The Curious Case of the Mystery Novelists

On May 22, which just happens to be the one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Tracy Mack and Michael Citrin are settled in among the weathered antiques, old books, and collectibles that populate their Greek Revival cottage in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts. Mack is a tiny, freckled redhead in a blue-flowered sundress; Citrin, in a linen peasant shirt and chinos rolled to mid-calf, looks more a painter than a writer. Both are barefoot.

For the past six years, the husband-and-wife writing team has inhabited the fictional world of the Baker Street Irregulars, the ragtag band of homeless boys mentioned by Conan Doyle in four of Holmes’s adventures and now the main characters in Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars, a series of novels by the couple geared toward readers ages eight through twelve. While neither author expected to write popular children’s mysteries one day, their path, much like that of the orphans who act as the “eyes and ears on the street” of the Victorian master detective, has been one of coincidence and opportunity.

Citrin and Mack had always been intrigued by the idea of collaborating on a project; they just weren’t sure what that might be or how to go about it. But when Mack made the observation that new traditional mysteries for children were lacking, something clicked.

“I was always a fan of Sherlock Holmes, to the point where I read and re-read everything I could get my hands on, and I even started collecting things,” Citrin says, gesturing around the room to the original Strand magazines bearing the serialized Holmes stories, as well as paraphernalia like a Victorian pipe, deerstalker cap, nineteenth-century handcuffs, and a collected-works book he’s read so many times that its spine has given way, only to be held together by a pair of rubber bands. He was fascinated by the Baker Street Irregulars, a gang of helpful street urchins that appears in several Holmes stories (only one of whom is identified by name), and a new series was born.

As it turned out, the writing partnership, much like the couple’s own relationship, was natural. First up was a trip to London, or, as Conan Doyle calls it, “that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained,” for research. They gathered a staggering amount of material, but chose, for obvious reasons, to leave out certain information, such as Holmes’s daily cocaine habit. Next, Citrin and Mack staked out time to write every night after their daughter was in bed. In the early days, they would each write a chapter apiece and pass drafts back and forth, but the system proved inefficient. Once they outlined their plot and found the voice of their characters, their process evolved: Citrin writes the first draft and hands it over to Mack for rewrites.

“Michael has a great sense of dialogue and plot,” she says. “But my interest from the outset is always character. We want the mysteries to be exciting, but we still want them to be literary—characters and relationships you care about, some type of philosophical thought for kids to think about. We don’t want to do something everyone else has done.”

The first book, Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars: The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas, was released in hardcover in 2006 and in paperback last April. Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars: The Mystery of the Conjured Man came out last summer. The third book, subtitled In Search of Watson, was published this past November. The series is full of eye-popping adventures and dangerous situations, but always maintains its focus on the resourcefulness of the youngsters and their deep relationships with each other.

It also remains true to the period and to the Holmes “canon” (Conan Doyle’s fifty-six short stories and four novels), an important consideration, since Holmes fans span several continents and generations, and sticklers are known to dissect mercilessly any new works based on the classics.

Anne Dunn, a good friend who also edited both of Mack’s earlier solo novels and was instrumental in the development phase of the Baker Street Irregulars series, says, “In children’s books, there’s something of a schism between high-quality ‘literary’ novels and popular, plot-driven stories, in which the writing is often uninspired. Michael and Tracy’s books bridge this divide: they have managed to write accessible, exciting series books that have very high-quality writing.”

Originally from Westchester, New York, Mack remembers her mother reading to her until an “uncommonly late” age. “I loved Encyclopedia Brown, Harriet the Spy, Nancy Drew. Discovering these books for the first time as a child was an incredible experience.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, where she majored in English and art history, Mack’s tastes matured to Ernest Hemingway. “He doesn’t mesh with my sensibility in that he’s a misogynist, but his writing really struck me. The clarity and economy of language. The desire to tell a story in as few words as possible.” For that similar feeling of covering long distances in small spaces, Mack is also a fan of Mary Oliver, whose poetry she turns to for inspiration when working on her own fiction.
After a stint teaching English in Spain, Mack returned to the States. She longed to be a writer, but felt she didn’t have the life experience to compose anything of interest. Instead, she broke into book publishing in New York City. “When I started, I felt like a spy, because I really wanted to learn about the writing,” she remembers with a wide smile and a laugh. “I was almost more of an observer.” She also fell in love with the editing process and quickly rose through the ranks of publishing.

Citrin, laid-back whereas Mack is animated, is a Detroit native who was more interested in TV than books until seventh grade. On a family fishing trip, his father gave him a complete collection of Sherlock Holmes. Citrin was immediately drawn into the world of the British detective, and through most of junior high and high school, he read Victorian mysteries—Edgar Allen Poe, G.K. Chesterton, and the Holmes stories—almost exclusively.

Once enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan University, Citrin studied English and philosophy, with a concentration in fiction writing. Although he opted to attend law school at the University of Detroit, he notes, “The writing was always there. I really wanted to find a job that I’d be interested in and still be able to write.” He took a position as a public-sector attorney for the city of Detroit, working on police conduct cases, which provided a variety of exciting stories but not much in the way of great inspiration.

But, as Holmes might say, “Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.”

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that Mack and Citrin—she an executive editor at Scholastic Inc., and he an attorney—met in New York City. In 1997, they were vacationing in Oaxaca, Mexico, when they came across a wise-beyond-his-years boy named Raul who sold gum and hustled for food and spare change on the street. Raul gave them a tour of his village, and, over the next several days, introduced the couple to his posse of young friends and relatives, whose spirit in the face of adversity seemed remarkable. Mack and Citrin didn’t realize just how deep an impression the gang had made until a few years later when they created the characters for the Baker Street Irregulars.

In 2000, after eight years of editing other people’s work and toiling on twenty-odd drafts of her own, Mack’s first young-adult novel, Drawing Lessons, was published. It was a major critical success and was named to the Booklist Top 10 First Novels for Young Adults, a New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age, a Bank Street College Best Book, and a Teen People Next Award finalist.

Curling her legs beside her on the olive-colored sofa, Mack explains, “I have this theory that all adults remember being just one age when they were a child. For me that’s thirteen; it’s such a funny, transitional time. I just wrote this voice that came to me.” Her second novel, Birdland, which found her writing from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old boy, was released to more acclaim in 2003.

The couple married in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 2001, and shortly afterward moved to Ashley Falls. “There’s something about this village,” Citrin notes, trailing off. Giving a friendly squeeze of his arm, Mack finishes, “It’s the land that time forgot. It hasn’t changed much over time. But now there are the older-timers, there are New York transplants, there are young couples. It’s just a group of really interesting people of different ages and backgrounds.”

These days, Mack commutes to the city and Scholastic once a week and works part-time from home, while Citrin works as a lawyer. They have two daughters, a five-year-old and an infant, and a three-year-old son.

Despite the popular success of the Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars series, for Mack and Citrin, the novels represent the opportunity to share their voices as writers with children—and with each other. “When your significant other is working on the same project as you,” says Citrin, “it allows you to spend more time together. It forces you to be more disciplined—there’s another person who’s counting on you to get things done—but it also makes it more fun.”

“There are many aspects to their relationship that make them successful coauthors,” Dunn explains, “but the one that struck me the most [is] the way they each truly respect what the other brings to the collaboration. Their outlook [is] always that the books represent a joint effort, and I think the seamless quality of their storytelling reflects that.”

With the Baker Street Irregulars series ending at book four (to be published in July), the authors are thinking ahead to future projects. Mack is working on picture books, and Citrin has been mulling over ideas for modern mysteries for young readers—and they believe they’re in the perfect place to do this. [JAN/FEB 2010]

Robin Catalano is a contributing editor to Berkshire Living.

THE GOODS

Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars: The Fall of the Amazing Zalindas
The Mystery of the Conjured Man
In Search of Watson
By Tracy Mack and Michael Citrin

Drawing Lessons
Birdland
By Tracy Mack

Scholastic