Curling up on the beach with a book is a time-honored summertime pleasure. While some readers may enjoy shaking sand from a hardcover copy of Proust or a paperback romance, the go-to vacation read for many includes a high body count. Murder and surf go together like fried clams and tartar sauce.
The Hudson Valley may be light on surf, but murderous writers proliferate: Even a casual roundup of the usual suspects includes, among others, Alison Gaylin, Carol Goodman, Steve Hamilton, Marshall Karp, C.E. Lawrence, Jenny Milchman, Maxine Paetro, Wendy Corsi Staub, Sebastian Stuart, Kim Wozencraft, and uber-prolific late grandmaster Donald E. Westlake.
Why? To solve the mystery, I met with Alison Gaylin, Steve Hamilton, and Marshall Karp, who all have new books out this summer. Gaylin’s Stay With Me (Harper, 2014) is the third in her Shamus Award-winning Brenna Spector series. Let It Burn (Minotaur, 2014) is Hamilton’s 10th entry in the much-lauded Alex McKnight series, set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Karp is a serial writer of serials, publishing four books starring LA cops Lomax & Biggs before joining James Patterson for NYPD Red; both the series launch and NYPD Red 2 (Little, Brown, 2014) were New York Times #1 bestsellers.
Just before we meet at outdated: an antique café, a violent thunderstorm jumps uptown Kingston, unleashing rain so torrential the gutters flow white. Hamilton is first to arrive, a black umbrella angled over his lamb’s-wool corona of hair. He’s wearing a tropical yellow shirt and shorts, unfazed by the downpour. Gaylin enters next, in a red summer dress, flashing a smile as she refurls her folding umbrella. Then Karp rushes in, shaking off a golf umbrella and spouting one-liners about parking meters, his timing pure Borscht Belt.
We order cold drinks and sit down to chat about homicide. It’s hard to imagine a friendlier trio of authors. Whatever deep inner demons their genre of choice may reflect, they seem to be getting it out of their systems on paper. Each of them took different paths to writing crime fiction, and each has carved out a unique swath of turf.
Gaylin’s books feature smart, complex women who juggle impossible pressures as well as they can. Her first novels, Hide Your Eyes and You Kill Me, featured an intrepid preschool teacher who sees things she shouldn’t. Next came stand-alones Heartless and Trashed and the Brenna Spector series, which features a private investigator with hyperthemistic syndrome, a rare form of total recall, and an at-risk teenage daughter. Gaylin’s also written a young-adult novel, Reality Ends Here, and collaborated with Megan Abbott on graphic novel Normandy Gold, which they’re developing for television.
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Gaylin grew up in suburban Arcadia, California. At 10, she picked up a copy of Helter Skelter. “I thought it was a book about the Beatles,” she says, laughing. Mesmerized, she moved on to other true-crime classics: In Cold Blood, The Executioner’s Song. “It’s that whole feeling of what human beings are capable of, looking under that rock,” she says. “I always liked the feeling of being scared.”
As a theater major at Northwestern, she wrote plays and fiction, noting, “Everything I wrote ended up with someone getting killed in it.” After college, she did a brief stint as a tabloid reporter for The Star, where her assignments included going undercover as a TV extra, covering the bar mitzvah of “Wonder Years” star Fred Savage and crashing David Hasselhoff’s wedding.
She polished her journalism cred with a master’s degree from Columbia, and kept writing fiction in Abigail Thomas’s Tuesday Night Babes workshop. Thomas urged her to expand a macabre story into a mystery novel. Five years later, Gaylin finished Hide Your Eyes.
It didn’t sell. Editors loved her characters, but the plot didn’t thicken. Gaylin embarked on a rigorous structure tutorial, reading more than 100 mysteries while she and her husband, filmmaker Mike Gaylin, lived in Mexico. This time she got it right: Hide Your Eyes was nominated for an Edgar Award for best first novel.
Steve Hamilton’s first Alex McKnight book, A Cold Day in Paradise, won both the Edgar and Shamus Awards. He won a second Edgar for The Lock Artist; another stand-alone, Night, takes place in a hardscrabble Kingston, New York.
Hamilton was born near Detroit. “But if you live in Michigan, you go north every summer,” he says. “It’s a different world up there. The Upper Peninsula could be its own state, its own country.”
The mystery bug bit him early. “I grew up on Alfred Hitchcock books and Agatha Christie,” he says. Then he read Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and “my favorite, Jim Crumley. When I found the hard-boiled American crime fiction, I thought, ‘This is it!’ Because the writing is so good.”
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At 12, he sent his first story to Ellery Queen magazine; it was politely rejected. He studied computer science in college, and spent 31 years working for IBM in Kingston and Poughkeepsie. When did he start writing full-time? Hamilton takes a breath. “Yesterday. Literally.” His quiet bombshell is met with a chorus of congratulations and clinking iced coffee and milkshake glasses.
Cutting the day-job cord was “a combination of happy and terrifying. Before, this was this cool thing I did on my own time—I got to go to conferences with the coolest people I ever met. It was a secret life that’s not a secret anymore.”
With a full-time job, a wife, and two kids, “my own time” usually meant late at night, when he’d stay up writing for “two or three hours, or whatever it takes.”
Karp points out that writing is not always done at the desk—ideas often pop up while walking the dog, or in the shower. Gaylin agrees. “I don’t know what it is about the shower.” Karp nods sagely. “The shower’s the best.”
Hamilton has more breaking news: He just finished writing a screenplay of The Lock Artist for producer Shane Salerno. Karp flashes a grin and says, “Mazel tov. They’ll fuck it up.”
He should know. On his website, Karpkills.com, Karp confesses that “the fictional characters I murder are based on real people I worked with in Hollywood. Killing them on the page is totally legal and extremely cathartic.”
Television wasn’t his first career. As a smart Jewish kid whose dad owned a candy shop in West New York, New Jersey—even his hometown’s a punchline—Karp was expected to become a dentist. Luckily, he flunked college biology. “You want your dentist to know the difference between a tendon and an elbow,” he quips. He switched to a major in English. After graduation, he answered an ad for a copywriting job. “I could always write,” he says. “I grew up when you wrote letters to people.”
His girlfriend worked in advertising, and he got hired. “Holy shit, someone was paying me to write stuff!” he exclaims. “I wrote a tuna fish can label. Some people think I should go back to that.”
He worked his way up to an executive position, supervising the creative department, but missed doing what he loved most. He started writing plays, and one called “Squabbles” was produced and published by Samuel French. After a bidding war between ABC and CBS, he started developing TV pilots, but held on to his day job.
“In my 40s, I realized the life I was living was orchestrated by a 20-year-old kid. ‘My girlfriend’s in advertising? I’ll go with that.’ I realized I didn’t want that 20-year-old to plan the second half of my life. I asked myself, ‘What do I want to do when I’m 60?’ And I wanted to be in Woodstock writing a murder mystery.”
Karp took time off from work, figuring it would take him six months. (“Ha!” he says loudly.) He planned to go back in September 2001. Then his daughter, who worked near the World Trade Center, went missing for several hours. It turned out she’d hopped a ferry to safety, but the experience shook him so thoroughly that he decided to quit advertising.
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Though he was now writing nearly full-time, he still did some freelance consulting, sometimes for fellow ad man James Patterson. “I pitched him The Rabbit Factory over lunch, and Jim said, ‘It’s good, but it doesn’t have to end there.’ He suggested a twist, and another twist. It was like a master class.”
Karp sold The Rabbit Factory and three more Lomax & Biggs comic thrillers (Bloodthirsty, Flipping Out, and Cut, Paste, Kill). Then Patterson invited him to collaborate on Kill Me If You Can, and on NYPD Red, which features a male/female detective team with an uneasy romantic history who work for an elite celebrity squad (“In New York, the one percent get better service. Even when they’re dead”).
“I’m living the life I hoped I could get when I was 45,” Karp says, beaming. Though he keeps the details of working with Patterson close to the vest, it’s clear they enjoy it. Karp unspools an off-color tale about rewriting a sex scene, sending a customer scuttling for the door with protective arms around her two children. “They’re hiding their kids from you, Marshall,” says Alison Gaylin. Steve Hamilton laughs, and Marshall Karp gives a cheerful shrug. “That’s me. Always too loud for the room.”
Alison Gaylin is appearing with Wendy Corsi Staub 8/1 at 7pm, Oblong Books & Music, Rhinebeck, and 10/9 at 6pm, Word Café, Kingston (Wordcafe.us).
This article appears in August 2014.
