By Sophie Rawleigh for The New York Times
July 3
Eleanor Dash, 35, is ten minutes late for our lunch in a cute café in Venice Beach.
When she arrives, she looks like a writer—elegant athleisure wear, hair in a bun, and her nails unmanicured.
“I’m so sorry,” she says. “Harper’s going to kill me.”
Harper is her sister. An unlikely suspect if she ever falls victim to something like one of the characters in her multimillion-selling books.
“No, you’re wrong,” she says when I point this out. “She’d be the prime suspect. Because of the inheritance.”
Over the next hour, we cover the details of her “Wikipedia entry,” as she calls it. She and Harper grew up near here in a house their parents bought “back in the ’80s, when my mother’s parents died.” That house “probably costs a jillion dollars now,” but back then, it wasn’t a trendy neighborhood. Sometimes it was scary growing up there.
“Maybe that’s why I’m a writer? Childhood trauma. Check.”
Besides the fact that her mother named her after her favorite fictional heroine (Eleanor from “Sense and Sensibility”), Eleanor didn’t check off a lot of other boxes on her way to literary fame. She studied marketing at the University of Southern California, which she attended three years late because she was raising her sister after their parents died when she was eighteen and Harper was fifteen.
“I grew up pretty fast after that,” she says.
I ask her what that was like. Losing both her parents at once. Having to pivot to taking care of her sister.
“We took care of each other,” she says. “But it’s not something you ever really recover from. You’re never going to be the same person after something like that.”
Did she have any specific examples?
“I was going to be an actress—I’d been accepted at Tisch. But I couldn’t go. When it was my turn to go to college, it seemed impractical to try something so ephemeral. I mean, you can be a great actress and never book a gig, right?”
Why marketing, then?
“It’s what my father did.”
So, she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps?
“I didn’t know what I wanted. I was kind of living their life. Looking after my sister, living in their house…”
Their house is where she takes me after lunch. It’s nestled in the “quiet” section of Venice Beach, up against the boardwalk near the Venice Pier, with an incredible view of the Pacific. Eleanor admits to having spent a large portion of her advance for Books Three through Seven on renovating it.
That’s how she refers to her books—Book One (“When in Rome”), Book Two, etc. “I don’t even know why I do that,” she says. “Do people do that with their children?”
We nestle into a comfortable chenille sofa in her living room that looks at the view. “The people-watching alone is worth it. I’m lucky.”
That’s a theme of our conversation—luck.
It was lucky that when she graduated college she had enough money left from her inheritance to go to Italy for a month before her first job started. Lucky, too, that she met Connor Smith on her first night there, where she began a whirlwind romance that led to her being embroiled in the infamous Giuseppe bank robberies.
For those who aren’t true-crime-obsessed, ten years ago, the Giuseppe family (old-school Roman Mafia) worked out an ingenious bank-robbery scheme: rent a building near a bank, dig a tunnel to it, and then strike on a holiday when Rome was occupied.
“Connor was hired by one of the bank’s insurance companies to solve the case, and I tagged along. I’d read all of Agatha Christie growing up, and it was kind of like being thrown into one of her books. With a more dashing Hercule Poirot.” She laughs, then turns serious.
During the third robbery, the tunnel collapsed, and when it was excavated, a body was found. “At first, they thought he’d died in the collapse. But he was shot.”
The victim turned out to be Gianni Giuseppe, one of the many Giuseppe children.
Connor and Eleanor ultimately cracked the case by staking out a building that was near one of the banks that hadn’t been hit yet. Twenty million euros were recovered and Connor collected a finder’s fee of 10 percent. Antonio Giuseppe, Gianni’s father, went to prison, and one of his henchmen was convicted of Gianni’s murder.
“It was an intoxicating experience,” she says. “Italy, the danger, and falling in love for the first time. You know what first love is like…” She trails off and looks out at the ocean. “What’s that thing they say? When you fly too high, the crash is that much worse?”
It’s not an expression I’m familiar with.
“Oh God. I think I was just quoting myself! That’s embarrassing.”
When she got back from Italy, she felt compelled to write about her experiences. She wrote the first draft in three months of “coffee-fueled insanity,” as she called it, and changed most of the names and enough of the details to make a unique mystery and to “protect the guilty,” she said. “Except for Connor. He was so larger-than-life, I had to leave him in. And the rest, as they say, is history.” She laughs, then shudders, her focus pulled to the window.
Outside, a homeless man is talking to the sky. Eleanor excuses herself and goes to talk to the man, who, it becomes immediately apparent, she knows. She gives him some money and he leaves. When she comes back inside, she’s bemused. “It looks like I arranged that on purpose.”
I ask her if she did. “No. But it would be a good cover, wouldn’t it?”
What would she want to be covering up?
“Oh, this and that. Nobody’s perfect. Me least of all.”
She sits back down, distracted. She gets up in her head, she explains, the downside of being a writer. Which she wasn’t ever supposed to be. “Harper’s the writer. I’m just a hack.”
A hack who got an agent and a large book deal in record time, who’s gone on to sell ten million books, I point out.
“Yes, well, that’s what I meant about luck. There are so many better writers than me. Take Oliver Forrest … His new book is a masterpiece. It’s called ‘One for the Show’ and it’s going to win all the awards.”
And all the book sales?
“Those things aren’t linked, unfortunately. But I hope so.”
This is where a journalist is supposed to ask if the rumors about her and Forrest are true. That they dated for several years and then broke up suddenly a few years ago.
But something in her eyes stops me.
Instead, I ask her what she’s got in store for us next.
“You’ll have to read to find out,” she says, then laughs and shows me out.