HALLIE EPHRON: Long buried secrets… For mystery writers they're the golden threads woven into our novels.
Today we’re delighted to host three-time Agatha award winner Leslie Budewitz, writing this time out as Alicia Beckman, with a just-published novel that began with her own golden threads.
Alicia Beckman/Leslie Budewitz: Fifteen books and I’m finally going home again, on the page.
Blind Faith, written as Alicia Beckman, is my fifteenth book and second standalone suspense novel. And in all those words on all those pages, only once before, in a short story, have I set anything in the town where I was born and raised, Billings, Montana, even though it’s a place I love and home to many stories.
An oddity of publishing is that by the time a book comes out, an author has usually written another book and is well into a third. I started Blind Faith in the summer of 2016, thought it was finished in early 2019, then revised it yet again in 2020. I worked on it between other projects and honestly can’t tell you how many other books and stories I’ve written since starting it. So I’ve been going back over my book journal to remind myself of the process. (Thank you to the late Sue Grafton for the brilliant tip to keep a journal for each book, to keep track not only of story ideas but your own doubts and questions.)
Boy, was I surprised by what I discovered, especially the process of overcoming doubt and finding the story. Though I’ve been practicing law for decades, I’d never written anything with a lawyer as a main character. (Corpse, yes, but that doesn’t count.) As this story emerged, I knew it was best told through multiple points of view and a dual time line, a contemporary cold case investigation interspersed with scenes from the past. Could I pull that off? Could I find the right factual twists to unearth the deep emotions that drive psychological suspense?
And I found lists of things I remembered from childhood, like this one:
Let me explain that last one. For many years, my parents bowled on Saturday nights at an alley not far from our house. It was a family-friendly place, with a kids’ play area and a lunch counter run by one of the bowlers. When he was in a good mood, he’d mix cherry Cokes and Green River sodas for the kids.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who knew what a Green River was, so maybe it was a regional treat or Mr. Tollefson’s own invention, taking its name from the thick green syrup he mixed by hand with flavors, then added carbonation to create a lemon-lime soda.
The bowling alley also had a bar, called the Jubilee, and occasionally my parents would stop for a drink with other bowlers after the last pin fell. Kids were—still are—allowed in bars in Montana, and I enjoyed sitting in the curved leather banquette, the neon beer signs flickering in the windows, and listening to the adults talk. It was the late 1960s and talk covered the range of issues burning across the country.
One thing they did not talk about were labor unions, particularly the United Mine Workers, despite the union’s strong presence in the state and the national ruckus over allegations of corruption, rigged elections, and misuse of power and influence by union leaders, namely its president, Tony Boyle. Why? Because the head of the local, a kind, nondescript man who bowled in the same league as my parents, was Tony Boyle’s brother. A few years later, Tony Boyle was charged with embezzlement and later with conspiracy for the murders of a rival, his wife, and daughter, and was convicted. He died in prison.
Is that not fascinating, how one brother’s ambitions focus on the ten pin while the other plots a gruesome murder for hire?
When I started Blind Faith, I wanted to write about Tony Boyle, but he was too old to be connected to the key events, involving two teenage girls who meet in 1981 and again in 2016 as middle-aged women. But I could take what I perceived as his ruthlessness, his seeming talent for using people against each other, and the determination to escape the hardscrabble life of a mining family, and play that out on a local stage.
Then I read a lengthy newspaper feature about the Rainbow Bar in Billings, still owned by the same family that founded it as a beer hall shortly after Prohibition. The Jubilee was long gone, but after a dip into divedom and a thorough scrubbing, the Rainbow thrives. I hadn’t been in it in years, but could easily picture the block, a long row of two- and three-story redbrick buildings facing the railroad tracks on the edge of downtown.
I could see one of those women, lawyer Lindsay Keller, walking down the street, passing under the curved neon sign, and reaching for the old brass door handle.
While nothing on that list from the early days of Blind Faith except the school and the pop made its way into the book, those lists set my conscious and subconscious wheels turning. A lake. Brothers. A ruthless man. A fast car and a forbidden party. A murdered priest. A lawyer haunted by her choices. And a bar, where an old man mixes Green Rivers and whiskey-and-sodas with equal ease.
Readers, is there a notorious crime or criminal from your childhood that still haunts you? (Or maybe a sweet treat, lost in a childhood memory?)
Thanks to Crooked Lane Books, one lucky reader will win a copy of Blind Faith. (US addresses only.)
