Ellie Marney discusses the conclusion of her Every series, gives us a verdict on Sherlock vs Elementary, and more.
I sat down with Ellie Marney in celebration of Every Move, the final book in her Sherlock Holmes-inspired Every series, which is released this week in Australia. I started off by talking about the tropes that Marney has so successfully avoided in this series.
Related: Ellie Marney’s next book is an Every Breath spinoff
Ellie Marney: Sherlock was always slightly socially incompetent, not because he couldn’t pull it off when he needed to, but because he just didn’t care. Mycroft has differences because he does have that veneer of social acceptability. He’s really very good at making lots of superficial friends but doesn’t really tell people what’s going underneath.
Hypable: And Rachel is much more than the sidekick, or the typical Watson.
EM: I wanted her to have agency. I didn’t want her to be just standing on the sidelines and helping him out. They had to be an equal pair; they had to be a snooping duo. In the traditional Sherlock and Watson, Watson was just accompanying Holmes and really recording it. I felt like I owed it to me, because I’m writing it, and to Rachel; I didn’t want her to be completely passive.
Female characters have outgrown that role. It was really important that she have a lot of agency, and that she be doing things and contributing to the investigation. Although Mycroft is acknowledged as the “genius,” she has a lot of practical skills and also she’s extremely intelligent herself. We can see how they compliment each other, but also where Rachel takes the lead.
Hypable: And we see it a lot more in this book. In Every Word, Mycroft is saving the day using his somewhat unorthodox skills, whereas in Every Move we are really in Rachel’s comfort zone on the farm. Was that choice just about balancing the relationship, or taking Mycroft out of his comfort zone, or was it something else?
EM: I covered elements of Mycroft’s personal history in the second book, so I felt it was really important to see Rachel’s history in the third book. I went to London to research the second book, and being able to be in it was really important. It was only when I started researching for the third book and I had to go up to Ouyen that I realized how much of the location feeds into the character. I wanted to show that she was on her home ground and that she has the home ground advantage. She knows the lay of the land, she knows the people, she knows how they react, she knows the equipment, she knows the weaponry and the machines, and she knows which cars are local.
All of those geographical aspects give her a real advantage. And also, it’s painful, because it’s nostalgia and she has a real sense of loss. She’s kind of torn by it at the same time. And I liked that aspect, to throw her into a bit of turmoil, but also to give the readers an insight into her as a person through the location I put her back in, and also that she be able to use what she knew to her own advantage.
Hypable: In terms of tropes, the major one you sidestep in this is the love triangle. What I really appreciated was the characters recognizing that, “Hey, someone is trying to kill us, maybe this isn’t the time to have romantic turmoil.”
EM: “Maybe this is not the moment.” I love how they do that in movies. “Oh, we’re being chased down a dark alley by some monster. Let’s just stop for a moment to have some heavy breathing and talk about our relationship.”
Hypable: Was it a conscious decision to deconstruct that, or did it not even occur to you?
EM: I really wanted it to sound real. That’s always been my thinking from the start, from when I first started writing the first book. I wanted it to be an adventure, and have all the meta Sherlock Holmes references, so it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a forensic mystery at heart. If you’re going to insert blood and gore and make that a significant aspect of the plot, you need to have a certain solemnity. To counteract the adventurous, fun parts, I wanted it to be quite real sounding. So if there was ever a choice, if I needed Rachel to make a choice in a situation, I tried to choose the one that I thought sounded like what a real teenager would choose in that situation. A more common sense decision, she’s a very common sense-driven person.
And we worked so hard to not make that a love triangle. I knew that as soon as there was another guy mentioned on the back of the book, everyone would go, “Oh my god! Love triangle!” Because people hate that, at the moment. I think people have love triangle fatigue. And I’ve read that trope so many times. I love Harris as a character, but a really essential part of Rachel’s character is that she’s very loyal. I was never going to go there. And in fact, I went through the manuscript with my editor and said, “Can you please help me make sure that there’s absolutely nothing in there.” We wanted to give the suggestion that she’s aware that he’s an attractive guy of approximately her own age, that he could be set up in this situation, and My is obviously aware of it, but Rachel’s just not registering it.
Hypable: Harris is a great character.
EM: Yeah, I love Harris. He’s such a sweetheart, and he has all of the great lines.
Hypable: You’ve written a crime series that just happens to be about teenagers. Have you had any pushback from your publishers or editors, or even readers? Not just with this book, but across the series.
EM: I haven’t had any pushback. That’s been the thing that’s kind of amazed me. There’s actually been times when I’ve wondered if it’s too gory. I’m very careful with language choice, and how I phrase things. You don’t need a full autopsy description. What you evoke in your imagination is enough for a YA book, and often works better generally, YA or not. Maybe it’s just people are inured; although I don’t know if you could say kids are inured to it. I don’t know if you really get inured to it if it’s framed in a personal way.
But teenagers like to not be talked down to. People die, they know that people get autopsied, and the forensic side
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is a side that isn’t really covered in fiction, but they know it exists. And I’ve read a lot that says teenagers need to talk about these aspects of human life, like death and what happens after death. I wanted to unbox that a little for readers who were interested in it, because I love forensic thrillers.
More Ellie Marney: ‘Sherlock’ vs ‘Elementary,’ trigger warnings, and more
Hypable: In this book you have a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder story, which again is something that isn’t raised often — not even in Young Adult — just in fiction generally. In ongoing series, you often don’t see the ramifications of a trauma from a previous book.
EM: That was another thing that I thought. I’ve read a lot of it like, now people are going into the Hunger Games arena, or they’re going into other situations where their lives are threatened or they’ve been assaulted, and then the next day they’re okay. I couldn’t imagine how Rachel would recover just like that. I tried to write around it just to see what it would be like, but it just didn’t feel right. So I tried to follow the instinct I had right from the beginning which was to keep it real, and write how I thought she would be. And after five weeks, I thought she’d still be pretty screwed up.
Hypable: That story felt especially personal. Were you basing it off something in particular?
EM: Sure, I think every woman has had some kind of experience. And as we were getting close to publication, I asked the publishers if they wanted to include some links at the end, and they said that isn’t something we usually do in Australian fiction, so we left it. But I followed it up anyway and talked about it a bit on my blog, just to let people know that I’d been in contact with those organisations. You have to be aware that it might have an impact on somebody. I’m not really into trigger warnings.
Hypable: You’re of the Roxane Gay school of trigger warnings.
EM: Exactly. I think anything could trigger anybody. And look, I’ve had personal experiences, and I’ve talked to people who have studied it. My experience was that I lived in Asia for a long time and I lived in Jakarta around the time that President Suharto fell. The whole city was basically at war, and it was a really full on time. We didn’t live in a separated expat area, we lived right in the middle of the city and actually along one of the main thoroughfares for protest marches. I was teaching at the time, and all my students and I had an overnight backpack in case we got trapped at the school.
“I’m not really into trigger warnings.
I think anything could trigger anybody.”
I think anything could trigger anybody.”
I’d ring my partner every day and say, “Is it safe for me to go home along these roads? Am I going to get hit with rocks, or Molotov cocktails, or is there a riot?” That was every day, for a long time. Then a whole bunch of students were shot outside our apartment building during a riot protest, and it was around that time that we started thinking, why are we living here? We were given an opportunity to go, which we took. We were expected to return after five or six weeks in Australia for a holiday, and it was only after we got here that we thought, “Did that really happen? And we really going back to that?” And we decided no, we really weren’t going back to that.
So we went to India, and we arrived right in the middle of Diwali, and there’s firecrackers going off everywhere and it was quite stressful. It was a very strange experience to go through, and it was like living in a war zone and it wasn’t until we left that it ceased to be normal. It took us a while to come back from that. And every woman has had a pretty full on experience on a one-to-one basis. Lots of people reading the book might relate, and hopefully they get the feeling that it’s possible to work their way out of that.
Hypable: Let’s go to more cheerful things. I want to talk about the meta.
EM: You love the Sherlock meta!
Hypable: I’m obsessed with it. We’re inundated with these modern Sherlock Holmes stories, and I just love that your characters exist in a world where Sherlock Holmes also exists and that they’re aware of the irony of their names and their situation.
EM: Well it started as a modern Sherlock Holmes story. Then I thought, there’s no way I can write around that, especially if I want to ground it in reality. How could they not know that he comes across like a contemporary Sherlock? And how can they ignore the symmetry of their names? It would be something that you would play on if you were a teenager. And of course, it ends up snowballing in the third book, so even the villain becomes part of the whole meta, and starts to goad them with clues taken from Conan Doyle’s canon. I had a lot of good fun with that.
Hypable: This book is heavily influence by Conan Doyle’s The Final Problem. How did you go about incorporating it?
EM: I had a few key things in the back of my mind, and I had a few keywords. Before I started writing the book I thought it has to come back to Rachel’s story, we have to have a resolution of Mycroft’s story, and there has to be a nemesis in there somewhere. I liked the idea of playing into that. But I wanted it to be on Rachel’s territory; I wanted it to be her show. I did want to hit some beats but I didn’t want to follow the track that Conan Doyle’s story actually took.
Hypable: More of an interpretation rather than an adaptation.
EM: Yeah. Taking a few things and weaving them in. I thought that would be enough for people, I didn’t want to overwhelm them. Some people have actually said to me, “Oh my god, enough Sherlock stuff. It’s a bit heavy-handed.” But they have to be aware of it, and it’s fun to play on it if you’re writing it. I read a lot of Conan Doyle when I was a teenager, and I went back through all of the stories when I was writing this series. And I’ve watched Sherlock, and Elementary, so I’m pretty well versed with the canon. And one of my favorite movies when I was younger was Young Sherlock Holmes. I love that movie so much! And I think the tall, English guy with the dark hair must have really lingered in my memory. I’ve read The Beekeeper’s Apprentice as well.
Hypable: I haven’t read that one.
EM: Oh you really need to read it. You’ll love it. It’s so faithful to the characters of Holmes and Watson, but such a completely beautiful retelling, and inserting this beautifully constructed character into that universe.
More Ellie Marney: ‘Sherlock’ vs ‘Elementary’ and the end of the ‘Every’ series
Hypable: Is Every Move the end for Mycroft and Rachel?
EM: For the time being, yes, this is the end. My brain needs a break. They might like to have a little break themselves. I can imagine doing some short stories, but that’s only if they really come knocking. I’m looking forward to doing something new and something different. I’ve been working with these characters for more than five years now, so it’ll be nice to tackle something new.
Hypable: What’s next?
EM: Well, you know Harris, and how fantastic he is? I might be toying with Harris’ location. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to say!
Hypable: So it’s the end for Mycroft and Rachel, but not necessarily for this world?
EM: Not necessarily for the world. I’m working on something now, I’m more than halfway through. It’s coming along. I can give you a few hints, but I can’t give you too much detail at this stage. It’s set in Mildura. It’s drug crime, so it’s going to be a little bit more real, and a little bit more romance. It’s quite a diverse cast, and one of the characters is a police sergeant’s daughter. That’s about all I can say at this stage. Gritty, and more with the romance. I’m going to kill you in the feels.
Hypable: And what was the last scene that you wrote in the entire series?
EM: It was the last scene in the book. I get to a point when I’m about three quarters of the way through, when I’m piecing it together, and then I really have to write it in order.
Hypable: You said goodbye as they said goodbye, how poetic.
EM: I know, it was really sad. I did feel sad. I found it really hard to write this book. Simmone Howell [author of Girl Defective] said to me, “You just don’t want to say goodbye to the characters.” And it really hit me then.
‘Sherlock Holmes’ quick fire round:
Hypable: I have ten quick questions for you. Number 1. Sherlock vs Elementary?
EM: I love Benedict Cumberbatch, but I find Elementary more human.
Hypable: Number 2. Benedict Cumberbatch vs Jonny Lee Miller?
EM: Oh that is so hard! How can I do this? I can’t do this. I love Jonny Lee Miller. I’m going to say Jonny Lee Miller.
Hypable: Number 3. Joan Watson vs John Watson?
EM: Joan. Even though Lucy Liu really got on my nerves at the start of the series, but then she grew on me.
Hypable: Staying on the gender-bending theme: Number 4. Sherlock‘s male Moriarty vs Elementary‘s female Moriarty?
EM: Elementary, definitely. I’m really coming down on the Elementary side, aren’t I? I love it.
Hypable: Number 5. Robert Downey, Jr. vs the upcoming Ian McKellen?
EM: Oh god, Ian McKellen. Robert Downey, Jr. was a terrible Sherlock Holmes.
Hypable: Number 6. Classic Holmes: Jeremy Brett vs Basil Rathbone?
EM: Jeremy Brett.
Hypable: Number 7. Watson/Sherlock bromance vs Watson/Sherlock romance?
EM: Canon or contemporary? Canon, bromance. And contemporary, romance.
Hypable: Number 8. Canon Sherlock Holmes stories written by authors other than Arthur Conan Doyle: Yes or no?
EM: Yeah! Horowitz’s House of Silk I felt was beautifully faithful to the style, it just didn’t really do anything for me.
Hypable: Our last two are themed for your books. Number 9. Rachel vs Mycroft?
EM: Oh, no! That’s so hard! If I had to meet them in person, I’d want to meet Mycroft. I’ve been picturing him in my head for so long.
Hypable: Do you feel that’s because you’re more similar to Rachel, so you already have that insight into her?
EM: Yeah. I’ve been living in her head for so long, but I’d love to see Mycroft in person.
Hypable. Number 10. Every Breath vs Every Word vs Every Move, which is your favorite?
EM: It’s like choosing one of my children. That’s really hard. I’m going to say Every Word, because it was a real joy to write that book. It came out very quickly and was like automatic writing.