A Song Of Frogs, Motherhood And Murder In Swampy San Francisco
The city was wonderfully ramshackle. It had been thrown together really fast, by miners and the restaurateurs and the prostitutes, and a few decades on, after the Gold Rush, it was trying to clean itself up, so that there were all these new laws against, for instance, the carrying of parcels on a long stick, just because that was how the Chinese happened to carry them.
But really, it was a city of liberty, and it was known not just for its freedoms but for its diversity and its very urban mindset. And also, the city was in the middle of a very untypical heat wave, so it was burningly hot all that summer in San Francisco, and they had a smallpox epidemic. You couldn't make this stuff up.
On Blanche and her career
I wanted to tell quite a subtle story of somebody for whom the sex trade seems to be working just fine; Blanche feels that she's got loads of power when she's dancing, and these helpless men are just throwing money at her heels. But I wanted to find moments in which she realizes that the trade is actually costing her too much, and in particular she's had a baby and has farmed it out, and I wanted to look at the subject of mother love, and see, could it possibly grow up on this stony soil.
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