Sarah Weinman has been doing a terrific job of resurrecting and recognizing women who have gone under the radar for far too long. Her 2013 anthology, Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, shone a welcome light on crime writers such as Vera Caspary, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Charlotte Armstrong, all part of an earlier generation of women writing giants on whose shoulders, it can be argued, everyone from Gillian Flynn to Paula Hawkins to Megan Abbott now stand. Weinman’s two-volume, Library of America Women Crime Writers, a 2015 anthology of eight suspense novels from the 40s and 50s, extended that enterprise and was, simply put, one of the most exciting publishing events of the year. And her 2014 take on British spy-thriller writer Helen MacInnes, “Spies Like Hers” for the New York Times, felt timely, welcome, and refreshing.
Weinman’s new book, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World, feels both like a turning point—the first non-anthology book from the writer—and a natural progression. Sally Horner was just 11 years old when she was kidnapped by 50-year-old Frank La Salle in Camden, New Jersey, in 1948. He held her captive for nearly two years, during which time they moved from city to city, ultimately landing in California. Meanwhile, Vladimir Nabokov was living in America and struggling to write what would become his literary masterpiece and gold mine, Lolita. Others have previously noted, acknowledged, and partly explored the influence that Horner’s true crime story had on Nabokov’s 1955 novel. Weinman, however, is the first to fully cover Sally Horner’s life story in tandem with the story of Nabokov’s writing of Lolita, and the result is riveting. As Nichole LeFebvre astutely observed on Twitter, The Real Lolita is “written like a thriller, researched like a dissertation.” Weinman’s book is, indeed, rife with jaw-dropping twists that bring escalating levels of resonance to the real-life story, even as Weinman works her way through library archives and interviews. One aspect of the tale in particular, affected her with a raw and intense immediacy which she translated onto the page as soon as she could: “I think maybe 70 or 80 per cent of what’s in that chapter is from my early draft,” she says. “I felt like I had to write it while it was still potent in my mind.”
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Weinman’s determined pursuit of Horner’s story first took shape as a 2014 article for Hazlitt. “I wonder why nobody either wanted or felt compelled to tell Sally’s story in this way before,” says Weinman. “In the instance of the Nabokov scholar Alexander Dolinin who wrote about the Sally Horner connection for the Times Literary Supplement in 2005, that makes some sense to me because he’s a scholar, he’s not a journalist. He was much more focused on how the case linked up to Lolita. I don’t know if it was as relevant for his purposes to find out more about Sally, to get at the humanity of her existence, of her story.”
She also points to a 1963 article by journalist Peter Welding in Nugget, an irregularly published men’s magazine, which drew in-depth parallels between Horner’s kidnapping and Nabokov’s novel, an article Weinman was made aware of through a dismissive letter written by Véra Nabokov in response to another journalist’s enquiry. Welding was clearly interested in the human angle but had fewer archival resources than Weinman.
“I knew that that article existed,” Weinman explains, “because of the letter that Véra wrote where she was writing not only at her behest but at Vladimir’s behest, in the role of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov. I looked at the letter and thought, ‘Wait, what is this magazine and how do I find it?’” It took, she says, about two years to track down the pertinent issue, but, then, Weinman’s entire undertaking has been about meticulous and persistent research, online, in print archives, and—old-school, detective-style—on foot. “I remember one day taking the train into Philly and then one of the commuter lines into downtown Camden,” Weinman says. “And I just went from courthouse to courthouse to courthouse, essentially doing the door-knocking equivalent of document hunting. At that time, phone calls were not getting me anywhere and there was material that I had, but I didn’t have enough; I wanted more. Ultimately, a lot of this was just piecing together fragments from various sources: it would have been wonderful if I’d had, say, a complete record with all of the court documents related to Sally’s kidnapping, but not every jurisdiction is as good at hanging on to documents. There were appeals documents that had information that I could extrapolate from, and the press accounts at the time, especially in Camden and Philadelphia, were pretty comprehensive. In the end, I had what I needed to build a narrative, but there are a few instances where I had to get speculative.”
A self-described “archive nerd,” Weinman thrives on curiosity, hence the professional focus on lost or muted voices. “If I don’t know about someone and I get curious,” she says, “I’ve always just assumed that if I have that inherent curiosity, other people will too. And I think the voices of girls and women have been erased for too long and history is as much about the people who are driven to uncover these stories as it is about the stories themselves. So, especially with the anthologies, it just never made sense to me that these women crime writers weren’t talked about in the same way as Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain, when their contributions were just as necessary and influential and informative. And recently, I did a whole Twitter thing based on a CrimeReads essay on Mary Higgins Clark which I really thought was very well done, but I thought it was important to point out again how critical Mary Higgins Clark is to the crime fiction world. It would be really easy to just go, ‘Oh, she writes commercial bestsellers so there’s no there there. But there’s a ton of there there! Without her you wouldn’t have this contemporary cohort of women suspense writers, you just would not.”
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Growing up in Ottawa, it was Weinman’s older brother, Jaime, who was the writer in the family. “I was the musician slash scientist,” says Weinman. “I didn’t think I was going to make a living as a musician, but I studied piano and took voice lessons and I’ve been in choirs since I was 15. I was determined to study something where I could get a job, and I like science a lot, especially biology, so that’s what I studied as an undergrad at McGill. During my senior year I was looking around for grad schools, and I stumbled over the website for John Jay College’s Forensic Science program and I thought, ‘I didn’t know you could study that! This is everything!’ I was already a huge crime and crime-fiction enthusiast; my serious reading of crime fiction began around 1999 and my formative contemporary crime writers were Laura Lippman, Harlan Coben, S.J. Rozan, Jan Burke, Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos—that whole cohort. I was hanging out on crime fiction message boards, and I went to Bouchercon for the first time in 2001, the same year I went to New York to start grad school. In New York, I worked one day a week as a bookseller at the late, great, mystery bookshop Partners & Crime—that was my first foray into what the book business was about. But, of course, it wasn’t just Partners in Crime—I also hung out at all the other bookshops: I was at The Mysterious Bookshop when it was still in midtown; I’d go to events at Black Orchid; I’d go to Murder Ink because that was on the Upper West Side where I lived at the time. It felt like every mystery bookshop had some reason for me to be there, just to hang out and buy books and go to events. I was getting myself into that community.”
She spent the summer of 2003 in London doing her thesis research, working in a forensic lab by day, hanging out at book events with crime writers by night, and attending the first-ever Harrogate-based Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival. Then it was time to write her master’s thesis: she returned to her parents’ home in Ottawa to work on that, and it was then that she started her mystery-and-thriller-focused blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind: “When I was in London, blogs were a way for me to access New York, which I missed. New York was always the city of my heart, really from a very young age. At that point, I didn’t think I was going to go back, or I didn’t know how I could go back. Doing that blog was a way to reconnect with the City but also just to be around the crime fiction world in a virtual way.”
That blog, meaty with book-world detail and as full of passion for crime fiction writers as it was for their books, was also what kickstarted her freelance writing and reviewing career where she’s made her crime-writing mark everywhere from the Baltimore Sun and the L.A. Times, to Macleans and the New York Times. Even once she took on a full-time role at Publishers Marketplace in 2011, Weinman has continued to publish widely on crime fiction and true-\ crime stories, sometimes the odder, the better. Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives had its germination in a 2011 essay for Tin House and, working on The Real Lolita, Weinman even surprised herself, realizing she’d written an article for Lolita’s 50th anniversary an article which she’d completely forgotten about. “It absolutely escaped me that I wrote it,” she says, laughing. “I went and checked my emails and there were emails that showed I had done it, it was just gone from my memory. But it shows that I was interested and attuned to Lolita-related material as far back as the mid 2000s or even earlier. It’s like I’ve been preparing to do this book for a while.”
Currently a contributing editor and columnist for Crime Reads, Weinman also sends out an entertaining newsletter, The Crime Lady, filled with various reading recommendations as well as more niche topics: one from earlier this year, for example, cannily showcased her affinity for both music and Yiddish. In a parallel, non-journalism career, her fiction has been published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and in the Lawrence Block-edited 2017 anthology Alive in Shape and Color: 16 Paintings by Great Artists and the Stories They Inspired.
“All the techniques that you need in terms of pacing, characters, setting, conflict, voice—you have all that in any story you write, whether the material is true or whether you’re making it all up.”“I started Confessions in October of 2003, and my first fiction story, “Seguidilla,” ran in the November/December issue of Plots with Guns, so my fiction and nonfiction start was pretty much concurrent,” says Weinman. “At that point I was trying to be like every other twenty-something, trying to figure out whether I have a novel in me. I remember a few months after the blog launched getting an email from a prominent agent then—who’s an even more prominent agent now—asking whether I wrote fiction. I was so intimidated! I was polite in my response, but, basically, I wasn’t ready. And, like a lot of people, I did try: I have novels in a drawer; they deserve to be in the drawer. But I also think that all the fiction that I’ve written absolutely informs the way that I write nonfiction now: all the techniques that you need in terms of pacing, characters, setting, conflict, voice—you have all that in any story you write, whether the material is true or whether you’re making it all up and it’s an entirely imaginative endeavor. And I do think that fiction writers can learn from nonfiction and that nonfiction writers can learn from fiction. For me, it all just stems from the fact that I read constantly and I read voraciously and I try to read as widely as I can. At first, it was purely a pleasure just reading stuff I wanted; luckily, I still get to read a lot of stuff I want, but of course as a professional writer, you’re also reading to learn.”
Professionally, Weinman also thrives on live events with other writers: “I do like to do events with authors—I get curious and I listen and I think those are the two things you need as an interviewer.” As for the shoe being on the other foot this year, going from being the interviewer to being the interviewee, from being the reviewer to the writer being reviewed, Weinman is “all in” when it comes to The Real Lolita. “You sort of have to be all in once the book is done and it’s time to go ahead and promote it to the world,” she says. “But this one in particular I feel a real sense of responsibility for, just because of the story that’s being told and the fact that I want Sally Horner’s name to be as widely recognized as Dolores Haze.”
