Behind the Kiki: An Interview With Kirsten Miller (pt. 1)

I’ve just finished your latest Kiki Strike novel  Kiki Strike: The Empress’s Tomb] and I’ve noticed that you are very good at pulling different elements and cool details into your work.  For example, a deceased character in the book is a definite version of Sarah L. Winchester of The Winchester House.  In another part we see a urinal with the signature "R. Mutt, 1917," on the side.  Where do you pluck these little ideas from?

My head (much like my father’s) holds an amazing store of useless information. I collect strange facts the way crows gather shiny objects. (Actually that crow thing is a myth.) You’d think I would be a big hit at cocktail parties, but surprisingly few adults want to hear about the giant pigs that once roamed New York’s streets or the carp that spoke in Hebrew to workers at the New Square Fish Market. Thank goodness for twelve-year-olds.

When I’m reading, there’s nothing I like better than discovering a tantalizing snippet of information tucked into the text. That’s why I try to base many of the more bizarre elements in my books on fact. If anyone bothered to investigate whether there’s really a castle in the middle of the Hudson River or tunnels under Chinatown, she might be pleasantly surprised by what she found. I suppose it’s a way of making detectives out of one’s readers.

Okay.  I simply must ask you this.  In Kiki Strike one of the characters is taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital.  While there, Ananka went to a nearby library branch.  BUT instead of the super cool Jefferson Market Branch that used to house a women’s jail AND was where Mae West was tried for her play Sex Ananka went instead to the Abiele Branch which, nice as it is, does not exist.  Why the switcheroo?  New York Public Library can be protective of its name.

I’ve never been in touch the New York Public Library. (Just let them try to censor me, though!) I live a few blocks away from the Jefferson Market Branch, and I’ve always loved both the building and its bizarre history. I keep a mental list of spots around New York that I think would make fabulous settings. (India House, the Morris-Jumel Mansion, the Police Building, Pomander Walk, Weeksville, etc.) Jefferson Market has always been at the top of that list. At some point it will make an appearance in one of my books, but I didn’t want to waste it on a relatively minor plot-point.  Now that I know that the NYPL is so touchy, I’ll be sure to come up with something extra special.

"Kiki Strike" was not the first girl-spy book out there, but it certainly feels like it.  It’s a cliched question, but where did you get the idea?

The best spies are people that everyone else overlooks. (In the business, they’re called “Gray Men.”) For the most part, adults still see girls of a certain age as innocuous—if  they see them at all. That gives girls the ability to fly under the radar, so to speak, in ways other people can’t.