Margot Douaihy is Conducting a Queer Retelling of Noir Through a Nun’s Gaze

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Detective stories have always been transgressive: Film noir detectives exist in the fringes of society, looking for answers in dingy dive bars filled with smoke, in shady corners of cities chasing down mobsters and femme fatales, stalking down clues and red herrings in the dead of night. Scorched Grace takes that one step further - the detective is now a recently converted nun with a shady past. A nun trying to set herself right, but a nun who can’t resist the temptation of a juicy mystery.

Margot Douaihy is a writer, poet and university professor. Her work is carnal, sensual, Dionysiac and very very queer. Her debut novel, Scorched Grace is the first release from renowned modern who-dunnit writer Gillian Flynn’s imprint for Zando Books. In Gillian Flynn’s own words, the imprint will “publish both fiction and nonfiction—books across genres that are propulsive, culturally incisive, and dynamic. The list will be unexpected, often voice-driven, conversation-starting and gasp-inducing.” Scorched Grace encapsulates it all. A chain smoking, heavily tattooed lesbian nun with a gold tooth prowling the streets of New Orleans like a noir detective, trying to solve a series of arson at the Catholic school she teaches music at. A truly unique tale that flips detective fiction on its head.

Scorched Grace is incredible - It ticks so many boxes for me. Love noir, love nuns, my family are Scottish so although I wasn’t raised religious Catholicism is so ingrained into my culture and heritage that it’s always in the background. Sister Holliday is such an interesting character to me because it feels like she’s always had this in her blood too and has made the leap of faith (pardon the pun) to fully submerge herself in the religion.

Totally! I guess people say lapsed Catholic? I find it fascinating because you're born into something that you didn't necessarily choose, but it’s very much ingrained into your life and becomes a part of you. Even the thoughts that you can think and notions of sin. I went to Catholic school, nuns were my teachers, so I’ve had lots of experience with them, but they were all above the age of 80. I wanted to play around with the idea of a young nun.

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I think it's interesting that you write Sister Holliday in such a positive light, because  nuns aren't always held in high praise, especially from people who went to Catholic school; they're often depicted as mean and cold. Why did you do this?

Someone on the book tour asked me if I was getting my revenge on the mean nuns I was taught by with the book! I didn’t go through physical abuse, I was just verbally and emotionally abused by the nuns at my school. If you want to get into the histories of abuse there’s the rest schools for the Native American and First Nations kids. And then also the Irish Magdalene Laundries. 

There’s a lot of troubled water in many ways. It’s important to talk about in terms of female becoming. There's a lot of that in the book about the calcification of abuse and pain. I wanted to explore what it’s like to be on the lower rung of a hierarchy for the entirety of your life. 

If you are a nun, you do all the hard work, but you cannot lead mass, you can't lead service. The priests tell you what to do and control everything. Those dichotomous tensions are part of what I'm interested in with the book.

There’s the potential for a feminist utopia when it comes to things like a convent. 

In many ways their convent is like an anti-capitalist refuge. They don't have money of their own, or cars or personal luxuries like cell phones. They grow their own food, they bake their own bread. That's really interesting in this current moment, where we're seeing so much strain on the capitalist system in the US. Where people who need services aren't getting them in terms of houseless people, folks with illness. So there's that promise of something like a utopia, but it's impossible within the current landscape.

“I wanted to write a real tribute to queer community, even though the stakes are really high. There's always hope, because we do get up and we get through it.”

At the end of the book there’s a quote “God is alive, especially in women.” A lot of nuns' stories are all produced by men, I love this idea that you were like, “The power lies in women”. These two female characters that hate each other, after all they’ve been through they can still be there for each other.

I love that you connected with that. At the heart of the book, even though it's noir and everyone, everyone is “fallen” and I try to move away from binaries of good or bad. Every character has a struggle. It’s a study of that darkness to expose light. 

That's what I personally find interesting about Noir. We go into the rainy, tenebrious shadowy world to study humanity, human temptations and human inclinations. How do we get up from the ashes? And those moments of small connection of like, tiny, tiny little moments even like smiling at a stranger on the street are like two previous enemies, but with some kind of magnetism toward one another, coming together in a moment of pain. There's a lot of voltage and promise in that. The world is so rough right now! I wanted to write a book of hope, even though it's all effed up.

Finding light in the dark. Which is essentially what Catholicism is trying to do at the end of the day. You're trying to find an answer amongst all the sin.

What made you want to make the main character a recently converted nun? In other detective novels she would usually be a side character portrayed in a very pious light or as a nun who crosses over to the other side to become a sinner.

I love mysteries. The golden age, the armchair detective, the cosy mystery. I find the riddle work so satisfying. And then to write it as a craft engagement is particularly unique. With a cosy mystery like Father Brown or Sister Boniface the violence happens off screen. I wanted to centre that pain in some ways, some of it on screen. It’s very important to render  sexual violence in the book very responsibly. I believe that crime fiction can be very reparative because we can create vocabularies around characters' experience. I tried to weave in these kinds of state of the nation polemics but without slowing down the actual pace.

The book is also very very gay with some excellent erotic writing - why did you want Sister Holiday to be a queer character?

I knew I had to flip the cosy detective trope on the head and write her as very sensual. Even though she's taken this provisional vow of celibacy, in her head and her heart, she's very alive with all of her senses which kind of torment her a little bit. There's a long legacy of queer nun storytelling and narratives. I wanted to just be a continuum from the Middle Ages through now. Look at the film Portrait of a Lady on Fire - Adèle Haenel’s character Héloïse had just left a convent. She was a character that voices what a lot of testimonies speak to. A convent was a place of refuge if you didn't want to get married to a man or be part of that heteronormative respected life. You could actually find some kind of solace or refuge in the walls of the convent.

The book is so visceral in terms of the body and bodily functions. You write a lot about the sticky New Orleans weather and how much it makes you sweat. There’s a lot of worshipping the body too. It’s all linked together! Even the act of having sex with someone you're not really thinking about anything else. You’re in a meditative headspace almost. Is depicting sex in a realistic way essential for you when writing?

When there's a sex scene in a book, and it's cheesy, or it's just half baked, it's like, oh my god, this is almost awkward to read. I wanted it to be just a totally integrated experience. But it also has to have some edge to it, it has to have some humour and tenderness and heat. Crime fiction could use some more humour. Have you seen Happy Valley? That really nailed that, a tremendous blend of humour and intensity and sardonic wit but within that crime setting. And then those moments that are really intense hit even harder. That’s part of my strategy.

The book also features a gay couple who are together in secret and there’s discussions of their family sending them to conversion therapy. LGBT rights in America seem so high stakes at the moment. Was it important to weave current politics into the story?

It's very chilling right now. Whenever there's this pendulum and it swings back there's this almost reactive push back. There’s the banning of queer books, anti trans and anti LGBTQ laws going through such as the don't say gay bill in Florida. It is politically expedient to scapegoat queer and trans people in this country at this moment. It's been gathering steam since certain political parties led by Trump needed some ground to stand on. People are demanding equality, civil rights and justice so they’ve rummaged around, you know, and they come up with book bans and book burning. And now they’re trying to ban drag? Can you imagine life without Drag Queens?! The celebration and beauty of being queer, I want to burn it all down to the ground!

Queer people taking care of one another and the friendships between LGBTQ people are absolutely crucial. For a long time, people didn't take care of us so we had to take care of one another. I remember going to early riot girl and punk shows and queer nights at the drag club in the 90 and feeling so much love and a lush sense of life. I wanted to write a real tribute to queer community, even though the stakes are really high. There's always hope, because we do get up and we get through it.

Words: Eden Young