The scene is, unfortunately, a familiar one to crime fiction fans: A hard, staccato rain falls on the grimy, gritty streets of The City. The grizzled police detective or private eye, harboring some deep, unspoken demons, stumbles upon the body. He pulls back the wet, plastic sheet and scans the prone form with his weary, bloodshot eyes. The camera pans to capture the victim’s face for the first time—a young, beautiful, virginal woman—slight, superficial wounds on her angelic, sleepy face. Welcome to the story of the Dead Girl.
The details may vary but the trope remains remarkably consistent. Serialized network police procedurals treat the battered bodies of young women as perpetual, recurring plot devices—the spark that fuels their repetitive narratives with little thought given to the life of the dead woman. Instead, viewers and readers are transported into the tortured psyches of their male leads. But side-stepping the cliche isn’t without its own problems. Crime books often involve murder, and the real world is rife with heinous crimes perpetrated against women. So how do today’s crime writers strike the balance between telling compelling, realistic crime stories without resorting to extreme and salacious violence?
True crime writer Carolyn Murnick, author of the acclaimed investigative memoir The Hot One, and Alex Segura, writer of the twice-Anthony Award-nominated Pete Fernandez Miami Mystery series, sat down to discuss.
CAROLYN MURNICK: What got you thinking about these ideas?
ALEX SEGURA: Miami Midnight is the fifth Pete Fernandez Mystery—and, if I’m being honest with myself, the last one. I was always interested in writing about how someone becomes a private eye, less interested in the episodic churn of being a PI. In this book, Pete finds out that what he thought he knew about his mom—that she died during childbirth— isn’t true. She was murdered. And he has to drill down and investigate that, while also pulling himself out of retirement, based on stuff that went down in Book 4, and come to terms with what he wants to be.
CM: Wow, I imagine you have some Ellroy / My Dark Places references in there.
AS: Yes, for sure. And Leah Carroll’s Down City—which, if I’m being honest, spurred the whole thing. It’s such a brutal, honest memoir, and it lead me back to My Dark Places. All the while, I’m struggling with the idea for this novel. Until I realized that the stuff I was reading for “pleasure” was actually what I wanted to write about.
But it also brought me up against the “dead girl” trope, which I know you’ve talked about at length—your TED Talk also put a lot of stuff into perspective for me while figuring the book out.
CM: When you say “put stuff into perspective”—what do you mean?
AS: Well, it was the Ted Talk and Alice Bolin’s great essay collection—aptly titled Dead Girls—that got me to think about it more. Because I think we—writers, usually male—are often tone-deaf when it comes to violence, body count, and what that means or what the consequences are. It’s easy to just have this virginal, beautiful woman as a victim without thinking that you have a responsibility to the reader to not only give voice to the victim but not be…a sicko when describing what’s going on.
CM: It’s great to hear this, of course, and I’m flattered you connected with my talk—because those are exactly the ideas that matter to me most these days. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to tell crime stories in a better, more feminist way (if we’re talking about female victims). A way that really says something, or sends a message, about gendered violence, rather than just doing these discrete stories over and over again about mutilated women and male killers.
AS: Yeah, it’s like, to what end? What do we get out of these stories? At a certain point—and I’m riffing off something I heard Sarah Weinman say at Miami Book Fair last year—the people ignoring the trope or rolling into it are arguably getting off on the violence…or at least using it in a gross way. But it’s also different from saying “do not have any female characters hurt or killed,” because then you’re just excusing your book or story from reality. I think the challenge is, how do I present this in a realistic way and how do I make the reader/viewer care about this character beyond the basic? Are there other, major elements of the trope that you find too common?
CM: It’s sensationalizing violence, drawing out the attention on the female body and the violence she endured, and that fact that almost all of the time the protagonist or central characters are male, either the detective or cop or the killer himself. He is the head we’re getting inside or seeing everything through.
AS: Right, and it’s all told to complement some bigger “journey” by the male protagonist—this quest to complete themselves at the expense of this murdered woman.
CM: Yes!
AS: Who often appears to be an idealized version of the person they want to be with, or virginal. or, like, she—gasp—has sex or some secret sexual life that the viewer/reader can also be titillated by.
CM: Which, obviously, is a complicated thing because in my book, my childhood best friend did have a somewhat secret life in the sex industry and I grappled with even including details about that for fear of appearing exploitative.
“We—writers, usually male—are often tone-deaf when it comes to violence, body count, and what that means or what the consequences are.”AS: I’ve read the book, and loved it, but can you talk about where you landed with that? I also feel compelled to mention Bob Kolker’s great Lost Girls—which manages to humanize the victims in such an organic, honest way, that it just makes their deaths so much more impactful and real.
CM: Thanks, yeah, it’s all very complicated, just like Ashley’s life and death was. I tried to include multiple perspectives in the storytelling, and include some of my interior observations on questioning what I was going after, in the sections of the book where I was researching her time as a stripper in Vegas. From my perspective, it is true to life in that Ashley was a complicated person, someone can have a sex life and be someone’s childhood best friend who had more “wholesome” interests like art and music—and I think it’s important to put the multiple perspectives out there in the same work. What’s been a bummer lately, since the trial for my friend’s alleged killer is going on now, is that there’s been a lot of media coverage of a much more reductive and sensational type. I don’t read most of it, but a few stories I have seen mention my book and refer to it as a “tell-all” that details Ashley’s work as a stripper and hardcore drug user, which really mischaracterizes things. It’s very tricky! On the one hand, writing about virginal female victims is inauthentic, and writing about female victims and their sex life produces knee-jerk reactions, too.
AS: I think that’s something you, Bob and Leah do really well in your books—you paint these complete pictures, and as a reader, I felt like I was getting so much more than just the surface stats, which in turn made what happened more emotionally resonant.
I don’t know if you’ve read Little Deaths by Emma Flint—it’s a great novel, and it’s based on a true case. The protagonist is a sexually active mom in the 60s who’s recently divorced and has a bad reputation…then her kids are kidnapped and murdered, and she’s implicated. I thought it was really well done, and felt so much more “real” than a lot of the stuff I see because it wasn’t afraid of showing the grays of life—that this woman could be making not-great decisions in her personal life, but that didn’t mean she was a bad person or a child murderer.
CM: That sounds like an awesome novel.
AS: Tell me about researching your book—what was that journey like for you?
CM: It had a ton of twists! The short version is my childhood best friend was murdered in 2001—I was 21 at the time and just starting my career in journalism. The case went unsolved for years and I wondered if maybe, one day, if I ever got the confidence, resources, you name it…I could focus my energies on finding out what happened to her. Then in 2008, I learned a man had been arrested for her murder and was connected to three other victims and would be on trial in LA. My initial reaction was “Holy shit!” Because the story had gotten bigger than I could have imagined, and I’ve had seven years to reflect on our friendship and I was a Senior Editor at New York Magazine, and it felt like it was the time for me to really dig in and learn more.
AS: That must have been such an intense moment for you.
“There’s never just one version of the truth…having other voices in there always makes it more complicated and more like real life.”CM: I really had no idea how to do it, so I just started slowly asking for advice from experienced reporters I knew around the office—people who had interacted with police and the courts. Then I went out to Los Angeles for the first time—which was very intense—and I attended a court hearing and saw the alleged killer for the first time. Again, very, very intense. That was eleven years ago. I look back on that and just think I was so young. I kept trying to connect with as many people who knew Ashley as I could, and attending more court hearings and visiting places she’d been. All of that came together into a book proposal I sold in 2010—but the book I pitched ended up being very different from what I actually wrote, because I’d intended to cover the trial of the alleged killer, which was projected to start a year or two after the preliminary hearing, but is actually happening right now in summer 2019. I wasted many years waiting for the trial to start, and then decided to just change course and write the book without the trial, and that’s The Hot One, which came out in 2017. The defendant was in jail awaiting trial for over a decade, and Ashley’s been dead for 18 years.
AS: What kind of reactions did you get from friends or family, while you were writing and researching?
CM: It was really all over the place. Some friends of hers wanted to talk at first, then later disappeared. Others went as far as making plans to meet and then just didn’t show up. Others really wanted to share their perspectives and there’s a few I’ve ended up forming really unique relationships with over the years. I mentioned this in the book, and it seems obvious now, but a 48 Hours producer I became friendly with, who was also following the case, he said “people need to have their own reason for wanting to share their story. You can’t force them.” So I just tried to keep that in mind and not take it personally if a particular avenue didn’t work out.
AS: We all want a piece of the narrative—which sounds more selfish than I mean.
CM: Right. There’s never just one version of the truth. Which is complicated as a memoir writer, because you do have to sort of choose a cohesive narrative, but having other voices in there always makes it more complicated and more like real life.
AS: Yeah, which as a reader, you appreciate. I love when the stories get…messy, for lack of a better word. Complicated. It’s something I want to reflect in my fiction, and something I wanted to be thoughtful about with this book. Because, without spoiling too much, I wanted to give Pete’s mom a voice in the book—but I also didn’t want to fall into the usual trap, where she’s a helpless victim and Pete becomes a more complete man by solving her murder…So, as you read the book, you learn a lot about her, and you see a lot of parallels between her and Pete, and it’s really a conversation between a son and his dead mother.
CM: What were some of your other inspirations there? How did you go about creating the mother’s voice/life?
AS: Well, all the books I name-dropped before helped me deal with the big picture, but the thing that crystallized Pete’s mom for me was listening to Attica Locke, randomly. I was at the Virginia Festival of the Book in March last year, and she was the keynote, and she was talking about her protagonist and his alcoholic mom, and it just hit me like a truck—that, of course, Pete, this guy who’s grappled with alcoholism for years, would have an alcoholic mom, and her death would basically negate any chance of her helping him on this journey. And that felt very real and sad to me, so I wanted to explore that, and how he’d deal with that realization, because I think it’s something we can all relate to, to varying degrees. I wanted to show these two, fucked up people kind of struggling to get their lives in order—except one doesn’t get the chance. Whether Pete does is…TBD, I guess. Pete’s mom has been a concept I knew I wanted to deal with since I started the series.
Did I miss anything?
CM: It’s amazing when you have those moments where you sort of suddenly realize what you’ve known all along. It also reminds me of something I heard the journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner talk about in an interview for her new (bestselling!) novel Fleishman is in Trouble. She was saying, to paraphrase, that she wanted to write a feminist story about women and divorce but she chose to center her story on the male character because she felt that showing the male perspective on the female characters would be an even more effective way to show, basically, all the crap women deal with. (The book is fantastic by the way!)
AS: Taffy is so great, and I loved the book—yes. Totally. I was talking to Laura Lippman a few weeks ago, and she mentioned that, basically, men have little to no sense of how on guard women have to be at all times—we were talking about her new novel, Lady in the Lake, also excellent. But that really stuck with me, and it’s something that I’ve learned just being around women and talking to them about it, and being open to hearing it. And that’s kind of the point of this discussion, in a lot of ways. I just think writers—especially men who might not be fully tuned in to how embedded the dead girl trope has become in our culture—should really try to be more open to adding weight and consequence to every action, and to give life and meaning to the people—the women—that populate their fictional worlds. Not just the ones that die, either. Spend as much time fleshing out the love interest, the mom, the best friend—you might surprise yourself by what you find, and where this effort takes you. Ask yourself—is it fair to this character to just have them be a nameless, brutalized woman? Is your hero truly a hero if they don’t explore this? Treat these characters as real people and your fiction will feel stronger and more genuine. Because, isn’t that what we’re shooting for when we write these stories? Some kind of truth?
