Where Are the Children? was my first suspense novel and the book that really changed my life.
I had written before and actually made a living for a time doing scripts for radio shows. I had also published some short stories, but while they were fun and gratifying, they didn’t pay the bills, so I decided to try my hand at a real book.
My first effort was a biographical novel about George Washington; it took three years to write, was published invisibly, and went directly to the remainder tables as it came off press. That didn’t faze me—I considered it a triumph. After all, it was published. Triumph or no, however, I sincerely wanted my next book to sell.
It was at that point that I studied my bookshelves and realized that from the time I was first able to read, whenever possible I had chosen to curl up with suspense stories. Clearly they were my favorite kind of fiction. I had begun with books featuring girl detectives like Judy Bolton and Nancy Drew; from them I had moved on to Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, Charlotte Armstrong, Mignon Eberhart and Daphne du Maurier, to name just a few. Whenever I read these books, I always tried to keep up with the author, to spot the bad guy, to solve the crime early on. Those writers were wonderful teachers, and gradually I absorbed some of the techniques they used.
I’ll use an old and familiar story to illustrate what I mean. One version of the Hansel and Gretel legend is that Hansel dropped smooth stones to mark the path back out of the forest, while Gretel dropped breadcrumbs. When they wanted to find their way back home, they discovered that while the stones were still there, the breadcrumbs had been eaten by the birds.
In the same sense, suspense writers drop their own different versions of smooth stones and breadcrumbs, and invite the reader to follow them on their journey. The breadcrumbs, so quickly gobbled up, turn out not to be the clues they seemed, while the stones, which blend in so well with the landscape, often prove to be the true guide to finding the solution to the crime. Over the years, I became quite good at separating the two.
As a reader, I loved suspense. I thought I understood it. So I decided to see if I could write it.
Some advice I had heard in a writing class came back to me: Take a true case or situation, one that interests you; ask yourself two questions: “Suppose . . . ?” and “What if . . . ?”; then turn it into fiction.
At that time in New York there was a celebrated murder case, covered daily in the newspapers and on television. A beautiful twenty-six-year-old mother—her name was Alice Crimmins—was accused of killing her five-year-old son and her three-year-old daughter. As it turned out, covered constantly by the press, she was convicted of both deaths, then both convictions were thrown out on technicalities. Eventually, she was released from prison, having spent only a very short time there. Once she was out, she remarried and disappeared from the public eye.
The case dragged on for years. It got so much media attention at the time that it was virtually impossible not to hear about it and to have an opinion as to Alice Crimmins’s guilt or innocence. Any mention of her name was sure to start a lively debate. So I asked myself the two questions: “Suppose . . . ?” and “What if . . . ?”
Suppose a beautiful young mother is accused and later convicted of the deliberate murder of her two young children? Suppose she gets out of prison because the conviction is overturned on a technicality? Suppose she remarries and starts a new life, then seven years to the day her two children died, the two children from her second marriage disappear?
I decided it was a strong premise, and so I began to plan my book. The setting was my first consideration. At that time I had just started renting a summer cottage on Cape Cod in Massachusetts and had fallen in love with the area. The Cape has lonely beaches to walk on and brilliant sunsets that offer a promise of joyous times to come. It also has terrifying nor’easters that lash the ocean savagely and send torrents of windswept rain across the Cape’s narrow, sandy width. In short, it has atmosphere.
It is, therefore, the perfect place for a young woman with a wounded spirit to flee to. Cape people are reticent. They respect privacy and would never intrude upon or question a person who is a loner.
As I began to outline the book, I could visualize the young woman—whom I called Nancy Harmon—leaving San Francisco and getting on a bus that would take her across the country to the Cape, which she had visited as a child and remembered as a place of peace—a place where she could heal.
My working title for the book was Die a Little Death, a phrase I had read in a memoir written by a mistress of Louis XIV of France. She had borne him a child, and it lived only eight months. In the memoir she wrote, “And I with my baby died a little death.” I thought it was an appropriate title because in my story, part of Nancy, in essence, died with her first two children. Since that time she had managed to blot out all memories of her life with them, but now she must suddenly try to recall every detail of the events leading up to their disappearance if she is to save her second family.
At the time I was writing the novel, I had a full-time job in radio, so the book took me three years to finish. When I was finally satisfied and knew I could add nothing more to it, I wrote in my journal, “I have finished the book, and it is GOOD!!!”
I still remember the black-and-white suit I was wearing when I dropped off the manuscript with my agent’s secretary—it was a very important day for me. Then six weeks passed without any word from my agent. Timidly I phoned her: “Pat,” I said, “by any chance have you had time to look at my book?”
Pat Myrer had been a senior editor before becoming an agent, and usually she ripped my short stories apart and had me rewrite them before she would send them out. When she told me that this time she felt no rewriting was necessary, that my novel was already out on submission with publishers, I realized I was on my way because I was sure in my heart that the book would sell.
The world was a slightly different place thirty years ago, and when I wrote that book, child molestation was pretty much a taboo subject. While there were no explicit scenes dealing with that, it was clear enough to the reader that the kidnapper was also a molester. As a result, two of the publishers to whom my manuscript was submitted turned it down. They feared the subject of children in that kind of jeopardy might upset their women readers. Fortunately for me, however, Simon & Schuster decided to take a chance, and they bought the book.
At the suggestion of Phyllis Grann, then an editor at Simon & Schuster, it was given a new title. The concern she expressed was that Die a Little Death might sound too much like a hard-edged crime story, so the title was changed to the more descriptive—and compelling—Where Are the Children?
The publication of that book marked the turning point in my life, and began a long and happy marriage with Simon & Schuster that has lasted to this day.