For this conversation, we assembled interview answers from the following nominees for the Anthony Awards:
Susanna Calkins—Nominated for Best Short Story
Joe Clifford—Nominated for Best Novel in a Series and Best Anthology
Hilary Davidson—Nominated for Best Short Story
Martin Edwards—Best Critical/Nonfiction Work
Jane Harper—Nominated for Best First Novel
Kellye Garrett—Nominated for Best First Novel
Barb Goffman—Nominated for Best Short Story
Debra A. Goldstein—Nominated for best Short Story
Attica Locke—Nominated for Best Novel
Jess Lourey—Best Critical/Nonfiction Work
Nadine Nettman—Nominated for Best Paperback Original
Louise Penny—Nominated for Best Novel
Thomas Pluck—Nominated for Best Paperback Original
Alex Segura—Nominated for the Bill Crider Award for Best Novel in a Series
Art Taylor—Nominated for Best Short Story
James W. Ziskin—Nominated for Best Paperback Original
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Inspirations and Influences
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CrimeReads: Have you ever been inspired by a real crime?
Attica Locke: Yes, the opening of Black Water Rising was based on a real event. My family was on a boat cruise on Buffalo Bayou in Houston, Texas, and floating at one point in darkness through a not great part of town and we heard a woman screaming for help… and then we heard gunshots. There was a debate on board about whether we should stop the boat and wade into whatever was going on or whether we should call the police and just hope for the best. We called the police. The opening of my debut novel started with the question of what if we had stopped the boat to save her…. and she wasn’t actually a victim.
Jess Lourey: Yes. I grew up in Paynesville, Minnesota, a tiny town that was home to Danny Heinrich. Heinrich abducted several local boys in the 80s; he released them all except for Jacob Wetterling, whose murder he finally confessed to in 2016. My novel now out on submission, The Devil in the Dirt Basement, takes a fictional perspective of the case, telling it through the eyes of a young girl who’s friends with the boys who go missing and come back changed, until one boy doesn’t come back at all.
Martin Edwards: A couple of times, in very different ways. The unexplained aspects of the famous Crippen case inspired me to write my first historical novel, Dancing for the Hangman. And the terrible crime of “family annihilation” was the starting point for my most recent Lake District mystery, The Dungeon House.
Kellye Garrett: I’ve actually ripped off Law & Order’s Ripped from the Headlines approach with all the books in my Detective by Day series. Hollywood Homicide was inspired by the Bling Ring, a group of teens who were breaking into houses belonging to Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and the like purely because they wanted to steal their designer wardrobes. The second book, Hollywood Ending, is loosely based on Ronni Chasen, a well-known publicist who died in a botched car jacking.
Hilary Davidson: I’ve been inspired by real-life crimes several times. The best example would be my novel Evil in All Its Disguises, in which a travel journalist is murdered and the property where it happened tried to cover it up. That happened to a fellow Frommer’s journalist early in my travel-writing career, and her story always haunted me. I changed the location and the details, but her disappearance is at the heart of that book. My short fiction is often inspired by things I’ve overheard strangers say in real life, or by news stories. One of the saddest was about a mummified baby being found inside the walls of a house in Toronto; that inspired a story I wrote about a home renovation tearing apart a marriage.
Barb Goffman: Oh yes. In 2004 I attended the Sleuthfest writers conference near Fort Lauderdale. Right before one of the panels, I went to the bathroom, removed my beautiful sapphire and diamond ring while I washed my hands, and then forgot the ring on the bathroom counter. I realized what I’d done no more than fifteen minutes later. I ran to the bathroom. The ring was gone. I had announcements made in every session throughout the rest of the conference and checked lost-and-found at the hotel repeatedly, but no one ever returned the ring. It’s quite likely that whoever found my ring saw me plead for its return multiple times during the conference but decided to keep it. I vowed to make something good come out of that event. The result was “Murder at Sleuthfest,” my first published short story (and my first award nomination), in which I dealt with the thief.
Susanna Calkins: My nominated short story, “The Trial of Madame Pelletier” was inspired by the real trial of a “Lady Poisoner” in 1840s France. I had written about the case in grad school when I was working on my PhD, focusing on how this woman had been tried in the court of public opinion as well as the assize court in Limousin. While my version is vastly different from the original, I did include a few fascinating details related to both the poisoning as well as the evidence gleaned from the actual forensics of the day.
Nadine Nettman: The murder/suicide of Ned Doheny and Hugh Plunkett at Greystone Mansion in 1929. There are so many lingering questions about the crime and several details that don’t match up, especially since police weren’t called for a while and the bodies were moved before they arrived. I’ve long been fascinated by the case and it inspired one of my current projects.
James W. Ziskin: Not sure if it qualifies as a “real crime,” but Cain Slays Abel gets right to the heart of the evil in man’s soul. The first capital crime. We crime writers can all find inspiration in that.
CrimeReads: Which authors paved the way for you to write what you write now?
Joe Clifford: All the women writing thrillers and mysteries today—Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, Wendy Walker, Jennifer Hillier, Emily Carpenter, Shannon Kirk.
Attica Locke: Chester Himes, Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane.
James W. Ziskin: All of them. Poets, novelists, biographers, essayists, philosophers. Of course I’m particularly grateful to the giants of our genre, especially those who gave female characters the chance to be the star in their stories. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Laurie R. King…
Debra A. Goldstein: When I write a short story, like “The Night They Burned Ms. Dixie’s Place,” I try to ground the plot, setting, and characters in a real world, but to also offer an unforeseen twist. Some of the authors who were my models and paved the way for this kind of writing to be accepted were Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and B.K. Stevens. In my novels and short stories, I often incorporate diversity and social issues into my characters’ backstories, experiences and growth, either subliminally or occasionally overtly. Edna Ferber, James Michener, and Harper Lee broke new ground in many of these areas and provided me with characters I could love and hate in Giant, Hawaii, and To Kill a Mockingbird. Finally, a group of poets, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Carl Sandburg and Maya Angelou, made the world, and this author, appreciate the beauty of words and the impact putting them together just so can have on readers.
“Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky for showing women don’t always have to be the damsel in distress. Janet Evanovich for showing it’s okay to laugh when discussing something as serious as murder. And, perhaps above all else, Barbara Neely, Valerie Wilson Wesley, and Eleanor Taylor Bland for proving that black women can be more than just the sassy best friend.”—Kellye Garrett
Kellye Garrett: Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky for showing women don’t always have to be the damsel in distress. Janet Evanovich for showing it’s okay to laugh when discussing something as serious as murder. And, perhaps above all else, Barbara Neely, Valerie Wilson Wesley, and Eleanor Taylor Bland for proving that black women can be more than just the sassy best friend. If I didn’t see and read these books when I was a teenager, it would have never occurred to me that I could—and should—write a mystery novel.
Alex Segura: I probably sound like a broken record, because I mention these writers in almost every interview I do, but the handful of names I always go back to are the reasons I’m even writing crime fiction: Laura Lippman, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Lawrence Block, James Ellroy, Megan Abbott, Reed Farrel Coleman, Michael Connelly…obviously, there are older, more classic writers that we all owe a debt to, like Chandler, Thompson, Hammett, etc—but the contemporary writers I mentioned first were the ones that opened my eyes to what crime fiction could be in a modern setting. They taught me the important of place in fiction and they showed me that having a flawed (and not necessarily likeable!) protagonist was much more interesting than a steel-jawed (white, male) gumshoe. Books like A Firing Offense, Baltimore Blues and A Drink Before the War helped me figure out what kind of book I wanted to write, because it was an offshoot of the kind of books I liked to read, with a heavy dose of me. They made my journey easier, and I’ll be forever grateful to those writers for that.
Jess Lourey: Sue Grafton, William Kent Krueger, and Janet Evanovich are the authors who brought me back to my love of crime fiction, which had fizzled under the weight of getting a Master’s in English and being told what was “worth reading” (hint: mostly plot-free books by dead white guys). Lately, I’ve been immersing myself in Karin Slaughter, Catriona McPherson, Meg Gardiner, and Alison Gaylin to master the art of wicked-deep suspense.
Susanna Calkins: When I was finishing grad school, I finally started reading for fun again, and I gravitated towards historical mysteries. Authors like Anne Perry, Charles Todd and Rhys Bowen first inspired me, and later I turned to Charles Finch, Tasha Alexander and Jacqueline Winspear. As a historian with a love of fiction, I gradually began to think, ‘Hey, maybe I can do this too.”
Martin Edwards: There’s a long list! The brilliant Golden Age plotting of Agatha Christie and Anthony Berkeley inspired my love of twisty plots, and was an influence on my latest book, Gallows Court. But the psychological insight of Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine was another big influence. And my enthusiasm for thrillers by the likes of Lee Child led me to want to write a thriller myself—and that’s why Gallows Court is set in 1930.
CrimeReads: Who’s a classic or past crime author you wish more people read today?
Louise Penny: Definitely Josephine Tey. I love her books, really more novella in length by today’s standards. She was not only masterful in terms of her plots, but her characters are distinct and rich, full and varied, and never, ever slip over into caricature. Every word is there for a reason, every nuance has purpose. Her books are clear, crystalline. Brilliant. Another one, from the same era, is Georges Simenon and his Maigret books. Unlike Tey, who only wrote a few novels, Simenon was prolific. GREAT novels…. a grandparent to much of what is written today.
Martin Edwards: There’s an even longer list! I’m pleased to be the consultant to the British Library Crime Classics which have revived some terrific authors. Among British authors, I’d mention talented but forgotten writers such as Bruce Hamilton and Milward Kennedy. Among Americans, I’m a very great admirer of Fredric Brown.
Art Taylor: Whenever I get the opportunity, I try to give a shout-out to Stanley Ellin. He’s far from unknown or unread—he won several Edgar Awards and he was a grandmaster of Mystery Writers of America—but many folks don’t know him, perhaps because his best work was in short fiction. He was the almost-undisputed master of the short form, and his stories boast a clockwork precision, both the plot and the prose. While my own writing doesn’t hold a candle to his—not hardly!—Ellin has been an inspiration to my work, something for me to aspire toward, and his commitment to the short story has inspired my devotion to short fiction as well.
Alex Segura: Margaret Millar. I love that she’s getting more acclaim of late, because it’s so well deserved, but she’s really underrated. Her spouse, Ross Macdonald, gets the lion’s share of accolades for his (great) Lew Archer books, but Millar took it to another level, and was doing Gone Girl-type work long before that book was a glimmer in Gillian Flynn’s eye. Which isn’t a diss on Gone Girl, or any of the great authors tackling domestic suspense now, but Millar (and her contemporaries) paved the road for that, and did it so well. Read Beast In View if you haven’t and prepare to be blown away.
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Your Life in Crime
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CrimeReads: What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
Louise Penny: Sorting mail over Christmas. It was mind-numbing.
Kellye Garrett: I moved back to New Jersey from Los Angeles in 2011 with no job and no job prospects. Since Sallie Mae was no longer trying to hear that I was too broke to pay her, I did a lot of odd jobs. The most amusing was handing out flyers for MetroPCS. It would be the dead of winter and I’d be standing on the street trying to get New Yorkers—and we all know New Yorkers are not the friendly people—to just take a flyer. We’d usually just give out a few, throw the rest in the garbage, and then hang out for the rest of our shift.
Thomas Pluck: Busing tables at a restaurant where the corpulent old owner with a gin blossom schnoz was sleeping with the head waitress, who stole his Cadillac in revenge, because he lied to her about leaving his wife and taking her to the Bahamas. She stole all my tips, and I had to hear the owner tell me how when he was my age, he used to use slices of veal from his mom’s fridge to masturbate. Turned me off veal for good. This was before we knew what they did to the poor calves. I’ve had grosser jobs—I’ve washed dishes in a kitchen with a sewage backup, I’ve cleaned the toilets in the Guggenheim—but I was alone with my thoughts, which is where I prefer to be.
Susanna Calkins: When I was in high school and college, I worked at a movie theater. While I loved selling candy, popcorn and tickets, I was unfortunately promoted to projectionist/assistant manager—a job well beyond my skill set. I really did not understand how to work the equipment except at the most basic level. I still remember the terrible moment when I was on duty, when the theater went dark, and there was no sound. I raced upstairs to the projection booth, only to find the entire platter of film—“Steel Magnolias”—dumping out onto the dusty floor instead of threading through the projector as expected. I had forgotten to place the arm correctly on the platter, and that was the end of the showing. Luckily, in my role of assistant manager, I was able to give out free movie passes to the angry customers and blame the witless projectionist for such a terrible mistake.
Alex Segura: I was a video store clerk for a few months during my last year in college—I’d just moved out of my mom’s house and for some silly reason I thought my finite newspaper internship would not…be finite? I guess I was hoping they’d hire me. When it ended, I realized I had bills to pay and so I got a gig at this dingy indie video store in Coral Gables. It smelled of cat pee and seemed to service a seedy, creepy clientele. That said, it was nice because the place was relatively quiet—business was bad for video stores even in 2001—so I got to spend a lot of time thinking about stories or playing with the store cat, a chubby tabby whose name escapes me. But it was not a fun job, by any stretch—mostly depressing. I couldn’t even pick the movies playing while I worked.
Hilary Davidson: Literally every customer service job I’ve ever had has been brutal, but the very worst was my stint at a Veterans Affairs office in Toronto just after I graduated from college. We had death threats every week from some of the center’s more disturbed clients, and one of them brought a can of gasoline up one morning and set our office on fire. No one died, but a couple of people were so badly injured that they couldn’t come back to work. I had PTSD for some time after that; all it would take was someone reaching into a bag on the subway, and I’d think I was about to die.
CrimeReads: Do you identify more with criminals, cops, or detectives?
Joe Clifford: Criminals. I used to be a criminal, drug junkie person. And I understand that state of mind. It’s a bad state of mind, obviously. But I still understand the desire to flout convention.
Attica Locke: I identify most with non-professional detectives, characters who stumble upon a crime or a mystery that they have to solve.
‘I identify more with those who live in that enormous gray area that we refer to as “outside the law.”‘—Thomas Pluck
Thomas Pluck: I identify more with those who live in that enormous gray area that we refer to as “outside the law.” That means cops, crooks, PIs, everybody. The middle class lens through which much of crime fiction is viewed … is not how I grew up. People sold things out of trunks. A hundred dollar bill passed to the cable guy got you free HBO. Detectives backed up their cars to the local drugstore to sell cases of Calvin Klein fragrances. I reject the definition that crime fiction is about returning the world to “order” because only the privileged live in a world with any sort of order.
Kellye Garrett: I’m nosy as hell, too out of shape to pass any sort of physical tests, and get nervous even when I don’t use my signal when changing lanes, so I’m probably best suited to be a detective.
Art Taylor: I’ve written stories from both the detective’s and the criminal’s points of view (I’ve never written a police procedural), but I personally find the criminal side more interesting—the places where people (all of us?) might cross the line or at least entertain some uneasy thoughts. I’m not sure I would call it identifying with the criminal as much as recognizing some dark parts of all of us, and I think even that word “criminal” might prove challenging in some case. My story “Parallel Play,” for example, poses questions about why a good person might kill—what might prompt such a person to do “bad things” and then whether we’d judge them truly bad if we had all the evidence.
James W. Ziskin: Definitely detectives. Detectives embark on a journey of discovery. I like to travel.
Debra A. Goldstein: I love working around rules. Consequently, I identify more with the criminals; however, having been a sitting judge and because I’m too much of a goody two shoes, there is a line I’d never cross—by the way, I have a bridge for sale.
Susanna Calkins: This is an intriguing question. If I weren’t the biggest ‘fraidy cat around, I think I would have liked to have become a cop, or perhaps a detective. As a kid, I devoured Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, The Three Investigators—you name it. I wanted to solve mysteries…but probably not the kind with dead bodies. And of course, my stories tend to focus on amateur sleuths, but the reality is, if I ever were to stumble across a crime, I’d call the police as I’m hightailing it out of there. But of course like most lovers of Agatha Christie, I’ve thought through my share of ingenious crimes from the perspective of a criminal, but I’m probably not ultimately comfortable being on the wrong side of the law.
Nadine Nettman: Definitely detectives. I love figuring things out, even if it’s small puzzles like the latest crossword answer or why the car won’t start to larger puzzles like following updates on a cold crime case. I love finding out the answer.
CrimeReads: If you had to disappear tomorrow, where would you go?
Susanna Calkins: Hmmm…I feel like I shouldn’t give my actual answer, just in case I need to flee my current existence unexpectedly. So I’ll give you a completely different answer, where you absolutely could not find me, even if you tried. Assuming I knew how to get off the grid and all that, I feel like I could easily blend into some small seaside town in New England, Michigan, or Ireland. I’m sure my lack of accent would give me away, but I think I could just pass myself off by earnestly finding employment in a local bar, and living in a cottage in the middle of town. But of course, if I tell you more, I will have to…. Well, you know the rest.
Martin Edwards: To Easter Island. Fantastic place, and a very long way from everywhere else!
“I feel like I shouldn’t give my actual answer, just in case I need to flee my current existence unexpectedly. So I’ll give you a completely different answer, where you absolutely could not find me, even if you tried.”—Susanna Calkins
Nadine Nettman: If I tell you and then I disappear, you’ll know where I’ve gone. So I’m going to keep this one to myself but let’s just say it involves somewhere far away. Or does it …
Hilary Davidson: Manila, because that’s a great place for a live person to buy their own death certificate. Don’t ask me how I know that. Let’s just say that travel writing gave me some interesting insights, and many stories that I haven’t used yet!
Debra A. Goldstein: Although I’ve got the kind of face and figure that blends into the crowd, if I tried to run away to Louise Penny’s Three Pines, I know I would be noticed, if only because of my Southernized Yankee Midwest accent. Consequently, if I had to disappear tomorrow, I’d probably get a phony ID, rent a condo at the beach, and spend my days reading or staring at the water.
Thomas Pluck: That would be telling. I’m an Irish citizen but I’d stick out there like an Italian sazeech in the bangers and mash. I liked Napoli, I could fit in there. It’s not that different than northern New Jersey, and people don’t trust their government, so they are unlikely to rat. I’d prefer to escape to the infinite highway, the road movie. My favorite of those is Vanishing Point and it doesn’t end well, so I’ll be working a pizza oven in Pozzuoli and avoiding the Camorra.
James W. Ziskin: Lebanon, Kansas. The geographical center of the United States. No one would look for me there.
