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Good Reading : November 2008
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author profile Although she had always written, it wasn’t until much later in life when she was writing a PhD thesis that she came to ‘serious writing’ and to reading classic noir, which inspired her to write her first novel Die a Little. ‘That’s how I came to read the books,’ she says. ‘I’d grown up on the movies and had studied the classics of English and American literature but had never read the pulp, so for my dissertation I decided to look into the rise of hardboiled fiction in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s and their film adaptations.’ Of the genre, Abbott says, ‘These books were never taken seriously drawn into the dark and seedy side of Hollywood. Set in the 1950s, Abbott says the idea for Die a Little actually came from a contemporary case. The teacher wife of an army lieutenant had been arrested for drug trafficking and he had lied to protect her. ‘It was a real suburban tale but to me it was like a classic noir story. She’s so beautiful, he’s so in love, he plays the sap and lies for her and then he pays the price. I also always wanted to do something with a brother and sister whose parents die early and they end up fulfilling every role for each other.’ Then comes the characteristic twist ‘I’d studied the classics of English and American literature but had never read the pulp.’ until very recently and in many ways they still aren’t. I had to make quite a case to write my dissertation on them because they’re considered pop culture artefacts rather than “literature”. I started reading James M Cain’s Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Reading the books was so interesting having known them only through the movies and writing the fiction was a way of trying to write my way into that world. It was like a fantasy exercise, an outlet for me. Die a Little was my “project on the side” and a way of taking a break from my academic writing.’ That first project on the side worked out rather well for Abbott. It was nominated for three literary awards, including a prestigious Edgar Allen Poe Award, the prize presented by the Mystery Writers of America, which has been awarded to mystery kings and queens like Raymond Chandler, John Le Carre, Elmore Leonard and Minette Walters. Die a Little is about schoolteacher Lora King and her brother, Bill, an investigator in the district attorney’s office. When the beautiful Hollywood wardrobe assistant Alice Steele suddenly appears and marries Bill after a very short time, their lives begin to unravel. Lora, the novel’s narrator, has a bad feeling about Alice, because something about her new sister-in- law’s past doesn’t feel right. Deciding to find out who the ‘real’ Alice is, she is Abbott likes to add to the mix: ‘The last thing was that I love those big 1950s, candy-coloured melodramas that were big here. They’re so gorgeous looking, this view of suburbia is so beautiful and at the same time these really dark noir movies were being made and I liked the idea of pushing the two together so the book is half suburban pseudo-glamour.’ ‘A bit like Desperate Housewives?’ I ask. ‘Yes, like Desperate Housewives gone even darker,’ she laughs. The Song is You, a tour of the nasty underside of Hollywood, is based on the unsolved disappearance of the young actress/dancer Jean Spangler. (Although this was written after Die a Little, The Song is You was available in Australia before Abbott’s other books.) Spangler’s disappearance gripped America in much the same way as the high-profile Hollywood murder of two years previous, that of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia. (James Ellroy’s novel The Black Dahlia was based on the Elizabeth Short case.) Spangler’s story, which has taken on a legendary quality, is that she kissed her five-year-old daughter goodbye at 5pm on 7 October in 1949 and went off to a night-time film shoot. She was reported missing the following day and her purse was found in a park with a mysterious note in her handwriting. It read: ‘Kirk, can’t wait any longer, going to see Doctor Scott. It will work best this way while mother is away’. Who was Kirk? Who was Doctor Scott? Was Jean Spangler pregnant? At the time, the rumour mill went into overdrive. To Abbott, Spangler seemed exactly like a character from one of the classic hardboiled books. ‘It was so perfect, as if she’d just walked out of a Raymond Chandler novel! She was so gorgeous, there were so many cryptic details to the case and she was living this classic starlet lifestyle but I could see her being painted in one of these books as a lethal woman or a gorgeous victim we must save, but her life was so much more complicated than that. She was a single mother supporting much of her family on her income and she was trying to achieve her dream of stardom and these were things you wouldn’t always see in these kinds of books, so I was interested in bringing these aspects into telling her story,’ she says. Abbott says the hardboiled novels drew an unrealistic picture of women, but her books are different precisely because they turn these notions around. ‘In the real world, because of economic unrest and because of the war, women were entering the workforce in ways they never had before and had freedom they hadn’t had before, and although the books are realistic in their portrayal of poverty, urban dread and violence, there’s something about the “tough guy” dynamic that just begs for you to have this femme fatale figure that sort of occupies all women and is always a threat. She is all-powerful, lethal and her only motives are always mysterious. She’s not like a real woman in any way. Maybe there’s a clinging girlfriend in the background.’ Queenpin finally won her the Edgar Award this year, and is very loosely based on the story of notorious 1940s NOVEMBER 2008 i goodreading 23
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