Alafair Burke: Behind The Better Sister

Here’s the quick summary of The Better Sister: Chloe Taylor thinks she has it all—a handsome husband (Adam), thoughtful stepson (Ethan), and thriving career (author, editor, budding cultural icon)—until she finds Adam murdered at their East Hampton beach house. Things manage to get even more complicated when police focus their suspicions on Ethan and his biological mother comes to town to try to help.

An added wrinkle? Ethan's mother (and Adam's ex-wife) is Chloe's estranged older sister, Nicky. 

Even that brief synopsis makes it clear that the book will delve into the fine line between sisterly loyalty and rivalry.  But I view The Better Sister as the third book in a thematic trilogy, following The Ex and The Wife, that explores the complexity of female relationships and the diverse roles that women play in contemporary society. As we juggle busy lives, we often show different faces to our spouses, exes, children, parents, siblings, and co-workers, all while trying to know and be true to ourselves.  

 Chloe and Nicky know each other only as siblings.  Adam knew them both as wives.  To teenaged Ethan, Chloe and Nicky are each a different type of mother to him.  And both women have independent existences where they can live without familial obligation.  It’s in that independent realm where the women of this trilogy of books have, I hope, provoked some thoughts about the often gendered nature of threats, abuse, and violence in our culture.

In The Ex, an accomplished criminal defense lawyer steps in to defend her ex after he’s accused of a mass shooting. The Wife is about Angela Powell, who’s dragged into the spotlight after her high-profile husband is accused of sexual assault, but has a survival story of her own. In The Better Sister, Chloe Taylor is a target for online threats and harassment because of her journalistic work related to the #MeToo movement. 

Each book in the trilogy shows smart, capable women searching for every ounce of fortitude to make their own mark on the world while also living up to obligations that fall to them in their status roles—as an ex, a wife, a mother, or a sister. Sometimes that work requires redefining what it means to be “better.”

The Better Sister by Alafair Burke is published by Faber & Faber in April (£12.99)

Call for Papers: Girls, Girls, Girls!: Defining and Deconstructing ‘Domestic Noir’

Call for Papers: 

Girls, Girls, Girls!: Defining and Deconstructing ‘Domestic Noir’

Trinity College Dublin

Deadline for Submission: 1 May 2019

Contact email: domesticnoirTCD@gmail.com

A free-of-charge one-day symposium on domestic noir fiction, hosted by the School of English at Trinity College Dublin in association with the Trinity Long Room Hub, on Friday 23 August 2019.

In recent years, the ‘domestic noir’ genre has seen a surge in popularity, with bestsellers like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window garnering critical acclaim and commercial success. These narratives of domestic suspense are the latest incarnations of a genre which has existed in various forms since the nineteenth century, from the ‘had I but known’ intrigue of the sensation novel to the mid-20th-century marriage thriller. These narratives invariably centre on the domestic sphere, with a particular focus on the lived experience of the women for whom these spaces may prove treacherous or psychologically stifling. Author Julia Crouch, the originator of the term ‘domestic noir’, defines it as fiction that “takes place primarily in homes and workplaces, concerns itself largely (but not exclusively) with the female experience, is based around relationships and takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants.” This symposium is the first of its kind, focusing exclusively on narratives which broadly fit these criteria.

We are delighted to have secured the author and originator of the term ‘domestic noir,’ Julia Crouch, as a keynote speaker for this event. Our second keynote speaker is Dr Bernice Murphy F.T.C.D. (Trinity College Dublin), world-renowned expert on popular literature. 

We are pleased to announce that we have in place an agreement with the peer-reviewed journal CLUES: A Journal of Detection to publish a special issue on domestic noir in Spring 2020 based on the best papers from this event.

We invite proposals to take part in informal 3-person panels where each contributor will present a 10-minute mini-paper on their topic, to be followed by a chaired group Q and A discussion. 

Papers may focus on, but are not limited to:

·     Early examples of ‘domestic noir’ fiction (e.g. sensation novels or mid-century marriage suspense thrillers which centre female experiences).

·     The complexity of the female characters who often populate the pages of these narratives - the deliberate ‘unlikability’ of some of these women

·     the relationship between reader and (female) victim or perpetrator.

·     Domestic suspense and class positioning.

·     The inversion of gothic imagery in the contemporary ‘domestic noir’ thriller –

·     violence or psychological breakdown in the supposedly safe confines of the pristine middle-class home.

·     The intimacy of the crimes these narratives typically focus on.

·     The popularity of the ‘girl’ novel, particularly among female readers.

·     Motherhood and ‘domestic noir’

·     The femme fatale and domestic noir

Abstracts (around 300 words) along with a short biography should be sent to Dr. Clare Clarke and Eva Burke at domesticnoirTCD@gamil.com by 1 May 2019.

Event website and booking: 

https://www.eventbrite.ie/myevent?eid=57269506636

We are pleased to announce that we will have 10 travel bursaries of €100 available for unfunded students or ECRs. Please include a short statement about your circumstances along with your proposal if you would like to be considered for one of these bursaries. (Bursaries will be provided after the event on production of vouched travel receipts)

Natasha Bell on Finding Her Genre

There’s a certain amount of luxury to writing your first book: no pressure, no deadlines, no expectations. Of course, the benefits of all this luxury are inevitably overshadowed by a persistent sense of self-doubt, a need to fit writing around the day job/life/everything else, and the big, overriding yet unanswerable question: “Why on earth am I doing this to myself?” Still, you’ll often find authors looking back nostalgically at writing their first book, and I’m no exception.

The biggest luxury I realise I had but didn’t recognise when I first set out to write Exhibit Alexandra was naiveté about genre. I started with a story: I knew Alexandra was missing, I knew what had happened to her, and I knew her husband Marc would need to find her. The plot was clear to me; what was not, was how to tell it.  It’s taken me eight years and I don’t know how many drafts to get from that initial idea to the novel I now get to hold in my hands. What seems crystal-clear in hindsight is that, for those eight years, most of what I was looking for was my genre. Even so, it wasn’t until I had a book deal and was sitting in a meeting room with my editor while she all but bashed my head against the table to make me see it, that I properly realised what I was writing.

The thing about finding your genre is that it makes you wonder how you ever thought you belonged anywhere else. You don’t realise you’re playing Prince Charming trying to slip a glass slipper onto dozens of knobbly feet until you find the one it fits. I’d floundered around for so long trying to tell this story in all the wrong ways, that there was a beauty and obviousness when I finally hit upon the right way. Story and genre felt interconnected.

Exhibit Alexandra straddles a few labels: crime, psychological thriller, domestic noir, and what Jake Kerridge appears to have coined “cellar-lit”. One of the early reviews describes its unreliable female narrator as a “nigh-exhausted genre.” The rest of the review was lovely, so I won’t take exception too much, but it did get me thinking. First (because I’m an angry feminist), about why, after centuries of unreliable male narration, we can only apparently stomach a few years of the female equivalent. And, second, about what it is that makes the crime and thriller genres so ripe for this kind of story.

What unreliable narration does is force us to explore the complexities of a character. It asks us to be active readers, looking out for hints and clues that the character misses, but also building an image of them as a whole, inconsistent and struggling human being. We might open a book looking for a story, seeking escape, but an unreliable narrator and particularly a female one will push against our instinctive passivity as readers. She’s prickly. She refuses to sit neatly into the hero’s journey. She won’t allow us to pigeon-hole her. And we definitely won’t finish the novel feeling anything as simple as like or dislike.

The strength of doing this in a crime book is that the genre already has great form for

destabilisation. Time and again it presents us with the world we know – with recognisable characters, locations and scenes – then violently disrupts it. By portraying but disturbing the everyday, we’re forced to re-examine it. Alexandra is an ordinary woman, a wife and a mother. Because of this, it is only through her disappearance that we (and her husband) begin to pay attention to everything else that was going on in her life before she disappeared.

My first draft was told from Marc’s point of view and later I tried out third person, but it wasn’t until I realised this was Alexandra’s story to tell that it properly came to life. By using her unreliable voice and adding an obvious layer of subjectivity to all of the events of the novel, hopefully the process of destabilisation works on both the characters’ lives and on our act of reading them.  In hindsight, Exhibit Alexandra could not have been any other kind of book, but I’m strangely grateful for my meandering journey into this genre. I think if I’d set out to write crime, then the narrative I’d have come up with would have been less complex, less rich and less challenging (both to write and to read). By doing it this way, though, genre and story are in equal partnership, pushing against as much as complementing one another.

Call for Papers - Crime Fiction: Detection, Public and Private, Past and Present

CfP: Captivating Criminality 4

29th June – 1st July 2017

Corsham Court, Bath Spa University, UK

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its fourth UK conference. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous three successful conferences, Crime Fiction: Detection, Public and Private, Past and Present will examine what is arguably the very heart of this field of critical study.

Crime fiction narratives continue to gain in both popularity and critical appreciation. This conference will consider the ways in which both the public and private aspects of criminality and detection merge and differ from each other. The police detective, bound by laws of the state (however loosely adhered to) brings a different set of skills and methods of detection than the often maverick private eye. Of course, detection includes the criminals who attempt to avoid capture – the term ‘anti-hero’ can apply to both upholders of the law and to those evading it.

A key question that this conference will address is the enduring appeal of crime fiction and its ability to incorporate other disciplines such as Criminology, Film, and Psychology. From the ‘sensational’ novelists of the 1860s to today’s ‘Domestic Noir’ narratives, crime fiction has proved itself exceptionally proficient in expanding its parameters to encompass changes in the wider culture. With this in mind, we are interested in submissions that approach crime narratives from the earliest days of crime fiction up until the present day.

This international, interdisciplinary event is organised by Bath Spa University and the Captivating Criminality Network, and we invite scholars, practitioners and fans of crime writing, as well as interested parties from Criminology, Psychology, Sociology, and Film and Media, to participate in this conference that will address these key elements of crime fiction and real crime. Topics may include, but are not restricted

to:

The Detective, Then and Now

The Anti-Hero

True Crime

Contemporary Crime Fiction

Victorian Crime Fiction

The Golden Age

Hardboiled Fiction

Forensics and Detection

The Body as Evidence (silent witness)

Crime and Clues

Dostoevsky and Beyond: The Genealogy of Crime Writing Fatal Femininity Seduction and Sexuality The Criminal Analyst Others and Otherness Landscape and Identity The Country and the City The Media and Detection Adaptation and Interpretation Justice Versus Punishment Lack of Order and Resolution

Please send 300 word proposals to Dr. Fiona Peters

(f.peters@bathspa.ac.uk) by 13th February 2017. The abstract should include your name, email address, and affiliation, as well as the title of your paper. Please feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Postgraduate students are welcome. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome.

​Attendance fees: £145 (£95 students)

--

Joanne Ella Parsons

Lecturer

Bath Spa University

Falmouth University

Twitter: @joparsons

www.joanneparsons.co.uk

www.damagingthebody.org

The Rise of Domestic Noir

There are dark stirrings within the stable of crime fiction. Given recent successes such as Paula Hawkins’ ‘The Girl on The Train’ and Gillian Flynn’s ‘Gone Girl’, it’s safe to say that within crime fiction, ‘Domestic noir’ is an increasingly popular genre.

Anecdotally at least, it also appears that readers who never before considered crime fiction are drawn to this new genre.  Indeed it’s fair to deduce that domestic situations provide a fertile breeding ground for any suspense thriller. Every day, dramas play out around kitchen tables or in the bedrooms of family homes.

In fact, generally speaking, the more life is presented as ‘perfect’ to the outside world, the more we find very strange goings-on behind closed doors. We only have to look to the bizarre and dubious private behaviour of high-profile people in public life to attest to this. Of course, such behaviour is not confined only to those in the public eye. Individuals who on the face on it are normal, professional, respectable, family people can just as easily turn out to be sinister and deviant. Perhaps this is exactly why ‘Domestic Noir’ is so powerful. It’s unsettling precisely because it lies darkly somewhere between the creepy and the familiar.

‘Domestic Noir’ allows the reader to get under the skin of the characters and to explore what’s going on in their heads - their wants, desires, and motivations. It allows for increased voyeurism.

No longer is it just enough to know who committed the crime, or how they committed the crime for this new breed of savvy readers. Readers of this genre want to know far more. They’re often allowed to become very involved in the psychology of a crime – why a villain did something as well as how they did it.

It’s also fair to say that ‘Domestic Noir’ draws much of its appeal from characters that are generally quite engaging. Certainly for this author, when characters are flawed they’re at their most intriguing. Often, in this genre the reader is never quite sure who the villain is – perhaps that too is part of its appeal. Readers are allowed to become armchair detectives, solving crimes from afar. They’re allowed to connect with their inner Hercule Poirot or DI Jane Tennison from the comfort of their living rooms or on their train commute.

What happens to relationships of ordinary people when they’re put under pressure both from inside and outside relationships makes for engrossing reading. People do strange things and react bizarrely when under pressure. In Gillian Flynn’s ‘Gone Girl’ we see the author adroitly use the genre to explore the dynamics and psychology of marital relationships.

Everyday life can turn on a sixpence. Catastrophic events sometimes happen out of nowhere. Someone can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time, say the wrong thing to the wrong person, or simply make a small mistake that snowballs into something grievous and sinister. 

‘Domestic Noir’ explores these many possibilities and extrapolates on everyday situations that we can all identify with. In Tana French’s ‘Broken Harbour’, she skilfully explores what happens when evil breaks into a family’s dream home. The setting is a suitably gloomy ghost-estate in recessionary Ireland - the perfect ‘noir’ backdrop.

In Hermann Koch’s ‘The Dinner’, two couples dine in a smart restaurant in Amsterdam and discuss how they are going to keep their children out of trouble. Their children have been caught doing something horrendous on CCTV but so far only the parents have recognised them. We see the lengths the parents will go to, to protect their children.

And in another good example of the genre - Peter Swanson’s ‘The Kind Worth Killing’, a man meets a woman in an airport bar while waiting to board his flight and he complains about his wife. The woman in turn offers to kill the wife. It too is a good example of the genre with lots of twists and turns along the way.

Much of what we read in ‘Domestic Noir’ is now echoed on our TV screens. In fact, there’s a growing synergy between the two. Recent successes are fuelling the desire for more both of the same in books and film.

In a recent airing on Channel 4, I watched ‘The People Next Door’  - a one-off suspense. The characters were ordinary and believable - people that viewers could identify with which made it an all the more enriching and rewarding experience. While we wouldn’t want all this mayhem going on in our own lives, it’s great to observe it at a remove.

Whether these successful novels and TV screenings are in part responsible for spawning the genre, or simply responding to an increasingly voyeuristic desire to explore what really goes on within four walls is difficult to say.

One thing is for certain – it seems that it’s set to lurk around for a while longer at least. And that can only be a good thing. May the genre go from strength to strength.

Vive Domestic Noir!

Twisted River by Siobhan MacDonald was published on 18^th April by Canelo, price £1.99 in eBook.

“She would never have fit as neatly into the trunk of his own car.” Limerick, Ireland: the O’Brien family’s driveway. American Oscar Harvey opens the trunk of his hosts’ car and finds the body of a woman, beaten and bloody. But let’s start at the beginning.  Kate and Mannix O’Brien live by Curragower Falls in Limerick, in a lovely house they can barely afford. Their son Fergus is bullied at school, and their daughter Izzy blames herself, wishing she could protect him. Kate decides that her family needs a vacation, and is convinced her luck’s about to change when she spots an elegant Manhattan apartment on a home-exchange website.  Hazel and Oscar Harvey and their two children live on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Though they seem successful and happy, Hazel has mysterious bruises, and Oscar is hiding things about his dental practice. They, too, need a change of pace. Hazel has always wanted her children to see her native Limerick, and the house swap offers a perfect chance to soothe two troubled marriages. But this will be anything but a perfect vacation. And the body in the trunk is just the beginning.

More information can be found on her website.

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