His favorite Christie novel is Crooked House, which he admires for its family, its plot, and its freedom of invention.
All That Smolders also draws directly from Sulzer’s own life. The opening scene reflects a painful childhood memory, and the world of scalloping is portrayed with authenticity because, as he notes simply, “I actually worked in the industry.” For three seasons in the early 1980s, he was a commercial scalloper, and he continues family scalloping to this day, loving “being out on the water in Nantucket’s magnificent harbor.”
The novel is set in 1980, when a murder shatters the peace of a storied New England island and offers Peter Christie a chance at redemption. And this is only the beginning. “Yes we will!” Sulzer says, when asked, that Peter will return. He is currently writing the sequel, All That Matters, set twenty years later on the same island, with many of the same characters—proof that, for James Sulzer, the tides of story are far from done turning.
All That Smolders: A Mystery is now available on Amazon.
