When I started the crime fiction binge in 2013 that landed me here (in a roundabout way) Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary series was a highlight. I make fun, but I love the hipstery; it’s the gentle teasing of friends between those books and me. Liz Hand’s Cass Neary series was a must for that list: Cass is a drug addict. She’s probably an alcoholic. She has four pieces of clothing and one thing of value: her camera. Cass is a very good photographer, so good her first book is incredibly hard to get. Cass is a major fuck-up: she steals whatever she can from the nearest medicine cabinet and swallows it. She never has much money. She’s always itching for a fight.
The tone for the series is set beautifully in Generation Loss (2007), Hand’s first Cass book, which paints a specific picture of a woman dealing with trauma and dealing with how to be an artist, and traveling from the punk dens of the Lower East Side to Maine to find a once-famous photographer—a scenario drenched in irony as Cass was once an acclaimed photographer. Loss has been reissued a new edition by Small Beer Press, as is the second book in the series, 2012’s Available Dark, in which Cass explores Scandinavian death metal and hangs out in Iceland. Cass three, Hard Light (2016), found her mixed up with some very precious relics of the Britons and haunting the rock/rave/punk/avant-garde art scene in London, where she becomes entangled with a notorious gambler and his three groupies. Now, Hand has written another Cass quick on the heels of Light: The Book of Lamps and Banners (Mulholland 2020).
We are social media friends—that’s how I knew she ran with the OG NYC punks, and as one of my time-travel fantasies is to live downtown in the mid-1970s when New York was scary and punk was thriving—Television, Blondie, Talking Heads, Ramones, New York Dolls—I have been very keen on meeting her. I was anticipating Liz would be fun, and she was, but she’s also smart as hell and very funny (fun people are not always funny). We Zoomed for a long time—she was at her house in Maine, I was in Toronto—so this conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Lisa Levy: I feel like this is the moment to celebrate and to talk about Cass, which I have been very eager to do. I have pet series and pet authors that I like to talk up and you are one of them.
Elizabeth Hand: Thank you so much. I’m very grateful and happy that you like it, that you get the books.
Levy: What I think is so cool about them and about Cass is her curiosity is not stereotypical crime fiction curiosity. It’s real intellectual curiosity. She’s not just chasing a clue. She’s opening up a whole strange world of Scandinavian death metal or life in ancient Britain. A lot of crime fiction writers really pull back from letting their characters have rich intellectual lives and Cass—for all of her issues, and she has issues—does have a really interesting brain.
Hand: It’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it that way before. I find I read crime fiction, but I don’t read a huge amount. The books I like tend to be ones that explore a mystery other than the mystery involving the actual crime.
Levy: Exactly. The series I like—yours; Adrian’s McKinty’s series about The Troubles because his antihero also has a very rich inner life; I like Sarah Gran very much. You’re not people on the fringes, but you’re not people in the center either. These books show what crime fiction can do in the hands of somebody who’s an intelligent person, who’s not just interested in crime fiction, which is how most crime fiction people are. It’s not a monoculture and every smart crime fiction writer reads voraciously, right? Lots of interests.
Hand: I like to write about topics that I’m learning about, but it’s not just a chance to show off my knowledge. It’s a chance for me to research and learn and get ideas. I find that really exciting. And I try to transfer some of that to what Cass is doing.
Levy: It is exciting. It’s what gives the book another dimension.
Hand: Oh, well, thank you. She always ends up in a world which is unfamiliar to her, so she’s very defensive. She doesn’t quite acclimate cause she never acclimates, but she earns the respect of the people she needs to.
I felt from the outset when I realized that this would be more than one book that she had to stay in motion. She was like a pinball: as long as she was in play it worked, but if she ever settled down anywhere, that would be the end of it.
Levy: I think that’s smart too. This relates to something I feel like I I’ve been thinking about since 1977, when I was mainly listening to radio: There was never a song about a woman that rambles. It’s always men who are taking off and moving on. The assumption is the woman’s just sitting around, waiting for a rambler. I want Cass to ramble. I want Cass’s Lower East Side punk roots to be yours. It’s the fantasy I had for myself: if I could live at any time, any place, where would I live? I would go to CBGBs in 1977. Of course that’s what I do.
Hand: Well, I did go to CBGBs in 1977 and like you, I grew up around New York City. I got to hear music and to see plays and did museums. But I went to college in DC and I found DC a much more congenial place to live in 1975 than New York City.
Levy: Those were the bankrupt Koch years. It was dangerous and it was dirty and scary. By the time I moved back, it was very different.
Hand: I don’t like all the gentrification that’s pushed out working people and artists. It was not a sustainable model. It was very obvious that it was all going to go up in flames or there would be a shift and gentrification of course is what the shift was.
Levy: How and why did you go back to Cass?
Hand: I just felt like I wasn’t quite done, and the publisher wanted another book, so I said, I’ll do it. I had in mind at least a four-book and maybe a five- or even six-book arc. But I have a low boredom threshold. So I did other books; I just wanted to try something different. [NB: Hand also writes fantasy/horror.] I wanted to go back to Cass and I wanted to do something that would involve Cornwall. When I was researching it, I found out about all the weird stuff about the snails. There was all this cool stuff that I wanted use. So I thought, well, just throw it into the mix and we’ll see what happens.
Levy: One of the reasons I really adore your books is because I always learn about something wacky. I’m not big on historical fiction. I’m too picky. If they’re supposed to be in medieval France, and as soon as somebody is like, “Dude, I’m okay,” I’m out. But Cass is an emissary to these weird subcultures, and the books take place in subculture. By existing in subcultures, they are critiquing the mainstream.
Hand: A critic wrote about one of my relatively early books, or maybe mid-career books, and he said Elizabeth Hand tends to write a lot about wonky subcultures. I find them interesting.
Levy: They are interesting. One of the things I like about genre fiction is that it’s capacious. You can put all kinds of things in it.
Hand: My academic background was in cultural anthropology. I was especially interested in ethnography. In ethnography you can’t be an innocent bystander. How do you gain entry to a group of people different than yourselves? How do you observe them? How do you talk to them? How does mutual trust evolve, so you can ask them questions and find out about their culture and society and how it works.
I never pursued it, but that was a part of anthropology that I found really interesting. I did a couple of papers where I would go out and be with people. When Dungeons and Dragons first came out, I observed a group of D and D players and wrote about that. I did another paper on video arcades. I would go and hang out at these places and get to know people and talk to them and then tape record an interview. I’m always interested in weird stuff at the time. But as an outsider, the way that Cass is—she’s somebody who’s quite conscious of not being inside the charmed circle.
Levy: When you said anthropology, that made perfect sense to me, because that is Cass’s role. She’s very much like, I’m here because of this thing. And I need you to explain X or Y to me, but this isn’t my scene. I’m not trying to be your friend. I need to know about this object. Especially for a female protagonist, to make her not that nice—it suits her personality. She’s probably drug-addicted. She has a hard time sitting still. She’s somebody who has things in her past that she hasn’t really reckoned with. She’s a troubled soul, but she’s an interesting troubled soul.
Hand: Exactly. She’s an interesting troubled soul. And I think that’s the key. She’s definitely a pain in the ass, but she has a saving grace and that is she has a smart mouth and is smart.
Levy: Yeah. The thing I find really refreshing about her is she’s just like what happens to me, whatever, but I know I need to know the answer to this. I don’t think a lot of writers let female characters be like that.
Hand: It’s funny because now conversations are all about likability. I just feel like Cass is way beyond that. She’s kind of like, like me, don’t like me. I don’t care. I am who I am. I think of a song from the punk era and that the name of the band escapes me now. But the song is called: “She is beyond good and evil.” You can Google it. It’s just like, ‘I love you in the bar. I don’t like you at home.’
Levy: Yeah. I’ve had some friends like that.
Hand: I think we all have. If you’ve done any living, then you should know a couple of people like that. You know, they’re good people to be a sidekick to. I did a lot of that when I was younger; I was a sidekick to people who were, you know, crazed and wild and did all of these things and a lot of them are dead now. But they were interesting because they would do things I would never dream of doing. Or if I did do them, I only did them once. Cass does have a moral compass. She’s fucked up, she’s a drug addict, and she’s certainly an alcoholic, but she…
Levy: That doesn’t mean you don’t have a moral compass. That’s an idea that we’ve imposed on addicts.
Hand: Exactly. I think Cass has a very powerful moral confidence—she is compassionate to people who she sees, who were like herself, who are beaten down and overlooked, or addicts. She has a thing where people gravitate towards her who are troubled because they sense that she’s troubled.
Levy: It’s—my husband’s this way also, we’re punk rock teenagers deep inside. And every once in a while, you become your inner punk, right?
Hand: You gotta punch back. It’s kicks against the pricks. It’s the same thing with other genres, with science fiction and fantasy. The same books and writers are trotted out over and over again. The Hugo awards thing a few years ago—that was a good thing, bringing [sexism and racism] to the fore so that people saw what’s been going on.
Levy: I wish that would happen in crime fiction. There has not been a reckoning like that. And there are plenty of predatory men around and everybody knows and they have powerful people to protect them. I think at ThrillerFest last year there was some kind of shakeup, but I don’t think crime fiction has had its reckoning yet. That’ll be interesting when it comes. Especially because we are people who think about this a lot. I only recently decided I could not write about rape culture anymore. I had done it like four or five times and I just was chewed up.
So is there another Cass? Or do you not know?
Hand: I’m doing a standalone book next. A psychological thriller.
Levy: Oh great, that’s my jam. I do the psychological thriller beat. Listen, I always have wanted to meet you.
Hand: Well, thank you so much. I’m very grateful and very appreciative for it. I hope someday we can meet in person.
