St. Paul novelist Mary E. Roach updates an ancient Greek story, with a lesbian twist

I cut myself shaving right before I met Mary E. Roach. No big deal, but it’s worth mentioning because it’s so on-brand: I lost track of the number of times a character in her “We Are the Match” holds a knife to another character’s throat.

It’s a violent book. In the recent past, Paris is bent on avenging a tragedy she survived as a youth (her gender has been switched from its origin in Greek mythology, where she was a dude). Meanwhile, Helen of Troy, the daughter of a crimelord, is bristling at her lack of control of her own life. Paris and Helen fall in love or lust and, along the way, lots of knives and throats are involved.

“It sounds terrible but I know how to hurt people, because of doing Hapkido,” said Roach, who teaches the martial art in Mendota Heights. “I promise I’m a peaceful person, but it does help with the choreography and with things like knowing how a smaller person fights back against someone who is bigger.”

Roach, who lives in St. Paul, grew up there and on a farm near Hutchinson.

For a time, Roach helped other writers with fight scenes, similar to the way consultants stage battles in the theater.

“Before I was too busy to do this, I used to do editing work on fight scenes, specifically. Because what I know about most writers is that they don’t go outside much. So they’d be like, ‘I don’t know what these characters do with their elbows in this scene,’ or, ‘If a feisty girl in a bar knees somebody in the ribs, will that work?,” said Roach, whose fight editing has added authenticity to books including Gabriela Romero Lacruz’s “The Sun and the Void.”

The reason Roach is too busy is that she has many books in the works. “We Are the Match” is her first novel for adults, but she published young adult title “Better Off Buried” last year and has another YA book, “Seven for a Secret,” coming in September.

The back cover of “We Are the Match” identifies it as a romance but the book straddles many genres. Knowledgeable fans may slot it in the subgenres of “dark romance” or “Mafia romance” (yup, that’s a thing). But tough-talking heroine Paris could have stepped out of Raymond Chandler-like noir and “Match” moves as fast as a thriller. Even Roach wasn’t always sure what it was; when she began writing, the setting was in the distant past but she ended up shifting it to roughly the present.

“I started with, ‘What if Helen of Troy wanted to burn everything down?’ and then I went from there,” said Roach, who said wife-to-be Arynn Copeland is the reason she writes romance. “I wanted to write about who Helen was, without the male gaze. So much of it has always been, ‘She is the most beautiful woman in the world and all the wars started because of her.’ And I was like, ‘What if the thing she was chasing was not the approval of men or a man, but instead she was chasing her own freedom?’”

Roach had a little more freedom in writing “We Are the Match” than she has had with YA titles, starting with the frank sex scene that opens it. Writing for adults doesn’t have quite as many rules as writing for younger readers, where Roach must be careful about messages that could be perceived as harmful.

“When you write for children or teens, you write about them making bad choices but not bad choices that don’t get challenged by the narrative. You have this responsibility. Kids are reading this, and what are kids going to take away from it? Are there any messages I’m sending that I don’t want to send?” asked Roach, citing something she took out of one of her YA books. “One of the moms said, ‘I have coffee for breakfast,’ and my editor was like, ‘Hey, I don’t want us to accidentally reinforce any diet culture messaging.’ And I said, ‘I think that’s a good point.’”

In her writing for all age groups, Roach expects to continue exploring queer characters, people whose stories she knows and understands. There’s also apt to be more violence, which helps raise the stakes.

We Are the Match

By: Mary E. Roach.

Publisher: Montlake, 282 pages.