Printfresh x Simon & Schuster | Meet Author Jaclyn Goldis

I read an article in a travel magazine about how the Orient Express trains were being reintroduced, refurbished to look like the originals that traversed Europe in the 1920’s. I thought immediately how fun it would be to set a locked-room mystery on one of the modern trains. Of course, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is one of my all-time favorite mysteries. I took the book in a totally different direction, but it was fun to reimagine a mystery on the iconic train.

Yes, I did. In fact, the ending is one of the initial images that came to me when I was conceiving of the book. I knew that was where I was going, but it took me a while to figure out how to get there.

To be honest, I am a plotter, so I plot my books pretty thoroughly before writing them, as opposed to pantsers who discover the story as they write it. Sometimes characters do surprise me, and new twists emerge, but for this one, I knew all of the twists before I started writing. The thing that did surprise me, though, turned out to be the few chapters I decided to set in the Soviet Union of the 1980’s. I had conceived of a different way of unfurling that storyline, but early in the drafting, I realized it would work best for the chapters to be set decades before in the Soviet Union. That was a fun surprise—and special to execute because of my family history that inspired that arc. My father is from Ukraine in the Soviet Union, and it was meaningful to write a storyline that was in part inspired by him. 

Always! I adored Nancy Drew mysteries as a kid, and then Agatha Christies. And now there are so many excellent authors writing mysteries. Some of my favorites are Anthony Horowitz, Lucy Foley, Daniel Silva, Richard Osman, and Susan Isaacs.

Living abroad for over eight years now shapes my books in many ways. I enjoy writing about Americans abroad. That is what I am, and my greatest personal growth has happened in these years I’ve been abroad. I think partly that’s due to plunging myself into an entirely new experience—wading through a culture that is not entirely mine and meeting people so different from myself. Similarly, I find that putting my American characters in new places and experiences is a perfect petri dish for conflict to erupt and then ultimately, growth. Which is what you want for your characters.

I get my best writing done when I walk on the beach every morning! I have no phone or computer with me, so the writing is thoroughly in my head, but in nature and without technology, everything somehow unlocks. Inevitably I find myself rushing home to write furiously for an hour, because those walks are when all the thorny plot points that I can’t figure out suddenly resolve themselves.

The last chapter. I think it’s unexpected and yet the perfect payoff. I hope that when readers finish, they are shocked, but also feel that it all makes perfect sense.