How a Small Nevada Town Inspired a Crime Novel by Heather Young

 

One hundred miles east of Reno, Nevada, there is a town. You can’t see it from Interstate 80, but I stumbled upon it one day when the pumps at the Exit 105 Chevron were broken. Lovelock, it’s called. “Lock Your Love in Lovelock,” says the billboard on the interstate. As I drove its short main street I slowed the car. I tried to imagine why 1,847 people might choose to live there, in the middle of the desert, so far from anyone else. 

This wasn’t unusual for me; I’ve always been fascinated by small towns. I grew up in a subdivision, but my parents grew up in picture-perfect Midwestern villages, with elm-shaded streets and white-painted bandstands. Each summer we visited my father’s hometown, and I walked to the soda counter and swam in the community pool. It was a theme park version of the perfect childhood, and when we left I’d feel cheated. My parents had had that life. Why couldn’t I?

Then, when I was in high school, my mother said she wanted us to move back to Iowa, and suddenly I could imagine nothing worse than living in those cornfields, far from the malls and multiplexes of my teenaged suburban world. You’ll be Homecoming Queen, my mother promised, as though there were nothing better than being Homecoming Queen in a small Iowa town, and I realized the nostalgia I’d always heard in her voice was really regret. She’d never wanted to leave. But my father had always wanted to live in the wider world, so we didn’t go back. And ever since, I have driven slowly through small towns. I think about my mother, who wanted to stay, and my father, who wanted to leave. I think of my own internal conflict: my heart is drawn to the slow beats of these lovely pastoral villages even as my mind revels in the kinetic energy of the large city where I’ve chosen to live instead.

Lovelock, though, is not a lovely pastoral village. It’s an unsightly scab on a bleak landscape. Its drab commercial buildings house pawn shops and slot casinos. Its houses are small and nondescript, with sandy lots and concrete sidewalks cooking in the sun. Yet its existence out there in the desert struck me as kind of wonderful, as if I’d found a secret pocket in the lining of a raggedy coat. I’d assumed the appeal of small towns lay in their quiet beauty: in grassy town squares, white-steepled churches, and graceful homes with wraparound porches. But it couldn’t be beauty that kept people in Lovelock. I knew that someday, I would set a story there. 

The Distant Dead is that story. It’s about a man who moves to Lovelock seeking sanctuary only to meet death at the hands of the demons he tried to outrun. It’s about a woman who feels trapped in the town where she was born, and a young boy, burdened with a terrible secret, who wants a place to belong. All three wrestle with the idea of home: what it means, how much it matters, and whether it’s possible to leave it and start fresh. Through their interwoven stories, I examine the mystery at the heart of the question I’ve asked myself my whole life: how the same small town can offer succor to one person and feel like a cage to another.

The answer, it turns out, lies in the human connections that are only possible in small towns. The bartender at the Whiskey Barrel on Main Street explained it when she told me how she’d married her high school boyfriend, followed him while he served in the Army, then moved back with him when his tour was over. There are prettier places, she allowed. But they wanted to raise their children alongside people they’d known since they were born. The owner of the town’s only coffee shop echoed her. She knew the town was struggling, but her family had been there since the beginning. Leaving would feel like a betrayal. Anyone else in Lovelock would tell you the same thing: they don’t stay because they like the weather. They stay because their people are there. Their history is there. Their dead are there. 

That’s also, of course, why they leave. Because for some, the fact that their name makes everyone in their town nod in recognition is a claustrophobic horror, and the generations that came before are not a legacy to be honored but a haunting to be outrun. 

But whether they stay or go, they will always feel the weight of home in a way I never will. My investigation of this one small town taught me that this—the birthright my parents denied me when they left Iowa--is why I’m fascinated by all such places. I will never be known the way my parents were. Nor will I ever know anyone else as deeply or effortlessly as the people in Lovelock know one another. I desperately wish I had had that opportunity. I’m profoundly grateful I did not. And so I will always drive slowly through small towns, feeling envy and relief in equal measure. 

The Distant Dead by Heather Young (Verve Books) Out Now

A body burns in the desert... Does the boy who found it know more than it seems Sal Prentiss, orphaned and burdened with a terrible secret, just wants a place to belong. Sal lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills, and finds himself at the centre of a brutal murder mystery when he discovers the body of his maths teacher, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles' compound. In the seven months he worked at Lovelock's middle school, the quiet and seemingly unremarkable Adam Merkel had formed a bond with Sal and was one of the few people to look out for the boy. Nora Wheaton, the school's social studies teacher, sensed a kindred spirit in Adam - another soul bound to Lovelock by guilt and duty. After his death, she delves into his past for clues to who killed him. For Sal's grief seems shaded with fear, and Nora suspects he knows more than he's telling about his teacher's death.

Books to Look Forward to From No Exit Press and Verve Books

 August 2021

Deep Cover is by Leigh Russell. When a sex worker dies in suspicious circumstances in York, Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel struggles to remain focused on the murder investigation: she is distracted by her worries about her colleague and life partner, Ian Peterson, who has disappeared. As Geraldine becomes close to her new DS, Matthew, she is unaware that Ian is working undercover in London, trying to identify a criminal gang who have been targeting her. As a second victim is discovered in York, and Ian's life is threatened by a psychopath the tension mounts. If he fails in his mission, both he and Geraldine may die...

October 2021

On The Edge is by Jane Jesmond. Jen Shaw has climbed all her life: daring ascents of sheer rock faces, crumbling buildings, cranes the riskier the better. Both her work and personal life revolved around it. Until she went too far and hurt the people she cares about. So she gave it all up and checked into rehab. Then Jen awakens to find herself drugged and dangling off the local lighthouse during a wild storm, and must battle her way to safety. Once safe, Jen has face her troubled past in order to figure out whether something triggered a relapse, or if there is a more sinister explanation.

November 2021

The Lost Girls is by Heather Young. In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family's vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her father commits suicide, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil. Sixty years later, Lucy, the middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers an escape from her manipulative boyfriend and gives her daughters the home she never had. But the lake is isolated and eerie. Her only neighbour is a strange old man who seems to know more about the summer of 1935 than he's telling. Soon Justine's troubled oldest daughter becomes obsessed with Emily's disappearance, her mother arrives to steal her inheritance, and the man she left launches a dangerous plan to get her back.

The Killing Hills, is a compelling, propulsive thriller in which a suspicious death exposes the loyalties and rivalries of a deep-rooted and fiercely private community in the Kentucky backwoods. Mick Hardin, a combat veteran now working as an Army CID agent, is home on a leave that is almost done. His wife is about to give birth, but they aren't getting along. His sister, newly risen to sheriff, has just landed her first murder case, and local politicians are pushing for city police or the FBI to take the case. Are they convinced she can't handle it, or is there something else at work? She calls on Mick who, with his homicide investigation experience and familiarity with the terrain, is well-suited to staying under the radar. As he delves into the investigation, he dodges his commanding officer's increasingly urgent calls while attempting to head off further murders. And he needs to talk to his wife. The Killing Hills is by Chris Offutt and is a novel of betrayal - sexual, personal, within and between the clans that populate the hollers - and the way it so often shades into violence.

December 2021

THE WESTERN FRONT, JULY 1918. Gregor Reinhardt is a young lieutenant in a stormtrooper battalion on the Western Front when one of his subordinates is accused of murdering a group of officers, and then subsequently trying to take his own life. Not wanting to believe his friend could have done what he is accused of, Reinhardt begins to investigate. He starts to uncover the outline of a conspiracy at the heart of the German army, a conspiracy aimed at ending the war on the terms of those who have a vested interest in a future for Germany that resembles her past. The investigation takes him from the devastated front lines of the war, to the rarefied heights of Berlin society, and into the hospitals that treat those men who have been shattered by the stress and strain of the war. Along the way, Reinhardt comes to an awakening of the man he might be. A man freed of dogma, whose eyes have been painfully opened to the corruption and callousness all around him. A man to whom calls to duty, to devotion to the Fatherland and to the Kaiser, ring increasingly hollow... Where God Does Not Walk is by Luke McCallin.

Robert B Parker's Payback is by Mike Lupica. In her latest thrilling adventure, PI Sunny Randall takes on two serpentine cases that converge into one deadly mystery. PI Sunny Randall has often relied on the help of her best friend Spike in times of need. When Spike's restaurant is taken over under a predatory loan agreement, Sunny has a chance to return the favor. She begins digging into the life of the hedge fund manager who screwed Spike over - surely a guy that smarmy has a skeleton or two in his closet - and soon finds this new enemy may have the backing of even badder criminals. At the same time, Sunny's cop contact Lee Farrell asks her to intervene with his niece, a college student who reported being the victim of a crime but seems to know more than she's telling police. As the uncooperative young woman becomes outright hostile, Sunny runs up against a wall that she's only more determined to scale. Then, what appear to be two disparate cases are united by a common factor, and the picture becomes even more muddled. But one thing is clear: Sunny has been poking a hornet's nest from two sides, and all hell is about to break loose.

January 2022

After Agatha: Women Write Crime is the first book to examine how British, American and Canadian female crime writers pursue their craft and what they think about crime writing. Hundreds of women who identified as lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, able-bodied, disabled, feminist, left or right wing, who were black or white, who had experienced violence, sexism, homophobia or racism and who came from big cities or small country villages had one thing in common: they read crime novels. The book explores why so many women who face fear and violence in their daily lives, should be so addicted to crime fiction, many of which feature extreme violence. The book analyses why criminal justice professionals including police officers, forensic scientists, probation officers and lawyers have joined traditional detective writers in writing crime. It examines the explosions of crime writing by women between 1930 and today. It highlights the UK Golden Age women writers, the 1950s American women novelists, the 80s experimental trio, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Sue Grafton, who created the first female American private Investigators and the important emergence of female police protagonists, as well as those central characters who for the first time were lesbian, disabled, black or ethnic minority. After Agatha also examines the significant explosions of domestic noir thrillers and forensic science writers. Most have taken to crime in order to reflect and comment on the social and political landscape around them. Many are creatively exploring the significant issues facing women today. After Agatha: Women Write Crime Fiction is by Sally Cline.

Guilt Edged is by Leigh Russell. An inoffensive man is murdered in a seemingly motiveless attack. Detective Inspector Geraldine Steel and her team are baffled, until DNA from an apparent stranger is discovered on the victim's body. Geraldine is not convinced the suspect is guilty. When a witness comes forward to offer the suspect an alibi, Geraldine lets him go. That night, a second murder is committed. The evidence points to the suspect who has just been released. As Geraldine attempts to make sense of the suspect's complex history, he goes on the run. Even his wife appears to condemn him. Only Geraldine still doubts that he is to blame for the murders, but is she prompted by her own guilt for having released him to kill again? As the story races towards a breathtaking twist, Geraldine is tormented by self-doubt, and struggles to focus all her attention on the case. Someone is lying and the police must uncover the truth before anyone else is killed.

March 2022

The author of Get Carter returns to his greatest invention, a smooth-operating hardcase named Jack Carter, who is about to burn a city down in order to silence an informant... London. The late 1960s. It's Christmastime and Jack Carter is the top man in a crime syndicate headed by two brothers, Gerald and Les Fletcher. He's also a worried man. The fact that he's sleeping with Gerald's wife, Audrey, and that they plan on someday running away together with a lot of the brothers' money, doesn't have Jack concerned. Instead it's an informant - one of his own men - that has him losing sleep. The grass has enough knowledge about the firm to not only bring down Gerald and Les but Jack as well. Jack doesn't like his name in the mouth of that sort. In Jack Carter's Law Ted Lewis returned to the character that launched his career and once again delivered a hardboiled masterpiece. Jack Carter is the ideal tour guide to a bygone London underworld. In his quest to dismantle the opposition, he peels back the veneer of English society and offers a hard look at a gritty world of pool halls, strip clubs and the red lights of Soho nightlife. Jack Carter's Law is by Ted Lewis.

Billy Rags is by Ted Lewis. A fascinating window in on life in a British maximum security prison, Billy Rags-by the author of Get Carter - is crime fiction at its best: lean, mean, and full of startling psychological depth. It's the 1960s and Billy Cracken is a hard man to keep locked up. An austere and troubled childhood has given way to life as a hardened criminal and now status as one of the most feared prisoners in England. He has been moved from one maximum security prison to the next. Guards and inmates alike fear and begrudgingly respect the powerfully-built Cracken. But a life doing his porridge, even if as a minor celebrity, isn't the one he wants. A girlfriend and a child await Cracken on the outside and he'll stop at nothing to get to them. While plotting his escape he crosses a powerful mobster who vows to make Cracken's life hell, and if nothing else succeeds at making his escape all the more difficult, something the ever-rebellious Cracken defiantly relishes. The follow-up novel to the wildly successful Get Carter, Billy Rags is a fascinating look into the lives of British inmates serving time in a maximum security prison. Lewis manages once again to tell an exciting, action-filled story with a soul - demonstrated most clearly in a series of brilliant flashbacks to Billy's childhood and in the end conjures a character that will remind readers of both Tom Hardy in Bronson and Lee Marvin in Point Blank.

April 2022

When a burnt body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town is rocked to its core. In the seven months he worked at Lovelock's middle school, the quiet and seemingly unremarkable Adam Merkel had formed a bond with just one of his students: Sal Prentiss, a lonely sixth grader who lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills. It is Sal who finds Adam's body, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles compound. Nora Wheaton, the school's social studies teacher, sensed a kindred spirit in Adam. After his death, she delves into his past for clues to who killed him. Yet, the truth about Adam's murder may lie closer to home. The Distant Dead is by Heather Young.

Having Your Crime and Solving it Too: Writing a Thriller and a Mystery in One.

 

People tend to use the labels “mystery” and “thriller” interchangeably, but they’re actually mirror images of each other. A mystery starts with violence, and the story is about figuring out who committed it. A thriller is the story that leads to that violence, building slowly to a bloody climax. In fact, many books that get lumped into the mystery/thriller genre are really just one or the other. Karin Slaughter’s The Good Daughter is billed as a thriller, but in its bones it’s a mystery. Lou Berney’s November Road won the Anthony Award, but it’s not a mystery. It’s a thriller.

There is a way to combine the genres, though, and books that are truly both mystery and thriller – like Tana French’s The Secret Place and Kate Morton’s The Lake House – are among my favorites. These authors use a dual narrative structure, with alternating chapters set before the murder (the thriller part) and after (the mystery part). I used this in my latest book, The Distant Dead, and while I’m not about to compare myself to either of those literary giants, I found it very rewarding. Here are some of my favorite things about it:

(1) I can show the murder on the page, like a thriller does. In a mystery, the sleuth finds out who killed the victim and why, but the very nature of a mystery requires the murder itself to happen off the page. Killer and motive are revealed through characters’ recollections and the parsing of clues. But in a dual narrative, I can interrupt the sleuthing with chapters set in the past, which let me show the slowly building events and complicated relationships that will make a seemingly ordinary person commit murder. I can also show the crime itself, in all its gory glory, something traditional mysteries typically don’t do.

(2) I can show the aftermath of the murder, like a mystery does. A thriller often leaves its surviving characters reeling from the climactic violence, without saying much about how they’re going to pick up the pieces. But to me, one of the most satisfying elements of a mystery is seeing how a crime sends shock waves through the community of people connected to the victim. The dual narrative structure lets me delve deeply into that in the crime-solving chapters.

(3) I can double down on my themes. In The Distant Dead I played with themes of guilt and atonement, so I had one character in each of my interwoven stories commit a similar sin, but choose dramatically different (and in one case fatal) ways to make amends. This made my theme stronger because I could show that atonement is deeply personal, and isn’t always a right-versus-wrong proposition.

(4) I have more options for planting clues and red herrings. There’s a terrific tension in a dual narrative: the purpose of the “thriller” chapters is to gradually reveal what happened, while the “mystery” chapters try to hide the solution for as long as possible. I can play with this by having a chapter set in the past, then follow it with one where a witness lies about it, so the reader knows something the sleuth does not. Or I can drop a red herring in the sleuthing story and then, when I’m ready to show my hand, reveal the truth in a scene from before the crime. The whole thing becomes a delightful jigsaw puzzle for me and, hopefully, the reader.

(5) I have twice as many opportunities to build suspense. There are two kinds of suspense: the kind where you don’t know what’s going to happen, and another kind, rooted in dread, where you know exactly what’s going to happen. Writing a story where I reveal who the victim is right away, then show the events leading up to the murder while also putting potential future victims at risk in the aftermath, lets me lean heavily on both kinds of suspense.

Dual narratives are challenging to write, I have to admit. There were lots of index cards and late-night angst involved in crafting mine, and many times when I thought I should just toss the whole thing and write a traditional mystery or thriller. But in the end I found it a creatively stimulating way to write, one that gives me a chance to lean into different aspects of storytelling than if I were writing a classic mystery or thriller alone.

The Distant Dead by Heather Young (Oldcastle Books) Out Now

A body burns in the high desert hills. A boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of a grisly discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. When the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town is rocked to its core by a brutal and calculated murder.  In the seven months he worked at Lovelock’s middle school, the quiet and seemingly unremarkable Adam Merkel had formed a bond with just one of his students: Sal Prentiss, a lonely sixth grader who lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills. It is Sal who finds Adam’s body, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles’ compound.  Nora Wheaton, the school’s social studies teacher, sensed a kindred spirit in Adam – another soul bound to Lovelock by guilt and duty. After his death, she delves into his past for clues to who killed him. Yet, the truth about Adam’s murder may lie closer to home. For Sal’s grief seems shaded with fear, and Nora suspects he knows more than he’s telling about his favourite teacher’s death.

Strand Critics Awards

The Strand Critics Awards, recognizing excellence in the field of mystery fiction, were judged by a select group of book critics and journalists. They were presented on 12^th July 2017 in New York City.

Best Novel 
The Trespasser by Tana French (Viking) 

Best Debut Novel: 
The Lost Girls by Heather Young (William Morrow)

Clive Cussler was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award

Congratulations to All!