Laurie R. King’s career as a novelist captured in one busy weekend of literary events

Publishing a novel is an enormous achievement. Selling a lot of copies, that’s a harder task and an even bigger win. But when a writer gets to the point where her protagonist becomes durable enough to carry more than a dozen novels, and big-number anniversaries of that protagonist’s first appearance in print are cause for celebration among thousands of readers? Well, that writer is reaching peaks that a vast majority of writers can only dream of.

Such is the reality for Santa Cruz-based novelist Laurie R. King, the creator of the indomitable Mary Russell, the 1920s-era sleuth who becomes a foil and later the wife of the iconic Sherlock Holmes. This weekend is a big moment for King — and Russell.

First, on Friday, King will come to Bookshop Santa Cruz to introduce and talk about “The Lantern’s Dance,” her latest Mary Russell novel (and the 18th in the series). Then, on Saturday at the Museum of Art & History, King will be on hand for an all-day celebration known as Russell & Holmes Day, all to mark the 30th anniversary of King’s first Russell novel, “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice.”

“I just wanted to show my love for the Russell community,” said King of the Saturday event that will also take place later in the year in Seattle; Nashville, Tennessee; and suburban Washington, D.C. “There have been people who have been reading me since they were 15 years old. And there’s just this extraordinary community that comes together around this successful series, with Mary Russell in the middle. I just thought that I owed them something.”

The event will feature guest speakers, costumes, Q&As, games with prizes, and demonstrations of beekeeping and lock-picking, both of which figure prominently in “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice,” first published in 1994 by St. Martin’s Press. The book features the first meeting between Russell, an orphaned 15-year-old proto-feminist American, and the retired Sherlock Holmes in England during the early years of World War I. 

The germ of Mary Russell in King’s imagination sprouted some time in the mid-1980s. King was a mom with young children and she was fond of watching the popular PBS series on Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett. “I remember thinking, this is an interesting character,” she said. “Too bad he’s not a woman. So that’s where the idea came from — what if this irascible personality were housed in a young woman’s body instead of a middle-aged Victorian male body?”

Partly because the character of Holmes was already in the public domain, King eventually decided to make Holmes a central figure in “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice” (the beekeeper, in this case, is Holmes himself indulging in a post-retirement hobby, and Russell is the sharp young apprentice who impresses the famous Holmes with her gift for deduction).

“The Beekeeper’s Apprentice” was enough of a success that it spawned a second Mary Russell mystery, “A Monstrous Regiment of Women,” in 1995, followed by many more to the present, with the 18th book in the series, “The Lantern’s Dance.”

In the new book, Russell is still young, just 25, and now married to the much older Holmes. “It’s 1925,” said King. “They have just come across Europe, from Transylvania, where they were helping the queen of Romania with a little problem to do with vampires. And they end up in a village south of Paris, where Holmes’ son lives. And they are going to visit him, except when they get to the house, [son] Damien and his family have fled from some very obscure threat.”

Holmes takes off to hunt out his son, but Russell stays behind at the house, where she begins to decipher an old journal, which opens the door into Holmes’s past, many of the details coming from the original Holmes novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 

As prolific as King has been writing about the young and brilliant Mary Russell, she has explored other characters and settings in her long career as a novelist. She has, for instance, written another series of a half-dozen books with her recurring protagonist San Francisco police detective Kate Martinelli. Other than the Russell and Martinelli books, King has also written a number of stand-alone novels on a variety of themes, most of them steeped in a historical milieu.

Of the Martinelli series, King said, “I have a feeling that Kate is retired.” As for Mary Russell, the new book is almost certainly not her last. 

“If I live long enough,” laughed King, “so will she.”

Laurie R. King will be reading from her new Mary Russell novel, “The Lantern’s Dance,” on Friday, Feb. 16, at Bookshop Santa Cruz. The event begins at 7 p.m. It’s free. And the 30th anniversary celebration of King’s “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice” takes place Saturday, Feb. 17, at the Museum of Art & History.

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