Chelsea Cain

Megan Zabel interviewed Chelsea Cain, author of Evil at Heart and two previous Archie Sheridan novels, at Powells.com. From Zabel's introduction and part of the Q & A:

Heartsick, [Cain's] debut novel, was a New York Times bestseller, and garnered enthusiastic praise from... basically everyone. In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison called it a "dizzying novel. Lurid and suspenseful with well-drawn characters, plenty of grisly surprises and tart dialogue." Stephen King placed it, along with its follow-up, Sweetheart (now in paperback), on his ten best books of 2008 list.

Set in Portland, the series follows Archie Sheridan, a detective who spends a decade chasing the infamous "Beauty Killer," Gretchen Lowell, only to be captured by the beautiful psychopath. After 10 days of atrocities in a basement, Gretchen inexplicably releases him, and turns herself in. Archie emerges scarred (literally), with an addiction to painkillers and an obsession with the killer that reaches beyond the realms of his job description. Susan Ward, a zealous young reporter with an attitude, is handpicked to document Archie's troubles, and in the meantime, there are new murders to worry about in the Rose City.
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Megan Zabel: This series has been heavily lauded for its originality. How did you come up with the idea of Gretchen and Archie's unorthodox serial killer/police detective relationship?

Chelsea Cain: Twisted love...

Megan: Yes. I want to know about the twisted love.

Cain: It started with the Green River Killer. I grew up in Bellingham, WA and was ten years old when he started killing people — or at least, when they started finding the bodies. And as a kid, that was something I was really aware of. This was a guy who was killing people, and not just any person, but young women, some of them 15, 16 years old. Even though many of them were prostitutes, as a kid I just thought, "He kills kids." So I think that any kid would have monitored that, but I was also a kid with a pet cemetery and a morbid imagination, so I took an acute interest. [Laughter]

I'd read the Bellingham Herald daily, just to catch up on the Green River Killer and the Green River Killer task force. He was at large for 20 years, so by the time they caught him I was 30. I ended up watching this episode of Larry King when he was interviewing those cops that had been on that task force for so long and I was really intrigued by the obsession that would result when you've been working on a case for your entire career. Especially that kind of case where there's so much emotionally riding on it. These cops got to know the families of the victims so well, and the lives of the victims themselves; the cops worked such long hours, for so long, to catch this guy. They finally caught him, and he cuts this deal, which is the deal that I have Gretchen cut in the book: to avoid the death penalty, Gary Ridgeway agreed to tell them where more bodies were. So even after they caught him, it didn't end. If anything, the relationship intensified. There was this footage of one of these cops, in the interview room with Gary Ridgeway after this deal had been cut, and they just seemed like old friends, you know? They had this sort of convivial relationship. On the surface, it just seemed like they were hanging out together at a bar, chatting and laughing, but underneath there were all these different levels of manipulation. I was really intrigued by that, in the middle of the night, watching Larry...[read on]

Learn more about the author and her work at Chelsea Cain's website and blog, and at iheartgretchenlowell.com.

The Page 99 Test: Sweetheart.

The Page 69 Test: Evil at Heart.

--Marshal Zeringue