These fiery female authors are willing to kill for a little credibility
By Matthew Halverson
Photograph by Whitney Curtis
It’s always the ones you’d least expect: Joanna Campbell Slan got her start in writing with Chicken Soup for the Soul short stories, but these days she’s got murder on her mind. The Chesterfield native will publish her first mystery novel, Over Exposed, next fall, and this month, she and her fellow authors from the Sisters in Crime—a group of women who share her taste for blood—will gather at the Hilton St. Louis Airport for Forensic U., where they’ll learn how to kill their characters convincingly.
Might you be perpetuating a stereotype by holding a conference on blood spatter and body decomposition in “the most dangerous city in America”? St. Louis gets a bad rap. People locally know that those numbers are an inaccurate vision of where we live. However, we are a font of forensic expertise. Maybe having this conference here can shed a little light on the people who make it safe for us to live here.
What do mystery writers get wrong when they write about murders? I actually asked our speakers to come up with a list of those. Dr. D.P. Lyle [author of Forensics for Dummies] says that one of the big things people get wrong is that death is ugly. I would add that it’s smelly. I once put some meat on top of the refrigerator to defrost it, and I forgot it. Believe me, if one pound of hamburger can smell like that, 150 pounds of person would be a lot worse.
The conference will cover crime-scene basics, poisons and their detection, you’re going to have a firing-range activity—should your husbands be concerned? It’s not just our husbands.
Co-workers? Co-workers, neighbors, old boyfriends, siblings. We’re not the group of people you want to mess with. Unlike the cops, we’re looking for bad things to do and how to get away with them.
What compels you to write this stuff? We want to see right prevail. We want to see good people triumph over evil. We want to see the bad guy get his.
But you also sort of enjoy knocking people off. There’s a cathartic effect to bloodying up your enemies on the page. What I demand, as an author, is that I am paid to get to do that.
