Crimespree Magazine #56 Read online

  You might wonder why I’d choose to create a narrator like Elle. Why risk confusing readers? Why not go the traditional route, telling the story from a more trustworthy and consistent point of view?

  Here’s why: I did it because it was a challenge to present a story from the eyes of an unconventional character, and to reveal the world through her eyes.

  No question, Elle Harrison is different. Even her best friends recognize that she “pulls Elles,” drifting off into her own world from time to time. Elle has been diagnosed with depersonalization disorder, a type of dissociative disorder triggered in her case by trauma or stress. When upset, Elle has a tendency to disconnect from her surroundings. She’s an unreliable narrator because she’s likely to space out in the middle of a threatening situation, detach from a tense moment, or mentally separate from a perilous event. Obviously, her mental wanderings make it difficult to rely on her point of view.

  But let me be clear: Elle isn’t a complete oddball. Lots of people—one in ten—have experienced depersonalization. Have you ever had the sense of being outside your body? Of watching yourself from afar? Have you ever felt as if you’re caught in a “dream” where nothing seems quite real? That’s depersonalization. For most people, these sensations pass quickly and occur rarely. But, for Elle, they come fairly often and can be intense enough to interfere with her life. That’s why her symptoms are considered pathological.

  During her episodes, Elle recognizes that she is disconnecting and knows that the disconnects will be temporary. Even so, she can neither control nor prevent them. All she can do is minimize the triggers (stress and trauma) to reduce their frequency and duration. But seriously, what are her chances of minimizing the triggers? The woman lives on the pages of suspense novels—Murder and mayhem are everywhere. Stress and trauma are normal, which means her depersonalization triggers will continue, and her episodes are unlikely to subside.

  So let’s go back to why I decided to make Elle have this intrusive disorder. There are a couple of reasons.

  First, by writing in her voice, I was able to add tension to the plot. Even with her disorder, Elle functions quite well in stable environments, such as in her job as a second grade teacher. But in the context of the novels—confronted by danger, unexpected upheaval, tension, and violence, her stability declines. Every incident in which she wanders (“pulling an Elle”) allows me to add layers to the plot. While Elle drifts off from the stressful moment, she recalls significant elements of the past, ponders unresolved questions, or imagines the future, revealing aspects of her back story and character. When she “returns” to reality, she faces a gap in time. Both she and readers are left off-balance, not knowing what happened during that gap when Elle was “away.” That uncertainty is a useful device in creating suspense.

  For example, in ELECTIVE PROCEDURES, when Elle’s life is in danger, her mind takes her away to visit her late husband. Instead of panicking alone, she puts herself with a man who will soothe and reassure her. When she comes “back,” Elle—and readers as well—are left with questions. What actually happened to her? How did she survive?

  And earlier, in THE TROUBLE WITH CHARLIE, Elle has only a spotty memory of finding her husband’s body in her den. Because readers see through her eyes, they don’t know any more than she does. Did she find him already dead? Did she witness his murder? Did she kill him herself?

  Without her disorder, these questions and layers of uncertainty wouldn’t exist. In both books, the plots are enriched and tension is added because Elle’s perceptions are unreliable.

  The second reason I gave Elle this condition was so I could present insights about depersonalization disorder. It’s an incurable condition, under-reported in our society. And I took the opportunity to shine some light on it.

  In most of my books, I present characters that will broaden/reinforce readers’ awareness of mental health and various psychological conditions. In ELECTIVE PROCEDURES, for example, a character suffers from body dysmorphic disorder, a condition which causes her to see her body in a distorted fashion. In other books, my characters have presented conditions such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, narcolepsy, paranoia, depression, speech aphasia, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, narcissism, schizophrenia—and more.

  It’s my belief that suspense novels can do more than simply tell gripping stories; they can also present ideas and information. They can enhance understanding. I use my novels to create characters that sympathetically portray conditions affecting them. My plots contain accurate information about these conditions, so readers’ understanding is deepened even as they get caught up in the twists and turns of stay-up-all-night-reading page-turners.

  Elle Harrison is unreliable, for sure. But Elle does more than narrate a story; she portrays a multidimensional, believable individual with her own deep conflicts and struggles. In the course of telling us dark, suspenseful tales, her voice creates not just a sense of her own psychological disorder, but a hint of the broad spectrum of human experience.

  Merry Jones is a versatile author, having written suspense novels, thrillers, mysteries, humor and non-fiction. Married and the mother of two, she grew up in the Chicago area, received a Masters in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School, a BA from Cornell University, and now lives outside Philadelphia. Before writing full time, she was a business communications consultant, an independent video writer/producer, and a college instructor. Jones is an avid rower at Philadelphia’s Vesper Boat Club. She is active in the Philadelphia Liars Club, and a member of Mystery Writers of America, The Authors Guild, and International Thriller Writers.

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  Behind the Books: Ruin Falls

  By Jenny Milchman

  Issue 56

  It’s hard to remember—or believe—but once upon a time parents didn’t worry about their kids the way many of us do now. Children walked alone to school; they went into town to window shop or buy ice cream. By themselves.

  My mom likes to tell a story about when I was five years old and we had just moved to the suburbs. I was getting in her way as she tried to unpack, so she told me, “Go outside. Walk up and down the street and see if you can find a friend.”

  What, like I was supposed to knock on Mr. Bad Guy’s door? Ask if he had a daughter?

  My mother was and is a good mom. To judge from the friends I had growing up, before the day of the organized ‘play date’, most moms of that generation had the same belief in the considerable independence of their children. The same sense of trust in the world.

  Sometimes I think…what would it be like to live with that sense of trust?

  I wonder if suspense novels and mysteries and thrillers were different back then. Which cultural factors came together to produce a constellation of novels that center in some way on a child who has gone missing, including my own second novel, Ruin Falls?

  One night a couple of summers ago, we were on the road. As usual, I was driving, my husband was navigating from the passenger seat, and the kids were asleep in the back because we were going to arrive at our hotel regrettably late.

  Once we’d arrived, I scuttled the kids into pajamas and helped them do a half-hearted brushing of their teeth. My husband opened up the sleeper sofa in the outer room, and we tucked the children into their quarters for the night.

  Then we locked the front door and went into our room in the back of the suite.

  How scary is that?

  You might say, Not very.

  But I am a suspense writer, and for me, the fact that the kids were sleeping near the entrance, while we were a whole room away, kicked off all sorts of ideas in my mind. Including the premise for my new novel. What if two parents went to sleep for the night in a hotel suite and woke up in the morning to find their children missing? And what if when they went to look for them, there was some clue that suggested whoever had taken them had also come back into the room for some reason?

  It was a far-fetched scenario, and I
knew it would take a wiggly, serpentine tale to motivate it. That part of the writing process is anxiety-provoking for me, when I am trying to provide the scaffolding for a novel. What if I can’t make it work? I was just itching to write that scene where the mother realizes there is no way someone could’ve gotten into their hotel room…unless she or he didn’t make it back out again.

  Many writers start with a what if. For me a new novel has to do with the thin gray line, faint as a horizon, which appears when I am in an otherwise benign situation. Cross that line and life goes from normal to a land where no one wants to travel.

  Because of the kind of writer I am, the kind of person I am perhaps, I knew that the children in Ruin Falls would have to be safe all along, and moreover, both the reader and my fictional heroine would have to know that they were safe. No queasy imaginings of kids vulnerable at the hands of a madman would I be penning. The suspense in my story would derive not from the idea of children-in-jeopardy, but from the mother’s intense battle to find out where her kids had gone and how she could get them back.

  It all grew out of one brief night spent in a hotel.

  But really, it grew out of more than that. The world I grew up in, where a crossing guard helped me across the busiest of streets, after which I wended my merry way down a series of smaller ones until I reached school, has disappeared. Vanished in the amount of time it took for a child not to come home one day—or perhaps, a couple of children.

  When I was ten years old, one of those tragedies that change the culture forever took place. Thankfully, this event didn’t impact me personally, but that’s the thing about such cases. Their reach is so great that after the initial whirlpool drowns those who are directly involved, the ripples extend outward until almost no one is left untouched.

  I’m talking about the kidnapping of Etan Patz.

  We lived in the suburbs, but I had been born in New York City where Etan disappeared. He and I were only a few years apart in age. The man who would become my husband—although of course I didn’t know this then—lived just a few blocks from the street where Etan vanished that day.

  His disappearance laced fear and horror into the lives of everyone who heard about it. I don’t know that the actual amount of danger changed in the world. Non-domestic kidnappings have always been rare, and thankfully, continue to be so.

  But our perception of danger did change. The media shone a light on this terrible case, and suddenly mad strangers who wanted to get their hands on children seemed to be lurking behind every dark corner, and in sunny store doorways, too.

  It took about a generation, but very few streets ring with children walking to school on their own these days. At the park, parents occupy benches and watch while their kids play. After-school activities are supervised; the very fact that kids have activities instead of free time to roam and explore represents a sea change in our culture. The term ‘helicopter parenting’ has entered the vernacular. A host of books and articles has cropped up to explore the potential unintended consequences of raising a generation of children whose time is both programmed and attended.

  There is a fear today that didn’t used to be. It’s not a simple fear, and it grew out of more than one child’s vanishing. The phenomenon of child abuse became a societal focus during the years when Etan was missing; there were other terrible and attention-catching cases, such as the murder of Adam Walsh, out of which the Center for Missing and Exploited Children grew.

  And a canon of novels arose to reflect our preoccupations and terrors. Where Are the Children by Mary Higgins Clark wasn’t the first missing child novel, but I think it’s safe to say that it unleashed a wave of books that could be categorized as such. The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard was Oprah’s first book club pick, and Oprah is of course a huge advocate for victimized children. Songs for the Missing by Stuart O’Nan appeared, along with Judas Child by Carol O’Connell. The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond. Red Leaves by Thomas Cook. Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card.

  These books belong to different genres and are driven by vastly differing characters and plots. Their explanations—or in O’Nan’s case, its lack of explanation—range widely as well. But they are all linked by the missing child factor, and this list could go on and on. I’ve probably left off at least one that clenched you by the wrist.

  The fact that there are so many reflects a change in the zeitgeist: we are afraid for our children.

  This fear became a part of the world I grew up in, and a part of the world of my second novel. It also affected me as a parent. As I tucked my kids into bed that night in the hotel, the fear my heroine would have to face in the world of Ruin Falls encircled my neck like a python. Once we know that the worst can happen—when the media beams a broadcast of it into our homes every night—how can we ever justify looking away? And yet we have to look away from our children, every day, or we will cripple them.

  The remedy for such an inescapable dilemma lies for me in fiction. I write books to cope with the impossible…or to turn it my way. There was never any doubt for me that Liz, my heroine, would get her children back. But first I had to figure out where she was going to get them back from, and then I had to decide how she would do it.

  In Ruin Falls, Liz’s children are not snatched by a demonic stranger, but by someone she trusted completely. At the same time Liz is tracking down her kids, and ultimately challenging those who have them, she is also trying to make sense of a world turned upside down. What she believed to be right and true in that world isn’t. What she believed to be right and true in herself isn’t either.

  Liz’s journey takes her from the hot flatlands of western New York back to the mountains of Wedeskyull, the setting for my first novel. Her actual homecoming reflects one that is taking place metaphorically as well. In order for Liz to find her children, she first must find herself.

  Writing this book was, perhaps surprisingly, very soothing to me. Riding the roller coaster of my story world is like therapy for me. In that world, good conquers evil, and a woman who’s a lot like you or me, not even particularly strong at the beginning, is going to restore her life and the lives of her family to balance.

  A good suspense novel, even as it deals with terrifying things, can return to us a feeling of safety by the end. Of all’s right with the world. And in a world that contains tragedies like the case of Etan Patz, that’s no small reason to read, and no small reason to write.

  Jenny Milchman’s debut novel, Cover of Snow, was chosen as an IndieNext and Target Pick, and nominated for a Mary Higgins Clark award. Jenny’s second novel, Ruin Falls, is coming out on April 22nd and she will hit the road with her family on the second of her multi-month book tours, where all sorts of ideas for stories will probably occur.

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  The Funny Side of Gore

  By N. P. Simpson

  Issue 56

  I don’t enjoy what I call “the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out” crime fiction, that is, fiction that is more preoccupied with the grisliness of the murder and the minutiae of decomposition than with clues and motives. I don’t have to read five pages of detailed human suffering in order to sympathize with a victim. And I am not drawn to callous or sophomoric investigators who make wisecracks over corpses. Having said that, it is possible to write humorously about repellent events under certain conditions. First, the writer must not betray the reader by trying to make him smile at the suffering of a character he has come to care for. Second, the humor must derive from the irony of the situation or from the narrator’s perceptions, not from the suffering itself. Third, the humor must be counter-balanced by empathy or wisdom. In the following excerpt, the reader smiles because the narrator is a child, with a child’s distanced understanding of a gory photo. But the humor is also grounded by the child’s awareness that there is a difference between violence that results from an accident and violence resulting from an intentional act.

  This excerpt from “Underground Iron,” N. P. Simpson’s work-in-
progress about growing up in the Jim Crow South during the 1950s. The narrator, an 11-year-old smartypants, is butting horns with her insurance-agent father over his insistence that she ride in the backseat of the car, which he believes is safer. The narrator’s best friend’s father is a CPA. Both girls are avid and precocious readers of detective fiction.

  I know one thing insurance agents have that CPAs don’t. Pictures of dead people. My father has a folder full of them, including one that shows a woman hanging out of a car door with her arm bent every-which way. And another one that shows a man wearing argyle socks stretched out through a broken windshield onto the hood of a car with his chin propped up on the hood ornament like he was doing the breast stroke. You might think he was wearing a black mask, because the picture is black and white, but I just know that mask would be blood red in Kodacolor. I realized right off that the people were dead as doornails because, if they weren’t, wouldn’t people be rushing around giving them first aid instead of taking pictures?

  I don’t want anybody to think my father has a morbid streak. I was only supposed to see one of those pictures, and then only because he was at the end of his tether. It started with me refusing to sit by myself in the back seat of the car like I was still four-years-old. He has this idea that it’s safer for me to sit in the back seat. When I flat-out refused to get in the back seat to ride to the grocery store with him, he drove off, leaving me standing under the carport, fit to be tied. I didn’t think he’d really go off without me. He should have known I was about 10 seconds from giving in. But there he went, pulling out of the carport, yelling across the front seat at me: “I’ve got something to show you when I get back, Miss Smarty Pants!”