Never Look Back
“It was the girl.” The old man leaned forward, bracing against the worn-out armchair as though he were trying to escape its grasp. “April Cooper. She was the real killer.”
Quentin Garrison watched his face. He was very good at describing people, a skill he used all the time in his true crime podcasts. Later, recording the narration segments with his coproducer, Summer Hawkins, Quentin would paint the picture for his listeners—the leathery skin, the white eyebrows wispy as cobwebs, the eyes, cerulean in 1976 but now the color of worn denim, and with so much pain bottled up behind them, as though he were constantly hovering on the brink of tears.
The man was named Reg Sharkey, and on June 20, 1976, he’d watched his four-year-old daughter Kimmy die instantly of a gunshot wound to the chest—the youngest victim of April Cooper and Gabriel Allen LeRoy, aka the Inland Empire Killers. Two weeks later, his wife, Clara, had decided her own grief was too much to bear and committed suicide, after which Reg Sharkey had apparently given up on caring about anything or anyone.
Quentin said, “Wasn’t it LeRoy who pulled the trigger?”
“Yes.”
“But you blame April.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Reg stayed quiet for several seconds. Quentin resisted the urge to fill in the dead air. This was a trick that often worked in interviews, the subject finally relenting and spilling his guts—anything to put an end to that awful, uncomfortable silence.
Quentin listened to the hum of the air conditioner and the whoosh of a passing truck. Just outside the shaded window, a bird shrieked—a blue jay, Quentin thought, or some other similar species put on this earth to destroy radio broadcasts. He was glad Summer had talked him into the cardioid mic—it was so much better at cutting out background noise than the omnidirectional he’d planned on taking. You’d be surprised at how many distracting sounds there are in a typical living room, Summer had said. And she’d been right. Of course, if Summer had seen this place, she’d never have called it typical.
Reg’s living room was a time capsule, from the faded plaid earth-toned couch, to the Formica coffee table, to the avocado-green ashtray and matching coasters that looked as though they hadn’t been unstacked since the premiere of the very first Star Wars movie. There was a coffee-table book of photography—The Best of Life Magazine—and a few dusty TV Guides, one of which had Fonzie on the cover. It was as though Reg Sharkey had attempted to stop the clock on June 19, 1976, before his family had crumbled into a billion pieces.
Quentin took in the line of photographs on the mantelpiece—almost all of them of Clara and Kimmy, holiday photos and vacation shots, birthday party pictures, mother and daughter, smiling and young, forever hopeful, just we two... Quentin’s jaw tensed, a tiny, bitter seed taking root at the pit of his stomach.
He took a deep breath, willing the tension out of his body as he’d learned in the holistic yoga class his husband, Dean, had forced him to take. In with the positive energy, out with the negative... God, Dean could be so Californian sometimes, but it was better than nothing. Worse than downing a globe-size martini, or putting one’s fist through drywall. But better than nothing.
“They’re all I have,” said Reg. “Those pictures you’re looking at. They’re the only family I have left.”
“Well...” said Quentin.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.” Quentin struggled to keep his tone neutral. “I know what you mean.” But the truth was still right here with them, hanging in the stale air and coursing through Quentin’s tensed muscles, showing itself in his narrow face and his slight overbite and the thick black lashes that used to get him teased when he was a kid. No matter what Reg Sharkey thought he meant, the truth was with them. It had nowhere else to go.
Reg and Clara had another daughter, a girl ten years older than Kimmy. At the edge of the mantel stood the evidence, a faded professional photo of the Sharkey family: Kimmy as a baby in Clara’s arms, posed between Reg and that older daughter, Kate.
Quentin stared at the ten-year-old standing next to her mother, a skinny kid with a pained, buck-toothed smile, a puffy-sleeved pink party dress that seemed to swallow her whole. Thick lashes behind plastic-framed glasses, dark eyes identical to his own.
He gritted his teeth. One picture. Out of this entire gallery, just one picture of Kate in a bent, cardboard frame. Anger bubbled within him, the kind a healing breath couldn’t fix, and Quentin had an urge to point that out—just one fucking picture of her—but he kept his mouth shut, remembering Reg’s rough voice over the phone. How he’d relented, finally, to thirty minutes and not a second more. Quentin needed those thirty minutes if this podcast was going to work. He needed to keep calm.
Quentin cleared his throat. “Back to my original question,” he said. “What did April Cooper do to make you think she was the real killer?”
“She didn’t do anything.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Reg sighed heavily. “Gabriel LeRoy was all over the place. He was firing at everybody in that Arco station. He was consumed by rage. Out of control.”
“Okay...”
“She wasn’t.”
Quentin nodded slowly. “She could have stopped him, but she didn’t.”
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but I’m really trying to understand this. Can you explain to me why that makes a fifteen-year-old girl guiltier of murder than the legal adult who actually killed everyone?”
He drew a long, weary breath. “Think about a house on fire. It’s your house. Burning to the ground, taking with it everything you own. Everything you love. April Cooper—a fifteen-year-old girl as you point out—is standing next to the firehose, but she doesn’t make a move toward it. She just watches the flames and smiles.” Reg ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward, eyes blazing. “Who are you going to blame for all that destruction—the fire? It’s a thing of nature. It can’t exist without burning.”
Quentin took too big a gulp of the iced tea Reg had brought him—lukewarm and bitter. Hard to swallow. Everything you love.
“Kimmy was just eleven years younger than April Cooper,” Reg was saying. “She could have been her little sister, but that... that girl just stood there. Her boyfriend shot my daughter in cold blood. He took away everything I loved and April Cooper stood there, like she was watching a movie. Do you understand me now?”
Dark thoughts whirled through Quentin’s brain. He tried another of Dean’s deep, healing breaths. “Yes,” he said. “I understand.”
“Good.”
Quentin pulled his steno pad out of his pocket. With shaking hands, he thumbed through the pages he’d covered in notes from the hours he’d spent online, reading old issues of the San Bernardino Sun.
“I haven’t seen one of those since I was still working.” Reg gestured at the pad. “I did the books for a Ford dealership in La Quinta. Spent twenty-five years in that same office, one secretary the whole time. Sweet old lady named Dee. I bet a kid your age wouldn’t even know what shorthand is, but Dee was sure good at it.”
Quentin cut him off too quickly. “Tell me about June twentieth, 1976,” he said, reading from his notes. “It was a hot day, right? Close to ninety degrees.”
“Yes. It was.”
“And it was a Sunday. Did you guys go to church?”
“Yep.”
“How soon after church did you and Kimmy go to the gas station?”
“We went home, had lunch. Kimmy asked if we could go for ice cream. The gas station was a quick stop first. But Kimmy loved it there.”
“She loved the Arco station?”
“Yeah. There was a mural there—I think the owner’s kid painted it. Noah’s Ark, with all the animals.”
“That’s sweet.”
“It was.”
Quentin asked Reg to set the scene—to describe the sights and sounds and smells at the Arco station once he and Kimmy arrived. He wanted him to remember it in full, to the point of crying, so that listeners might feel something for this man. That he might feel something for this man...
Reg obliged, his voice soft and contemplative and weary. Good radio, though Quentin couldn’t get himself to concentrate.
“...steam coming off the pavement,” Reg was saying. “His shouts. They echoed. The boy wasn’t in his right mind. He was drunk or stoned. Maybe both. He was swaying on his feet. I told Kimmy to get down, and she did. But... she was holding her favorite plastic horse. The shiny black one. She dropped it. It made this clattering sound on the pavement, and then LeRoy just… he just...” A tear trickled down Reg’s cheek. “I begged her. I looked right into April Cooper’s eyes and I said, ‘Please make him stop...’ But she didn’t. She... she gave me this look. Like she expected this to happen. I think she might have smiled.”
Quentin closed his eyes for a moment.
“You okay?” Reg said.
Don’t say it. Don’t say it... But he said it. He had to.
“Everything you love.” And it was as though Quentin stepped off the edge of a cliff, years and years of pain and anger spread out below.
“What?”
“The burning house,” Quentin said. “You said it takes down everything you love.”
“That’s right.”
“What about your other daughter? What about Kate? She wasn’t taken down. LeRoy and Cooper didn’t get her. Are you saying that you didn’t love Kate?” Reg wiped the tear from his face with the back of his hand, jaw squared, eyes turning to ice. There would be no more crying, Quentin knew that much. He’d mentioned the elephant in the room about twenty minutes too early.
“That isn’t what I—”
“Have you ever wondered about Kate? Tell me, sir. Have you ever felt bad about ruining her life?”
“You are nothing but a sleazy, fake-news journalist.”
“Do you know what it’s like for a child to grow up, completely ignored by her own father?”
“I will not be ambushed.”
“Did you ever think about how that might affect her as a person, as a mother? Did you ever think about how it might make her treat her own son?”
“You said this was going to be about the Cooper and LeRoy murders,” Reg said. “That’s the only reason why I agreed to talk to you. You want to make this into some... some kind of family thing.”
“The Cooper and LeRoy murders are a family thing.”
Reg glared at the open laptop on the coffee table, the cardioid mic plugged into it, capturing every last word. “Turn that off,” he said.
“Kate was a victim. She not only lost her sister and her mother. She lost her father too. You. You were never there for your daughter, and it ruined her. Jesus, you blame April Cooper for just standing there while horrible things happened in front of her. What did you do during my mother’s entire life? You just fucking stood there.”
“Turn it off.” Reg lunged for the laptop, but Quentin was there first, unplugging the mic, closing the lid, slipping it back into its case.
“Get out of my house!”
Quentin gripped the case, his palms slick from sweat. He headed for the door and Reg followed him. “There is no podcast, is there?” Reg said. “Your mother put you up to this.”
Quentin turned. Stared him in the face. Reginald Banks Sharkey. His grandfather. He’d never laid eyes on him until today. And until today, he’d never realized how little he was missing. “We were both better off without you.”
Quentin headed out the door and into the late afternoon sunlight, the old man shouting at his back.
© Alison Gaylin 2019
This story is an excerpt from the novel Never Look Back by Alison Gaylin, Morrow Paperbacks 2019.
“It was the girl.” The old man leaned forward, bracing against the worn-out armchair as though he were trying to escape its grasp. “April Cooper. She was the real killer.”
Quentin Garrison watched his face. He was very good at describing people, a skill he used all the time in his true crime podcasts. Later, recording the narration segments with his coproducer, Summer Hawkins, Quentin would paint the picture for his listeners—the leathery skin, the white eyebrows wispy as cobwebs, the eyes, cerulean in 1976 but now the color of worn denim, and with so much pain bottled up behind them, as though he were constantly hovering on the brink of tears.
The man was named Reg Sharkey, and on June 20, 1976, he’d watched his four-year-old daughter Kimmy die instantly of a gunshot wound to the chest—the youngest victim of April Cooper and Gabriel Allen LeRoy, aka the Inland Empire Killers. Two weeks later, his wife, Clara, had decided her own grief was too much to bear and committed suicide, after which Reg Sharkey had apparently given up on caring about anything or anyone.
Quentin said, “Wasn’t it LeRoy who pulled the trigger?”
“Yes.”
“But you blame April.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Reg stayed quiet for several seconds. Quentin resisted the urge to fill in the dead air. This was a trick that often worked in interviews, the subject finally relenting and spilling his guts—anything to put an end to that awful, uncomfortable silence.
Quentin listened to the hum of the air conditioner and the whoosh of a passing truck. Just outside the shaded window, a bird shrieked—a blue jay, Quentin thought, or some other similar species put on this earth to destroy radio broadcasts. He was glad Summer had talked him into the cardioid mic—it was so much better at cutting out background noise than the omnidirectional he’d planned on taking. You’d be surprised at how many distracting sounds there are in a typical living room, Summer had said. And she’d been right. Of course, if Summer had seen this place, she’d never have called it typical.
Reg’s living room was a time capsule, from the faded plaid earth-toned couch, to the Formica coffee table, to the avocado-green ashtray and matching coasters that looked as though they hadn’t been unstacked since the premiere of the very first Star Wars movie. There was a coffee-table book of photography—The Best of Life Magazine—and a few dusty TV Guides, one of which had Fonzie on the cover. It was as though Reg Sharkey had attempted to stop the clock on June 19, 1976, before his family had crumbled into a billion pieces.
Quentin took in the line of photographs on the mantelpiece—almost all of them of Clara and Kimmy, holiday photos and vacation shots, birthday party pictures, mother and daughter, smiling and young, forever hopeful, just we two... Quentin’s jaw tensed, a tiny, bitter seed taking root at the pit of his stomach.
He took a deep breath, willing the tension out of his body as he’d learned in the holistic yoga class his husband, Dean, had forced him to take. In with the positive energy, out with the negative... God, Dean could be so Californian sometimes, but it was better than nothing. Worse than downing a globe-size martini, or putting one’s fist through drywall. But better than nothing.
“They’re all I have,” said Reg. “Those pictures you’re looking at. They’re the only family I have left.”
“Well...” said Quentin.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.” Quentin struggled to keep his tone neutral. “I know what you mean.” But the truth was still right here with them, hanging in the stale air and coursing through Quentin’s tensed muscles, showing itself in his narrow face and his slight overbite and the thick black lashes that used to get him teased when he was a kid. No matter what Reg Sharkey thought he meant, the truth was with them. It had nowhere else to go.
Reg and Clara had another daughter, a girl ten years older than Kimmy. At the edge of the mantel stood the evidence, a faded professional photo of the Sharkey family: Kimmy as a baby in Clara’s arms, posed between Reg and that older daughter, Kate.
Quentin stared at the ten-year-old standing next to her mother, a skinny kid with a pained, buck-toothed smile, a puffy-sleeved pink party dress that seemed to swallow her whole. Thick lashes behind plastic-framed glasses, dark eyes identical to his own.
He gritted his teeth. One picture. Out of this entire gallery, just one picture of Kate in a bent, cardboard frame. Anger bubbled within him, the kind a healing breath couldn’t fix, and Quentin had an urge to point that out—just one fucking picture of her—but he kept his mouth shut, remembering Reg’s rough voice over the phone. How he’d relented, finally, to thirty minutes and not a second more. Quentin needed those thirty minutes if this podcast was going to work. He needed to keep calm.
Quentin cleared his throat. “Back to my original question,” he said. “What did April Cooper do to make you think she was the real killer?”
“She didn’t do anything.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Reg sighed heavily. “Gabriel LeRoy was all over the place. He was firing at everybody in that Arco station. He was consumed by rage. Out of control.”
“Okay...”
“She wasn’t.”
Quentin nodded slowly. “She could have stopped him, but she didn’t.”
“Yep.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “but I’m really trying to understand this. Can you explain to me why that makes a fifteen-year-old girl guiltier of murder than the legal adult who actually killed everyone?”
He drew a long, weary breath. “Think about a house on fire. It’s your house. Burning to the ground, taking with it everything you own. Everything you love. April Cooper—a fifteen-year-old girl as you point out—is standing next to the firehose, but she doesn’t make a move toward it. She just watches the flames and smiles.” Reg ran a hand through his hair and leaned forward, eyes blazing. “Who are you going to blame for all that destruction—the fire? It’s a thing of nature. It can’t exist without burning.”
Quentin took too big a gulp of the iced tea Reg had brought him—lukewarm and bitter. Hard to swallow. Everything you love.
“Kimmy was just eleven years younger than April Cooper,” Reg was saying. “She could have been her little sister, but that... that girl just stood there. Her boyfriend shot my daughter in cold blood. He took away everything I loved and April Cooper stood there, like she was watching a movie. Do you understand me now?”
Dark thoughts whirled through Quentin’s brain. He tried another of Dean’s deep, healing breaths. “Yes,” he said. “I understand.”
“Good.”
Quentin pulled his steno pad out of his pocket. With shaking hands, he thumbed through the pages he’d covered in notes from the hours he’d spent online, reading old issues of the San Bernardino Sun.
“I haven’t seen one of those since I was still working.” Reg gestured at the pad. “I did the books for a Ford dealership in La Quinta. Spent twenty-five years in that same office, one secretary the whole time. Sweet old lady named Dee. I bet a kid your age wouldn’t even know what shorthand is, but Dee was sure good at it.”
Quentin cut him off too quickly. “Tell me about June twentieth, 1976,” he said, reading from his notes. “It was a hot day, right? Close to ninety degrees.”
“Yes. It was.”
“And it was a Sunday. Did you guys go to church?”
“Yep.”
“How soon after church did you and Kimmy go to the gas station?”
“We went home, had lunch. Kimmy asked if we could go for ice cream. The gas station was a quick stop first. But Kimmy loved it there.”
“She loved the Arco station?”
“Yeah. There was a mural there—I think the owner’s kid painted it. Noah’s Ark, with all the animals.”
“That’s sweet.”
“It was.”
Quentin asked Reg to set the scene—to describe the sights and sounds and smells at the Arco station once he and Kimmy arrived. He wanted him to remember it in full, to the point of crying, so that listeners might feel something for this man. That he might feel something for this man...
Reg obliged, his voice soft and contemplative and weary. Good radio, though Quentin couldn’t get himself to concentrate.
“...steam coming off the pavement,” Reg was saying. “His shouts. They echoed. The boy wasn’t in his right mind. He was drunk or stoned. Maybe both. He was swaying on his feet. I told Kimmy to get down, and she did. But... she was holding her favorite plastic horse. The shiny black one. She dropped it. It made this clattering sound on the pavement, and then LeRoy just… he just...” A tear trickled down Reg’s cheek. “I begged her. I looked right into April Cooper’s eyes and I said, ‘Please make him stop...’ But she didn’t. She... she gave me this look. Like she expected this to happen. I think she might have smiled.”
Quentin closed his eyes for a moment.
“You okay?” Reg said.
Don’t say it. Don’t say it... But he said it. He had to.
“Everything you love.” And it was as though Quentin stepped off the edge of a cliff, years and years of pain and anger spread out below.
“What?”
“The burning house,” Quentin said. “You said it takes down everything you love.”
“That’s right.”
“What about your other daughter? What about Kate? She wasn’t taken down. LeRoy and Cooper didn’t get her. Are you saying that you didn’t love Kate?” Reg wiped the tear from his face with the back of his hand, jaw squared, eyes turning to ice. There would be no more crying, Quentin knew that much. He’d mentioned the elephant in the room about twenty minutes too early.
“That isn’t what I—”
“Have you ever wondered about Kate? Tell me, sir. Have you ever felt bad about ruining her life?”
“You are nothing but a sleazy, fake-news journalist.”
“Do you know what it’s like for a child to grow up, completely ignored by her own father?”
“I will not be ambushed.”
“Did you ever think about how that might affect her as a person, as a mother? Did you ever think about how it might make her treat her own son?”
“You said this was going to be about the Cooper and LeRoy murders,” Reg said. “That’s the only reason why I agreed to talk to you. You want to make this into some... some kind of family thing.”
“The Cooper and LeRoy murders are a family thing.”
Reg glared at the open laptop on the coffee table, the cardioid mic plugged into it, capturing every last word. “Turn that off,” he said.
“Kate was a victim. She not only lost her sister and her mother. She lost her father too. You. You were never there for your daughter, and it ruined her. Jesus, you blame April Cooper for just standing there while horrible things happened in front of her. What did you do during my mother’s entire life? You just fucking stood there.”
“Turn it off.” Reg lunged for the laptop, but Quentin was there first, unplugging the mic, closing the lid, slipping it back into its case.
“Get out of my house!”
Quentin gripped the case, his palms slick from sweat. He headed for the door and Reg followed him. “There is no podcast, is there?” Reg said. “Your mother put you up to this.”
Quentin turned. Stared him in the face. Reginald Banks Sharkey. His grandfather. He’d never laid eyes on him until today. And until today, he’d never realized how little he was missing. “We were both better off without you.”
Quentin headed out the door and into the late afternoon sunlight, the old man shouting at his back.
© Alison Gaylin 2019
This story is an excerpt from the novel Never Look Back by Alison Gaylin, Morrow Paperbacks 2019.
Narrated by Alison Gaylin
Narrated by Alison Gaylin
POST RECITAL
TALK
BR: Hi, Alison. Welcome to The Strange Recital.
AG: Well thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
BR: Now, Never Look Back is your eleventh novel and that’s an impressive body of work! And to think that I was in a workshop with you as you were writing your very first one, just… yesterday.
AG: Yeah I think so. It feels like yesterday definitely. It’s hard to believe that I’ve written eleven books, or even one book. I think the secret is to just think I’m writing three pages a day for a really extended period of time, or else I’d never be able to get through any of it.
BR: Right.
TN: Your books have been nominated four times for Edgar Awards, and last year your novel If I Die Tonight won the Edgar in its category. So, for those of us not working in your genre… what is this Edgar Award and who nominates you?
AG: Oh it’s quite an honor. It’s put on by The Mystery Writers of America, which is our main organization for mystery writers. They say it’s like the Oscars of mystery writing and it’s held at the Grand Hyatt in New York City, and it’s a whole sit-down dinner and it’s very exciting. I did not expect to win, having lost three times previously. I was very practiced at sitting there smiling and clapping, and then when I got up there I really didn’t have much of anything prepared and just managed to get through it. But there are panels and it’s a huge undertaking for these judges. There’s so many books that come out, especially in my category, which is paperback original, there were probably close to a thousand of these books that were submitted and so you really appreciate the amount of work that the judges put in, and then to actually win one—it’s just beyond an honor. It’s pretty amazing.
BR: Top of your field.
AG: I felt great that night and hungover the next day.
BR: Yeah. Well this excerpt from Never Look Back that we just heard comes very near the beginning of the novel. So without giving too much away, give us an idea of what’s in the rest of the story.
AG: Well it is about a series of murders, as you could hear in the excerpt, called the Inland Empire Murders that took place in 1976, in which this teenage couple went on this murder spree. They were presumed to have died in a fire but this podcaster, Quentin, after doing this interview with his grandfather finds out that the woman might still be alive. So he manages to get in touch with another woman, a film columnist in New York City who may, or may not be the daughter of April Cooper, who would have since changed her name and become another person. It goes back and forth between these letters that April Cooper wrote during this whole murder spree and the present, and it looks into how a crime of that magnitude can effect not only people during that period but for generations to come.
TN: Right now you might say we’re podcasting about a podcast.
AG: Yes!
TN: But we’re peering behind the mirror, between dimensions. Telling the true story of a fiction, if there can be such a thing. And to make it even more recursive, Episode number One of the imaginary podcast Closure can actually be heard through a link on your website.
AG: Yes. I’m really excited about that. It was so much fun to do. Quentin’s podcast is called Closure, which I didn’t mention in my description, and he’s done a few of these true crime podcasts but this one Closure is for his own sense of closure, because this is his family. So, it was actually the publisher’s suggestion. I wrote an episode of this imaginary podcast, complete with sound effects and everything, and it’s what Quentin would have gotten done before everything hits the fan in the book. It includes leading up to when he does the interview with his grandfather and afterwards. The only time I’ve ever scripted a fictional podcast in my life and maybe the last. I don’t know.
BR: Well I always like it when these worlds of fiction and so-called “reality” overlap one another, so as a reader then, you’re always asking yourself what’s actually true. How did you integrate reality into the fiction of Never Look Back? Are these Inland Empire Murders based on a real case?
AG: There were no Inland Empire murders and it’s funny because some of the people I’ve spoken to, who have interviewed me, or some of the reviews seem to assume that there really was this couple in southern California. There were no Inland Empire murders. There was no April Cooper and Gabriel Leroy but it’s based on the Charles Starkweather murders, which I don’t know if you’ve heard of.
BR: Oh that’s…yeah… the…
AG: Lots of things have been based on the Charles Starkweather murders.
BR: The movie.
AG: Yes. Badlands.
BR: Yes, yes…
AG: The Terrence Malick movie was based on it. There’s a Bruce Springsteen song Nebraska, that’s based on the Charles Starkweather murders—Natural Born Killers, California—a lot of those movies were based on these murders that took place in the ’50s, where this young man, Charles Starkweather, nineteen years old and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, who was fourteen, supposedly went on this murder spree together. If you read about it and look into it, it’s pretty obvious that she was a kidnapping victim and taken along on this horrible murder spree and then after she thought she was being rescued finally, she was tried as an accessory to murder and convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. And then she got out eventually on parole. I believe she’s still alive to this day but I feel like because of the way a young woman being taken off by some man was viewed during that time period, she was really vilified and so I decided to kind of look into that when I was exploring the character of April. She’s not the same as I view Caril Ann Fugate. I don’t think she’s as much of a victim because I think in writing the book that would just have been too depressing, the way I view her story to have gone. So April’s a little darker and she gets a little more influenced by the situation around her and she’s a little more of a survivor. So I’ll say that much.
BR: Yeah, so that blur of reality and fiction is under your control at this point.
AG: It is and I really think that’s why I’m so drawn to crime fiction and why a lot of crime fiction authors are. You can make order out of chaos and you can make things turn out the way you want them to, or you can make sense of things that in real life don’t make any sense at all. So it’s a real appeal of writing mystery or crime fiction to do that.
TN: Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s based on a true story or not. It can be argued that once a story is brought into a readable form on paper or screens, it becomes reality. Neuroscience has shown that there’s very little difference in the brain between reading about an experience and actually living it. We’re all murderers.
BR: Oh man. Yeah I think you’re right.
AG: That’s true and the more you feel lie you’re living the experience, the better job I’m doing as a fiction writer, so…
BR: Yeah, yeah. One thing I enjoyed about your book is the way it explores the unknowability of other people—even those closest to us. Everybody keeps secrets. Is it possible to really know another human?
AG: I don’t think it’s possible to fully know another human and I think we need to accept that. Even if you love someone more than anything, or if they’re you parents, or your child, you’re never going to know them fully and if you try you’re going to kind of ruin things for both of you.
TN: Well you know... knowing another human…understanding another human. in Auto da Fe, by Elias Canetti, a housekeeper marries her employer, or the other way round, depending on how you want to look at it. She marries him because she wants security and he marries her because he thinks she appreciates his books. So to me it’s a case study on how people misunderstand each other, and the ensuing consequences.
AG: Exactly. I hope my husband appreciates my books.
TN: I don’t know really what happened because I had to put it down. I found it too disturbing. Yeah, so Alison, are you working on any new projects at the moment?
AG: Yes I am. I’m working on a book. It’s actually due May 1st and I’m crossing fingers I get it done by then. It will be coming out next year. It’s got a working title, which I don’t know whether it will be the permanent title but I hope it is—The Collective, and it’s… er… it’s about a bunch of women, mothers who have lost children and people haven’t paid for that loss, and they are taking revenge. Let’s just keep it at that.
TN: Okay. Do you have any plans to write outside the mystery or thriller genre?
BR: Like maybe a bodice-ripper, under a pseudonym?
AG: I don’t think so. I’d love to be able to do that. I think romance writers are among the most talented and definitely the most prolific writers out there, and that they are able to keep it fresh with each book is amazing to me. I can’t do that. I have written a short story that… I mean there’s definitely a crime in it but it borders more on satire. I wish I could write more humor in my novels, so I could see maybe doing something like that but I think somebody would probably end up getting killed anyway.
BR: And you probably wouldn’t use a pseudonym if you did that.
AG: Yeah. No, exactly. No.
BR: I was just thinking, adopting a pseudonym is like making oneself into a fictional character. But that assumes we aren’t all just fictions already, you know—simulations in a giant video game.
TN: Oh, don’t get started on that.
AG: Oh, I’m getting scared…
BR: But there’s real science, there’s science…
TN: Well, thank you for joining us today Alison, and thank you for your contribution to our podcast.
AG: Oh thank you for having me.
TN: You’re most welcome.
BR: But, but… but really—what if the world is just a user interface, and everything we see is a desktop icon?
TN: Okay, I’m clicking the X in the corner. Right now.
BR: Hi, Alison. Welcome to The Strange Recital.
AG: Well thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
BR: Now, Never Look Back is your eleventh novel and that’s an impressive body of work! And to think that I was in a workshop with you as you were writing your very first one, just… yesterday.
AG: Yeah I think so. It feels like yesterday definitely. It’s hard to believe that I’ve written eleven books, or even one book. I think the secret is to just think I’m writing three pages a day for a really extended period of time, or else I’d never be able to get through any of it.
BR: Right.
TN: Your books have been nominated four times for Edgar Awards, and last year your novel If I Die Tonight won the Edgar in its category. So, for those of us not working in your genre… what is this Edgar Award and who nominates you?
AG: Oh it’s quite an honor. It’s put on by The Mystery Writers of America, which is our main organization for mystery writers. They say it’s like the Oscars of mystery writing and it’s held at the Grand Hyatt in New York City, and it’s a whole sit-down dinner and it’s very exciting. I did not expect to win, having lost three times previously. I was very practiced at sitting there smiling and clapping, and then when I got up there I really didn’t have much of anything prepared and just managed to get through it. But there are panels and it’s a huge undertaking for these judges. There’s so many books that come out, especially in my category, which is paperback original, there were probably close to a thousand of these books that were submitted and so you really appreciate the amount of work that the judges put in, and then to actually win one—it’s just beyond an honor. It’s pretty amazing.
BR: Top of your field.
AG: I felt great that night and hungover the next day.
BR: Yeah. Well this excerpt from Never Look Back that we just heard comes very near the beginning of the novel. So without giving too much away, give us an idea of what’s in the rest of the story.
AG: Well it is about a series of murders, as you could hear in the excerpt, called the Inland Empire Murders that took place in 1976, in which this teenage couple went on this murder spree. They were presumed to have died in a fire but this podcaster, Quentin, after doing this interview with his grandfather finds out that the woman might still be alive. So he manages to get in touch with another woman, a film columnist in New York City who may, or may not be the daughter of April Cooper, who would have since changed her name and become another person. It goes back and forth between these letters that April Cooper wrote during this whole murder spree and the present, and it looks into how a crime of that magnitude can effect not only people during that period but for generations to come.
TN: Right now you might say we’re podcasting about a podcast.
AG: Yes!
TN: But we’re peering behind the mirror, between dimensions. Telling the true story of a fiction, if there can be such a thing. And to make it even more recursive, Episode number One of the imaginary podcast Closure can actually be heard through a link on your website.
AG: Yes. I’m really excited about that. It was so much fun to do. Quentin’s podcast is called Closure, which I didn’t mention in my description, and he’s done a few of these true crime podcasts but this one Closure is for his own sense of closure, because this is his family. So, it was actually the publisher’s suggestion. I wrote an episode of this imaginary podcast, complete with sound effects and everything, and it’s what Quentin would have gotten done before everything hits the fan in the book. It includes leading up to when he does the interview with his grandfather and afterwards. The only time I’ve ever scripted a fictional podcast in my life and maybe the last. I don’t know.
BR: Well I always like it when these worlds of fiction and so-called “reality” overlap one another, so as a reader then, you’re always asking yourself what’s actually true. How did you integrate reality into the fiction of Never Look Back? Are these Inland Empire Murders based on a real case?
AG: There were no Inland Empire murders and it’s funny because some of the people I’ve spoken to, who have interviewed me, or some of the reviews seem to assume that there really was this couple in southern California. There were no Inland Empire murders. There was no April Cooper and Gabriel Leroy but it’s based on the Charles Starkweather murders, which I don’t know if you’ve heard of.
BR: Oh that’s…yeah… the…
AG: Lots of things have been based on the Charles Starkweather murders.
BR: The movie.
AG: Yes. Badlands.
BR: Yes, yes…
AG: The Terrence Malick movie was based on it. There’s a Bruce Springsteen song Nebraska, that’s based on the Charles Starkweather murders—Natural Born Killers, California—a lot of those movies were based on these murders that took place in the ’50s, where this young man, Charles Starkweather, nineteen years old and his girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate, who was fourteen, supposedly went on this murder spree together. If you read about it and look into it, it’s pretty obvious that she was a kidnapping victim and taken along on this horrible murder spree and then after she thought she was being rescued finally, she was tried as an accessory to murder and convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. And then she got out eventually on parole. I believe she’s still alive to this day but I feel like because of the way a young woman being taken off by some man was viewed during that time period, she was really vilified and so I decided to kind of look into that when I was exploring the character of April. She’s not the same as I view Caril Ann Fugate. I don’t think she’s as much of a victim because I think in writing the book that would just have been too depressing, the way I view her story to have gone. So April’s a little darker and she gets a little more influenced by the situation around her and she’s a little more of a survivor. So I’ll say that much.
BR: Yeah, so that blur of reality and fiction is under your control at this point.
AG: It is and I really think that’s why I’m so drawn to crime fiction and why a lot of crime fiction authors are. You can make order out of chaos and you can make things turn out the way you want them to, or you can make sense of things that in real life don’t make any sense at all. So it’s a real appeal of writing mystery or crime fiction to do that.
TN: Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s based on a true story or not. It can be argued that once a story is brought into a readable form on paper or screens, it becomes reality. Neuroscience has shown that there’s very little difference in the brain between reading about an experience and actually living it. We’re all murderers.
BR: Oh man. Yeah I think you’re right.
AG: That’s true and the more you feel lie you’re living the experience, the better job I’m doing as a fiction writer, so…
BR: Yeah, yeah. One thing I enjoyed about your book is the way it explores the unknowability of other people—even those closest to us. Everybody keeps secrets. Is it possible to really know another human?
AG: I don’t think it’s possible to fully know another human and I think we need to accept that. Even if you love someone more than anything, or if they’re you parents, or your child, you’re never going to know them fully and if you try you’re going to kind of ruin things for both of you.
TN: Well you know... knowing another human…understanding another human. in Auto da Fe, by Elias Canetti, a housekeeper marries her employer, or the other way round, depending on how you want to look at it. She marries him because she wants security and he marries her because he thinks she appreciates his books. So to me it’s a case study on how people misunderstand each other, and the ensuing consequences.
AG: Exactly. I hope my husband appreciates my books.
TN: I don’t know really what happened because I had to put it down. I found it too disturbing. Yeah, so Alison, are you working on any new projects at the moment?
AG: Yes I am. I’m working on a book. It’s actually due May 1st and I’m crossing fingers I get it done by then. It will be coming out next year. It’s got a working title, which I don’t know whether it will be the permanent title but I hope it is—The Collective, and it’s… er… it’s about a bunch of women, mothers who have lost children and people haven’t paid for that loss, and they are taking revenge. Let’s just keep it at that.
TN: Okay. Do you have any plans to write outside the mystery or thriller genre?
BR: Like maybe a bodice-ripper, under a pseudonym?
AG: I don’t think so. I’d love to be able to do that. I think romance writers are among the most talented and definitely the most prolific writers out there, and that they are able to keep it fresh with each book is amazing to me. I can’t do that. I have written a short story that… I mean there’s definitely a crime in it but it borders more on satire. I wish I could write more humor in my novels, so I could see maybe doing something like that but I think somebody would probably end up getting killed anyway.
BR: And you probably wouldn’t use a pseudonym if you did that.
AG: Yeah. No, exactly. No.
BR: I was just thinking, adopting a pseudonym is like making oneself into a fictional character. But that assumes we aren’t all just fictions already, you know—simulations in a giant video game.
TN: Oh, don’t get started on that.
AG: Oh, I’m getting scared…
BR: But there’s real science, there’s science…
TN: Well, thank you for joining us today Alison, and thank you for your contribution to our podcast.
AG: Oh thank you for having me.
TN: You’re most welcome.
BR: But, but… but really—what if the world is just a user interface, and everything we see is a desktop icon?
TN: Okay, I’m clicking the X in the corner. Right now.
Music on this episode:
"Mr PZ", composed by Mark Dziuba and recorded by Trio Loco on their album Jass. Trio Loco is Mark Dziuba on guitar, Studio Stu on Studivarious bass, and Dean Sharp on percussion.
