Lauren Beukes is a South
African novelist, short story writer, journalist and TV scriptwriter. She lives
in Cape Town, South Africa. Her novel Zoo City won the Arthur C Clarke Award
and the Kitschies Red Tentacle. Her latest novel The Shining Girls about a time travelling serial killer is
published today.
In South Africa, we have a
great expression, “picking up stompies”
(cigarette stubs) which means eavesdropping on snippets of a conversation and
jumping to conclusions. I pick up a lot of stompies,
from stuff I’ve read or seen or overheard or glanced from the car window. If
I’m lucky, sometimes something sparks in my subconscious and sets a story
alight.
The idea for a novel about a
time-travelling serial killer was a happy accident on Twitter. I threw out the
idea in the middle of some silly banter and immediately deleted the Tweet. I
had to write that, right now, before
someone else thought of it and because I knew I could do something really
interesting with it.
I abandoned my work in
progress and started writing The Shining
Girls on the plane. I had the general form of it. An impossible mystery
that could only be solved by an improbable survivor.
It’s about Harper, a mean,
low-down killer from the 1930s who hunts young women through the decades and Kirby,
the fiery young journalist who turns the hunt around in the 90s when Harper
fails to kill her.
But more than that, it’s a
story about obsessions that take over your life, free will and fate, how we
have been shaped by the 20th Century, the loops and echoes of
history.
All that meant it absolutely
couldn’t be set in South Africa.
The ugly narrative of
apartheid would have overwhelmed all the other things I wanted to talk about,
like segregation in other places, women’s rights, protest culture, McCarthyism’s
precedent for the War on Terror, economic depression, highways rewiring cities
and the ripples violence sends out through society. So, I set it in Chicago,
the birthplace of the skyscraper, and, conveniently, somewhere I’d lived for a
while.
I still had to do a lot of
research. I devoured books on the city, from the wonderfully salacious and
seedy Chicago Confidential by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer published in
1950 to Jim deRogatis’s Milk It: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music
Explosion of the 90s and Gang
Leader for A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh,
listened to Studs Terkel’s oral histories and true crime podcasts on serial
killers, and hired two part-time researchers to dig up fascinating real
snippets of history about a real-life burlesque dancer who painted herself up
in radium, for example, or the underground women’s organization, Jane.
I went back to the city on a
research trip and interviewed police detectives and sports
journalists and historians
and inveigled my friends to take me around on location scouts, driving through
Englewood, or prowling through the creepy back corridors of the Congress Hotel
or choreographing a murder scene on Montrose Beach.
Keeping track of it all was
something else. Because while Harper follows the typical serial killer’s
trajectory – becoming more elaborate and more violent as he goes on, his MO is
all over the place. He’s more violent in 1984 and less violent in 1993, for
example. But he also leaves trophies on the bodies to connect his victims in a
murder constellation through time, because he’s sick like that. I dealt with
being in his head by hurting him whenever the opportunity presented itself: dog
bite, torn tendon, broken jaw, which meant I had to keep an eye on his current
state and how he was healing.
I ended up with three major
timelines: the killer’s, the way the book plays out and the actual historical
timeline from 1931 to 1993, which I charted over real events from specific
baseballs games to the riots of the 1968 Democratic Convention.
I had to map it all out on the
space above my desk with a murder wall: timelines and images, criss-crossed
with red and black and yellow wool to link the objects and the killings across
the years.
The
Shining Girls
is a departure from my previous novels. Fans of The Shining Girls may get a shock if they go back to read my
earlier novels. Zoo City is a black
magic noir set in the inner city slums of Johannesburg. Moxyland is a future political thriller that plays out in Cape Town
in a neo-apartheid state. They’re all radically different.
But then, it’s not really up
to me. I write the stories that occur to me, that are nagging to be told. I
don’t know what spark will set my brain ablaze, I’m just the person who has to
try to direct the fire and cordon it off with red wool if need be.
The trailer for The Shining Girls is below -
More information about Lauren and her work can be found on her website. Lauren can also be found on Twitter @laurenbeukes and on Facebook.
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