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| Interview with Susan McBride, author of And Then She Was Gone,, nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers' Choice Award for Best First Mystery, and selected for the Oprah Reading Cafe online Summer 2000. Feature by Ron Miller of TheColumnists.com. Reprinted with permission. © 2000 by Ron Miller, TheColumnists.com Police Detective Maggie Ryan Looks For Clues in Her Own Troubled Past By RON MILLER In 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley was found bludgeoned to death with a bloody golf club under a tree on the family estate in Greenwich, Conn. Not far away, in the same neighborhood, 11-year-old Susan McBride became transfixed by the notorious murder case. "It really intrigued me," McBride recalls today. "I mean, it was a murder in my own neighborhood! It has stuck with me all my life." That very same murder case is back in the headlines again because 39-year-old Michael Skakel, a nephew of the lateSenator Robert F. Kennedy, is finally being charged as the killer. At the time, says McBride, nobody suspected Michael. Instead, the chief suspect was Skakel's brother, Tommy. "My friend's older brothers were at the party with Martha and Tommy Skakel," says McBride. "They all thought Tommy did it." For 11-year-old Susan, the murder carries its own bizarre memories. Martha was killed after a party held the night before Halloween. So, the following night, police were out in great force, watching over the scant few trick-or-treaters whose parents let them out to wander. "They thought there was a murderer roaming the neighborhood," says McBride. Now in her mid-30s, McBride suspects her fascination with a real murder - and the tremendous trauma it can do to a family and their neighbors - may have subtly nudged her toward the career as a mystery writer that's finally starting to blossom for her after years of frustration. Late last year, McBride's first novel And Then She Was Gone was published by Mayhaven, a small Illinois publishing house, after she won a book contract in a spirited competition with other writers. Extremely well-received by the mystery community, the novel has dramatically changed McBride's life. She's already completed a sequel Overkill which she hopes will come out next year. She's also been on a breathless round of promotional tours, speaking dates and book signing events. (She's coming to California Oct. 7-14 with three other mystery writers - Letha Albright, Sherri L. Board, Denise Swanson - on The Deadly Divas authors' tour.) A taut, suspenseful contemporary thriller, And Then She Was Gone is about the disappearance of a little girl from a peaceful neighborhood in a suburb of Dallas, Tex. One of the police detectives assigned to the investigation is Maggie Ryan, a troubled young woman who's still trying to cope with her own complex personal problems stemming from a traumatic period in her own childhood. The deeper Maggie delves into the fate of 4-year-old Carrie Spencer, the closer she comes to finally facing the ghosts of her own childhood. McBride's writing is so lucid, so crisply credible that even close family friends have been convinced that she must be spilling out her own dark secrets through her hero, Maggie Ryan. "Susan, did something happen to you that you never talked about?" they've asked her on more than one occasion. McBride has quickly reassured them that she's hiding no childhood traumas and, in fact, had a pretty 'cushy', uneventful, even boring childhood compared to Maggie's. It's not hard to see where McBride may have drawn upon her youthful memories of the hysteria surrounding the Moxley murder case, then used them to pump an additional layer of reality into the fictional criminal case of "And Then She Was Gone." The novel also was inspired by another real-life case the grown-up McBride followed when she lived in the Dallas area in the late 1980s and early 1990s. "There was a lot of information in the papers about the investigation of a 9-year-old girl who was abducted" in the Dallas area, McBride explains. "I got pretty involved in following what happened with that." Though "And Then She Was Gone" has a very realistic feel to it and some very grim twists and turns, McBride feels it could have been even more realistic. She wrote the book in 1995 and says she didn't have the close contacts with police then that she has now. McBride left the Dallas area in 1996 to be near her terminally-ill grandmother in St. Louis, Mo. After her grandmother's death, McBride decided to stay in St. Louis, home of her maternal ancestors for several generations. "Now I know several police officers who read my stuff and tell me if I'm doing anything wrong," says McBride. McBride also says she didn't set out to create a detective series built around Maggie Ryan, though she's the hero in two books already and is likely to appear in several more. In fact, she created Maggie as a somewhat flawed character because she was trying to make a special point. "I'd seen so many victims of childhood abuse on talk shows, using that to excuse their behavior later," she says. "I was sick of it. Awful things happen to people all the time. You're given a brain and you can use it to decide if you're going to be a good person or an evil person. I wanted to show somebody who came out of something awful and still wanted to be a good person." Most critics who've read "And Then She Was Gone" seem to agree that McBride has created a very interesting and strong detective hero in Maggie Ryan. She's not afraid to stick her neck out in the interests of justice, which she certainly does in the book. She's also likely to break a few rules when it comes to proper police procedures. "Part of Maggie's personality is that she gets a little emotionally overcharged and does things she knows she shouldn't do," McBride admits. So far, Maggie is single, like McBride, and uninvolved with the men in her life. McBride says that will change fairly soon because Maggie "is going to have a relationship with one of the characters" in the new mystery, which is about a shooting aboard a school bus that everybody at first thinks was a random act of violence. For McBride, the applause for "And Then She Was Gone" has been the payoff for years of toil. She wrote her first novel at 19 - a historical romance - during a break in her education. She had just left the University of Texas at Austin, but hadn't yet resumed her studies at the University of Kansas. The manuscript was well-liked by several editors, but the only contract she was offered was a losing proposition for her, so she nixed it and the book was never published. Though she has a journalism degree and was trained in public relations, McBride opted instead for the lonely life of a would-be novelist, working at part-time jobs to survive while she struggled as a writer. Before her success, McBride failed to sell several "relationship" novels, a "sorority house" novel, a "family saga" and some "cozy" mysteries of the Agatha Christie school. Even though it took four years for "And Then She Was Gone" to actually come out, McBride says she never lost faith in herself. "I'm the poster child of persistence," she says, though obviously happy that phase of her career finally may be over. © 2000 by Ron Miller, TheColumnists.com Autographed copies of Susan McBride's And Then She Was Gone can be ordered from the following bookstores: Grave Matters Books E-mail address: books@gravematters.com Phone: 513-242-7527 Big Sleep Books E-mail address: bigsleep.books@slacc.com Phone: 314-361-6100 |
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