Anaïs Nin wrote, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” And it is true: writing, for me, has always been an indulgence in nostalgia. I have written books set in the 1970s of my childhood (Such a Pretty Girl, Keeping Lucy, and Nearer Than the Sky). I have also revived places that no longer exist: 1940s Atlantic City, mid-century New England suburbia, the West Village in the gritty ‘70s. And many of my novels are set in rural Vermont, where I grew up, though most written while sitting (homesick) at my desk in San Diego.
But despite frequently reaching into my past for inspiration, until now, I have never revisited the 1980s. I was a teenager in the 1980s, my adolescence essentially a John Hughes film but with a Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 soundtrack. It is steeped in MTV, D.A.R.E., the TV’s nightly scolding of our hands-off, Boomer parents, “It’s ten p.m., do you know where your children are?”
My latest novel, Everything Has Happened, is the first book I’ve written that resurrects that time of my life. Now, I’m not sure why I waited so long. It was both a challenge and a sentimentalist’s dream to immerse myself in my memories (softened, of course, by time), and to try to conjure for my reader what it felt like to be a seventeen-year-old girl in 1986.
The 1980s, besides being a rich period for my own nostalgia, also proved to be the perfect venue for a mystery. No cell phones, no internet, no GPS. When my narrator’s little brother, Charlie, goes missing, he stays missing. And only the relic of a rotary dial landline, a tip line phone, connects that tragic past to my main character’s present nearly forty years later.
Here are some of my favorite literary mysteries set in the 1980s.
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Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Thanks to BookTok, Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel has been discovered by a whole new generation of readers. I purchased my own signed (!) copy back when it first came out and was quickly smitten. The Secret History is part mystery, part dark academia. It is smart and suspenseful and set in the mid- to late-eighties.
It opens with the murder of Edward “Bunny” Corcoran, one of a small, select group of Classics students at Hampden College, a fictional Vermont college based on Bennington, Tartt’s alma mater. The novel is told by a reminiscent narrator, Richard Papen, reflecting on the events that led to Bunny’s murder.
While the book is set in the 1980s, the pop culture references are few. The story, because of the insular nature of the setting, feels somewhat timeless, though the campus culture is recognizably that of the 1980s.
Bret Easton Ellis, The Shards
Another member of Bennington College’s so-called “Literary Brat Pack” is Bret Easton Ellis, who rose to fame in the 1980s with his debut Less Than Zero, published when he was just 21 years old. The Shards, which came out almost forty years later in 2023, like LTZ, is also set in 1980s Los Angeles and is narrated by an affluent, young, white man.
The eponymous narrator, Bret, becomes obsessed with Robert Mallory, a new student at his elite private school who is rumored to have recently been released from a psychiatric facility. Simultaneously, a serial killer, The Trawler, is on the loose in Los Angeles. Bret soon becomes convinced that Robert Mallory is the Trawler.
The Shards reads almost more like psychological suspense or horror than traditional mystery, but it fits the bill here with many 1980s references, particularly to music, mentioning nearly one hundred and fifty songs from the period.
Karen Winn, Our Little World
Our Little World is Karen Winn’s debut novel, which was published in 2022 but is set in 1985. The story revolves around the disappearance of Sally, a four-year-old neighbor of Bee, the twelve-year-old protagonist. And while the story involves a disappearance, it is also a moving coming-of-age story about sisterhood, jealousy, and secrets.
Our Little World is beautifully written and evocative of the period. It also captures the shift in the 1980s from children being relatively unsupervised to the media-driven parental hysteria which marked the Stranger Danger era.
M.O. Walsh, My Sunshine Away
This novel, set in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1989, is narrated by an unnamed, reminiscent narrator looking back on the year when a fifteen-year-old neighbor girl was raped, a crime for which he was a primary suspect. Like Our Little World, My Sunshine Away examines lifelong repercussions associated with decisions made by the young narrator.
The novel is also replete with 1980s cultural touchstones: the Challenger explosion, Unsolved Mysteries, and many scenes with 1980s soundtracks.
Megan Abbott, The End of Everything
Megan Abbott has become known as the contemporary queen of noir, but The End of Everything, published in 2011, is the first novel of Abbott’s which explores the intensity of friendships between girls, a subject found in many of her subsequent novels. The End of Everything, set in a midwestern suburb in the mid-1980s, centers on thirteen-year-old Lizzy Hood, whose best friend, Evie, is kidnapped. The novel illuminates the complexity of this friendship, the girls’ burgeoning sexuality, and their respective attractions to older men.
Abbott has said that it was inspired by Lolita, drawing from the second half of the novel during which Humbert Humbert kidnaps the young Dolores Haze and takes her on the road. As with all of Abbott’s books, The End of Everything is atmospheric, and much of the suspense psychologically driven.
Gillian Flynn, Dark Places
Before Gone Girl was Flynn’s Dark Places, a literary murder mystery and suspense novel, which offers a dual timeline, one of which takes place in 1985 when the narrator, Libby Day, is seven years old and her mother and sisters are brutally murdered. The 1985 timeline is set in Kansas during the height of the so-called “Satanic Panic,” and Libby accuses her brother, a heavy-metal loving teen, who then becomes the natural scapegoat of the “Satan Sacrifice of Kinnakee.”
The novel is twisty and dark, sharing the same hallmarks as Flynn’s better-known novels.
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