I swim against the tide on this when I can, within the limitations of my word count and the known parameters of my readership’s attention span. At the same time, you don’t want to make saints out of everybody: there are plenty of murder victims who, while they certainly didn’t deserve to die any more than anybody else does, weren’t exactly blameless in their lives. Everybody’s complicated. I try to cleave to this precept. It usually pays off, and it hasn’t been a particularly hard habit to keep, because it seems self-evident to me.
Once, in Savage Coast, I wrote about a rich family. I remember telling an interviewer after it came out that I’d had “fun” writing it, which I immediately regretted. The book detailed grisly crimes with real human cost; people who have more to lose often make bigger messes. They’ve never had to clean up after themselves.
It was my third book. The title came from a Randall Jarrell poem, a modern retelling of one of the Greek tragedies—brothers and sisters are always locked in battle to the death when it comes to the old masters, who invariably rise to their theme once the killing starts. I’d read the poem in college: I was up late one night trying to cram as much of the required reading as I could into the twenty-four hours before the final exam, but there’d been no way to understand the action without slowing my pace. To extract anything worth using from the poem, I’d had to read it out loud. It became a sort of self-hypnosis.
I was all by myself in the dorm, late spring in my sleepy Central California town, somewhere between midnight and dawn, caught up in a vision so vast that its import seemed to outstrip the drier themes of the class （Revenge Among the Ancients: it was an elective）。 A brother was sailing to an island to kill his sister, I still wasn’t clear why; she’d become a priestess since they’d last laid eyes on one another, and her acolytes were now laying hold to her brother to bring him to the altar, where she would dispatch him with great and brutal ceremony.
How strange to stand like a child, and tremble
At a headless body—one more head
To stuff and smoke and set on an empty stake;
And if in the long nights of the long winter
It still stares at you with its aching smile,
And when you name it, and lean to it longingly,
Its eyes seem to cloud in the firelight
And it turns from you, slowly, in the stinging smoke—
What is it but one more head?
In Savage Coast I tried to let Alan Halprin speak for himself. Son and presumptive heir to wealthy parents, he’d anticipated a windfall when his parents died; but his sister, Jessica, suffered from delusions, and couldn’t take care of herself. So they’d left her the estate, a sprawling neo-baroque complex overlooking the Pacific; it had been their opinion that hospitals were beneath her. The will further stipulated that a nurse stay on the property with her, although whether she genuinely required acute care became an important question at her trial.
To Alan, they’d bequeathed any cash left over; to them, this seemed like a fair division of the estate, but he decamped immediately to Hollywood, quickly squandering half his inheritance on cars and dead-end investments. The remaining half ought to have been plenty, and he might have done well for himself, but he could also see the more likely end awaiting him: dwindling assets, work for hire.
So he drove back to his childhood home in a Spider Veloce he’d paid for in cash, and there he lay in wait, hidden by the riotous coastal overgrowth. He’d brought along a pickax in his JanSport backpack. He crushed the nurse’s head when she came out one morning to water the zinnias; the first blow knocked her down, and the second one finished the job. But he hadn’t counted on his sister’s increasingly paranoid state; all the knives in the kitchen had been transferred to her dresser drawers, and she made short work of Alan when he came in through the back door: quietly, she thought, but not quietly enough.
The court was more sympathetic to Jessica than to Alan. The prosecution brought out huge blowups of the nurse’s shattered skull: hers had been a senseless death. It was an easy case to take sides in. A sick woman stalked by a jealous brother, an act of self-defense.
This had been enough to keep the jury from dwelling too long on the hideous list of indignities she’d visited upon her brother’s body over the next several weeks: the police don’t sniff around the mansions of the wealthy, so she’d had plenty of time alone with the body before anyone’s suspicions had been aroused. The long days she’d spent in the estate, enacting further mutilations upon the pliant cadaver at leisure until, an artist completing her work, she finally dismembered it, were awful to contemplate. To understand the particulars, I felt, was to feel pity for the person who had borne the brunt of them.