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Intro:
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Welcome to Modern Signed Books. If
you're interested in what makes your favorite authors tick, then you'll love
hearing what they have to say in our interviews. Learn how they got started
writing, the books and authors that inspired them, and much more. Meet
today's hottest authors as they discuss their lives and writing with our book
specialist, Roger Nichols. Don't forget to pick up a copy of your favorite
books at vjbooks.com. Here's Roger.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Welcome to Blog Talk Radio. Our
guest today is one of the premier writers of crime fiction. Karin Slaughter
burst onto the scene back in 2001 with Blindsided, which became an
international success. Published in almost 30 languages. Short-listed for the
Crime Writers Association Dagger Award for best thriller debut.
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Since then, she's sold more than 35
million copies of her books, which include the highly popular Will Trent and
Grant County Series, and since then she's joined the two, the latest,
featuring Will Trent and Sara Linton, The Kept Woman, now in mass market
edition. Very pleased to welcome Karin Slaughter.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Good morning.
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Rodger Nichols:
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What a delight. Now I'm going to
have to do something I never do. I'm going to unlock the storage room where I
keep the superlatives and simply say that the prologue to The Kept Woman is
flat-out the single most chilling introduction I have ever read in my whole
life. Without spoiling it, at one point you added additional detail to an
already highly charged emotional scene that rockets the intensity off the
charts and sets up a desperate struggle.
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Then, you shift to the first
chapter and Will Trent is worrying about something as mundane as having his
dog's teeth cleaned. It's like waking up from a nightmare to boring normalcy.
It's very fascinating.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Well thank you very much. I worked
very hard on that transition. I always feel like there needs to be some kind
of shock in the beginning of the book that grabs the reader and pulls them
into the story. Generally, my pattern with Will Trent is he's doing something
mundane like you talked about, or he's very happy in his life, everything's
going great, and he gets pulled into something awful and definitely what
happens in that first opening is really awful.
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Rodger Nichols:
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When I first read it, I grabbed the
book and I went in the other room where my wife was and I said, "Let me
read you this, but sit down first." She had the same reaction. Then of
course I had to fight her for the rest of the book but that's a whole other
situation going on. I know you love hearing stories like that because it
means that you've done your job as a writer superbly.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Absolutely.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Thank you. When I had an
opportunity to talk to you back in 2014 for Cop Town, you said a crime
fiction writer's job is to hold a mirror up to society. As society gets
stranger and more stressful, does that make the job easier or harder?
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Karin Slaughter:
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Well I think it's two sides of the
same coin. As a crime writer, things being harder makes my job easier. But as
a human being, of course I'm pretty appalled by stuff I see going on. But you
know, I think when I write a story, what I really concentrate on is not so
much the crime but how this crime affects people personally, emotionally and
communities at large. What does this say about us?
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I definitely think I'm still trying
to hold up that mirror. Especially with The Kept Woman where I'm talking
about domestic violence. I just want to show people this is why sometimes
women and men make that choice to stay in an abusive relationship and the
consequences for them if they try to extricate themselves.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah, and there are actually
multiple examples of that where a number of people in there have been abused
in multiple ways, including Will of course.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Absolutely. You know, I always
remind people who are concentrating on the love triangle between Will and
Sara and Angie, who is Will's soon-to-be ex-wife, that Angie's pretty
horrible. She's abusive to him. She treats him very badly. She jerks his
emotional strings around. She's just not a nice person. But also, she is a
person and there is a reason she is that way and that's why I wanted to take
the opportunity to talk about what her life looks like. Both she and Will
grew up in the foster care system. They both experienced some horrific
things.
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At some point in his life when Will
is an adult, he told himself okay, well this bad stuff happened but I'm going
to try to be a good person. Angie is a counterbalance to that because she
said this bad stuff happened and I'm going to punish everybody and I'm going
to do whatever it takes to survive no matter who it hurts. Sometimes that
person she hurts the most is Will.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah. You make a point in the story
someplace, it says that Angie is the only person in Will's life to have been
there for 30 years.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Exactly. Will did not have a
family. Angie was the one who was always his safety net in some ways. The
fact is, she did save him but then she turned around and punished him for needing
to be saved. It's a very abusive relationship. It's very manipulative. I
don't know if I think that he loves her, but I think that he thinks he needs
her. Sometimes that's even worse than love.
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Rodger Nichols:
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It's an addiction of a particularly
horrible kind because it's very hard to shake.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Exactly.
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Rodger Nichols:
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One of the things I enjoy about
your writing is you have these little telling character reveals. Faith
Mitchell is driving along and she's texting while driving and your comment is
that she's being one of those cops who only saw infractions in other people.
I think that's a great little character reveal.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Well, you know, that comes from
being around some cops who are exactly like that. It's a slippery slope,
right, because you don't want police officers deciding what's right and wrong
and who gets to do right and who gets to do wrong. You know, I think we all
have that ability in ourselves.
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We've all been in the grocery store
and we've taken a grape and eaten a grape without paying for it or we've been
speeding home. Which is breaking the law, you know? If you're speeding and
said to ourselves, "Well I need to get there. I'm just speeding because
I have a good reason." Faith is definitely one of those people who can
justify her actions.
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Rodger Nichols:
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You know, I want to go back a bit
in your background. You said in the previous interview that you were always
drawn to crime fiction. When other people are reading these much less or
maybe less frightening and safe books, you're reading Anne Rule and Helter
Skelter. You also lived in Atlanta at the time of the Atlanta child murders,
so do you have any concern about that or is it something you glory in?
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Karin Slaughter:
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You know, I don't have a concern
about it. I just think it's part of how I'm made. When my grandmother was
alive, she loved this magazine called True Crime Magazine.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Mm-hmm (affirmative).
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Karin Slaughter:
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Which is just basically snuff porn.
I mean it's horrible things happening to women. You read it and you are
afraid to leave the house. But she loved that magazine and she read it every
week, but she was ashamed that she did and so she head it under her chest of
drawers. I think probably a lot of people have that interest in crime and in
the darker side of things, but the difference now is no one's making us feel
ashamed about it. I think CSI and shows like that had a bit to do with it
because you could finally admit that you were interested in crime and crime
stories.
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Rodger Nichols:
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There's a lot of nifty bunch of
bits of police procedural stuff in here too and I learned some stuff about
that actually, how you work an Eldon card for instance. I've heard about them
but you go through the detail on how they work that and how they set it up.
That's fascinating. Whether you're interested in crime or not, that's still
fascinating.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Well you know, I try to write the
kind of book that I want to read and I try not to get bogged down in the forensics
too much. I want to just give an overview of it. That was a lot of fun to
look into. I talk to police officers all the time and other agents with the
Georgia Bureau of Investigation and honestly, they've been a font of
knowledge for me and I think people want to know those details because they
want to feel like they're in the middle of investigating a crime themselves
and try to figure out what the clues point to and what's really going on.
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A lot of people will try to solve
it before the character does, which is fine with me. I mean I want to play
fair with my reader and I always put all the clues out front and if they put
it together, that's great. If they don't, either way I hope they still keep
reading to figure out how Will finds out what happened.
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Rodger Nichols:
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It does, it does. A couple of other
things that I noticed first is I learned about uremic frost, which I'd never
heard of before, and the fact that Luminol only works once and you have to
catch it before it goes away. That's fascinating too.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Yeah. There was a Lifetime movie
years ago where some parents went to sleep in the bedroom of their son who
was accused of murder and they said, "Oh, he's innocent. He's
innocent," and then they went to bed in the bedroom where the son had
killed his wife and they turn off the lights and the walls glow with blood
splattered Luminol. But it's a chemical reaction. It only happens once. It
happens very quickly. Those are one of the many details that I pick up when I
talk to forensics people.
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Everyone has something that they're
sort of a quasi expert in and it really annoys them when people will show
Luminol just glowing all the time. I thought, well you know, this is the
common myth. Let me explode that. I like doing that for my readers. I like
for them to understand what really happens and also it gives them some
insight as to why every crime doesn't get solved, because it's not always
easy.
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Of course, in my books every crime
gets solved, but in real life a lot of times the cops know exactly who did
it, but they don't have the proof. Proof is what really makes the case.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah. There's so many layers to
this particular novel and so many interesting and complex characters and the
interaction between them. I mean, every situation is complicated because you
start out with an ex-cop being found dead but he's found dead in this partly
completed big giant complex that's owned by one of these sports stars and of
course it's surrounded by a phalanx of lawyers you describe as
interchangeable Bond villains. It's all wonderfully layered and complex.
Again, it's the kind of book that we love to read. This is maybe why you're
doing so well out there.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Well you know, I think that crime
writers have always held up American society and said, "Hey this is
what's going on." Really, the genesis of this book was, as I live in
Atlanta where a lot of athletes live, a lot of very wealthy athletes, their
wealthy agents and wealthy lawyers have houses here, I wanted to talk about
something that I was seeing happening, which is a lot of athletes were being
accused of doing horrible things. In some cases, they probably absolutely did
it, but unlike a lot of people they had a lot of money. They were able to
hire lawyers and support staff who could get them out of trouble.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Mm-hmm (affirmative).
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Karin Slaughter:
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That's something that happens more
often than not. We hade a spate of cases like that in Atlanta where the
police were just outgunned because they didn't have the money for the
experts, for the lab stuff that was done. Then there's an external pressure
that happens when athletes are accused of doing horrible things where their
fans come in and they vilify the accuser and they turn the press against the
accuser. There's just a pattern to it that I saw over and over again and I
wanted to just talk about that in my books.
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Rodger Nichols:
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You did very well in this one
because ...
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Karin Slaughter:
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Thank you.
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Rodger Nichols:
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A whole lot of stuff, as I say,
going on there. There's so many nice little details. I mean, you mentioned
once that, just kind of in passing, that Will had worked at a grocery once
and the walk-in where they kept the frozen foods was not dissimilar to the
mortuary he goes to visit.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Yeah. That probably makes people
reconsider where they buy their meat.
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Rodger Nichols:
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It probably does. Can I check the
provenance of this particular steak, please? On a more serious side, there is
a page where you describe Sara's feelings when she looses her husband and
having been through that, having lost my first wife, I identified with it so
strongly, I'm wondering if perhaps you had a similar experience.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Well I had lost my mentor, my ninth
grade English teacher. Obviously I'm not in ninth grade anymore. I won't do
the math and let people figure out how old I am. But it's been a while. We
were very close and a few years ago she passed away and it really threw me
for a loop. She had cancer and the loss of her is something I think that I
brought to the books. I think it's important to talk about that kind of loss.
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In some ways, a lot of people want
to put a time limit on it or they want to talk about other things. They don't
really know how to help someone get through that. Honestly, it's something I
think you have to get through yourself. But I will say that a friend of mine
said to me, "You know, your relationship with her doesn't end when she
dies. In many ways it continues." I think that's true.
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I think Sara having gone through
this horrible thing of losing a man who was, she thought, the love of her
life, it's something that I wanted to talk about because I talk about people
dying all the time in my novels, but I wanted to talk about what that does on
a personal level to someone.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Again, that's the similar sort of
thing as your thought about what crime does to people. What do these major
events or things happening, how do they react to them, how does it affect
their lives, how does it change things?
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Karin Slaughter:
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Absolutely. I think all good crime
novels do that. Even novels they don't call crime novels because people who
think they're really smart love them. You know, if you think about Gone with
the Wind or The Great Gatsby, there are myriad examples of novels that endure
in the American and English cannon that really are crime stories. To Kill a
Mockingbird, you can't get more crime-y than a courtroom drama and a man
falsely accused of rape who's eventually murdered. Spoiler alert.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah.
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Karin Slaughter:
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I think it's really important to
talk about crime in our society and really investigate what it does to us on
an individual level and every book I write has something to do with that.
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Rodger Nichols:
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When you go to see your friends in
the police, the people you've worked with and got information from, do they
feel comfortable in opening up with you now or sharing that information?
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Karin Slaughter:
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I think they do. The great gift of
some of them is that they're retired, so they can say whatever they want.
They're not really telling me anything top secret information like that. But
like any job, there are politics involved. The agents and the police officers
who are retired are a little more free about their opinions.
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But I think it's really important,
in my work at least, that Will is a good guy. We have myriad examples of
people doing bad things and cops doing bad things. You can't turn on and
watch the news a week without seeing something awful happen. I want to show
that Will is a good guy. He tries to do well. He doesn't want to cross lines,
he wants to stick to the law. You know, even when that works to his
detriment, he really thinks it's important that he be better than the bad
guys and not stoop to doing the things that they do.
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Rodger Nichols:
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That's a wonderful lesson for all
of us I suspect out there as well.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Absolutely.
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Rodger Nichols:
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One final thought, quick question.
Can we take a peek behind the curtain and see what you're working on next?
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Karin Slaughter:
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My next novel is out August 22.
That's called The Good Daughter. It doesn't have Will Trent, but I hope
people like it anyway. It's about a family of lawyers. I know what you're
thinking. How did I not just kill all of them in the first chapter? But
hopefully people will like them and be interested in what happened.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Should be great. There have been
some great legal dramas out there as well. Our guest this morning has been
the amazing Karin Slaughter and the book, The Kept Woman, is one of the
finest I've ever read. I really appreciate it and I highly recommend it.
Thanks so much for spending time with us today.
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Karin Slaughter:
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Thank you.
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