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Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heatwave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman called Jenny Bonnet is shot dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny’s murderer to justice – if he doesn’t track her down first. The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers and arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women and damaged children. It’s the secret life of Jenny herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as slippery as the frogs she hunts. In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue’s lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boom town like no other. This is Donoghue's eighth novel and twelfth book of fiction, an instant bestseller in Canada, Ireland, and a New York Times Bestseller. It was a Finalist in the 2015 Bisexual Book Award for Fiction, and an Honor Book in Literature (Stonewall Book Awards 2015). It has been optioned by Monumental Pictures, with Donoghue writing the screenplay.
A personal note: I’ve been wanting to write a novel about the murder of Jenny Bonnet since back in the late 1990s. When I finally found the time to get down to it, after Room, my decision to tell the whole story through the eyes of Blanche Beunon (in order to give Jenny a slippery, enigmatic quality) pushed the novel in a direction I hadn’t been expecting: it became a sort of double hunt, for Jenny’s killer and for Blanche’s baby. But I still thought of Frog Music as the opposite of Room in that it’s a dirty, messy, sticky-textured period drama – so I was startled by the first review pointing out that both novels hinge on a young woman’s response to giving birth in desperate circumstances. I have to admit, I so enjoyed writing about a bad mother this time around. Frog Music is my first crime novel, meaning that I’ve written about crimes before, but have never till now offered the reader the particular satisfactions of a mystery with a solution. It can also be placed with my other fictions about emigration – Landing and Astray – as well as being an obvious companion piece to Slammerkin, even if it offers a very different angle on the sex trade.
(Summary provided by the author)
Born in Dublin, Ireland, in October 1969, I am the youngest of eight children of Frances and Denis Donoghue (the literary critic). I attended Catholic convent schools in Dublin, apart from one eye-opening year in New York at the age of ten. In 1990 I earned a first-class honours BA in English and French from University College Dublin (unfortunately, without learning to actually speak French). I moved to England, and in 1997 received my PhD (on the concept of friendship between men and women in eighteenth-century English fiction) from the University of Cambridge. From the age of 23, I have earned my living as a writer, and have been lucky enough to never have an ‘honest job’ since I was sacked after a single summer month as a chambermaid. After years of commuting between England, Ireland, and Canada, in 1998 I settled in London, Ontario, where I live with Chris Roulston and our son Finn and daughter Una.
(Biography provided by the author)
Q & A WITH EMMA DONOGHUE
What was your inspiration for Frog Music?
I’ve been planning Frog Music for a long, long time, and I finally found a few years to write it. I think it was back in the early nineties that I picked up a fun illustrated book in some museum gift shop, Autumn Stephens’s Wild Women: Crusaders, Curmudgeons, and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era, and read her few paragraphs about the never-quite-solved murder of frog catcher Jeanne Bonnet in San Francisco 1876. So for almost two decades I’ve known I wanted to write something about this case.
When you finally sat down to write it, did anything surprise you?
Frog Music surprised me by turning out to be very much the survivor’s story—told entirely from the point of view of Blanche Beunon, the erotic dancer who was in that grimy saloon with Jenny when the bullets came through the window. And almost against my will, a one-line reference in a newspaper article to Blanche having a missing baby became central to the novel. Perhaps because I’ve spent several years now talking about Ma in Room—the heroic, almost saintly mother who protects her little boy—I couldn’t resist the chance Blanche’s story gave me to write about the ultimate bad mother: a selfish, promiscuous woman who farms out her baby and then mislays him. When mother love doesn’t come naturally, can it come at all?
Tell us a little more about the title. How do frogs relate to the story?
Frog Music is named for the amphibians Jenny hunted for the restaurant trade, but also for her fellow French, who dominated the San Francisco entertainment scene. The whole setup does sound slightly insane, I admit. One journalist kindly alerted me to the fact that there was a hoax in my Wikipedia entry, a claim that I was writing about ‘the murder of a cross-dressing frog-catcher!’—and was abashed when I told him it was true.
The music alluded to in the title leapt from background to foreground as I conducted my research. I ended up including almost thirty songs of the time, and using them to stitch together the multicultural quilt that was 1870s San Francisco.
How is Frog Music different from your other historical fiction?
Frog Music is a departure for me in several ways. It’s my first historical novel set not in Britain but on the other side of the water. And it’s my first mystery. I’ve written about crimes, but I’ve never before dared to attempt offering readers the pleasures I so enjoy myself when I read whodunits at their best: the tension, the fumbling, the guessing, the dread, and the final satisfaction. Perhaps it was the overwhelming response to the thriller aspects of Room I got from readers—some of whom e-mailed me right in the middle of reading the escape scene—that emboldened me to try my hand at a literary fiction that would really work as a crime novel, too. It’s always good for writers, like muscles, to have to stretch in a new direction.
What literary crime novels did you use as inspiration?
My favorite literary crime novels are those that manage to be deeply stimulating evocations of character, time, and place, as well as satisfying murder stories, without any of that sense of mechanical conventions pulling the strings of the plot that can make some genre-fiction crime tedious. I’m thinking of, say, stunners such as Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Iain Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost. So my ambition in Frog Music was to tell the story of Jenny Bonnet’s murder in a way that would also reveal it as the story of millions of immigrants, drifters, risk takers, broken families, and damaged children.
Anything else you would like to add?
I’d like to thank all you booksellers for the hand-selling that helped make Room a bestseller. Readers often have to be talked into tackling what sounds like such a grim account of an imprisoned childhood—led into the darkness, toward a faraway light. So I deeply appreciate what you do, every day, to persuade the public to take a chance on stories they may not know they’re going to enjoy.
(Questions issued by Hachette Book Group.)
