PUTTING GHOSTS TO REST
PUTTING GHOSTS TO REST
When you’ve had a few books out, readers ask what your favorite is. Or if they’re going to read just one, which should it be? The easy answer—the one I usually give—is whatever I just wrote, because it reflects how my writing has evolved, and what’s freshest in my mind. I never tell them to read Quiet Time.
As with many first novels, I wrote Quiet Time to put ghosts to rest. It’s not my favorite, or the one I’d want folks to read if they were giving my work a single chance. But if I had only one book in me, if I could have written just one book and no others, it’s the one I’m glad I wrote. Edited almost laughably beyond recognition, with characters invented and names and places and timelines changed to distance itself from the facts behind it, it still managed to retain enough truth to go out into the world and have an impact.
The facts are mundane, a domestic crime: on a hot summer day in 1973, a suburban housewife murdered in her garage. I was a college sophomore about to marry her son. That morning the killer—her husband, my soon-to-be-father-in-law—paid us an unexpected visit. That visit became his alibi. The family rallied around him. Talking about the murder was disloyal, taboo. Haunted, our marriage lasted nine years before it, too died. I became a lawyer and buried myself in work. Twenty years after the murder, I opened up to my new husband. The result was Quiet Time.
Quiet Time went through more than twenty drafts. The manuscript was a weird kind of laboratory, where I experimented with fiction technique while trying to get my head around the few facts I had. I was straight with Bantam as to the story’s origins. I didn’t fight them on a single change. To avoid stirring up ghosts, I published it under my new married name.
Quiet Time came out a week after 9/11. It had a short life and a quick death. But somehow the story’s emotional guts survived. And they summoned up other people’s ghosts. In 2005, when the killer’s elderly sister saw me talk about Quiet Time on a late-night rerun of a defunct public TV show, she came forward with a confession he’d made. A cold case was opened. After thirty years, the ghosts took human shape: old cops, family members, statements from witnesses long dead, and timeworn forensics brought the truth to life. And wreaked havoc on the living.
When the cold case ended, I rewrote Quiet Time as a true-crime book. But the catharsis was past, and years of court battles had hardened me. The queasy third-person memoir that resulted honored the facts but stripped them of emotion. Finally I turned to a blog. Uniting the facts and my voice in that form is the closest I’ve come to the story I always wanted to tell.
As for Quiet Time itself? I’m reissuing it.
In making that decision, I didn’t count on how painful rereading it would be. It isn’t how I write anymore. The story takes its time to unfold, the characters are more tender, the ending is tidier and less bitter than sweet. The book is strangely anachronistic. It’s not just the substitution of made-up names for real places, or the cornpone detective I invented twenty years ago because I needed to believe someone cared.
It’s the things I so desperately wished I’d known when I wrote it, those things whose absence made me recreate the crime to give it an ending I could control. And it captured the murder’s emotional impact: how it felt not to know. I decided not to edit it, to leave its words alone. Because despite my best efforts to distort them, and with no intent to do so, they went out in the world and invoked justice. Now I can let them go.
Quiet Time’s true ending was the effect it had on real life. It upended many lives, including mine, and at the end a special kind of justice prevailed. Would I write it again? The good thing about reality is I don’t have to answer that question. In real life there are no second chances. It’s always too late.
Which brings me to mortality, with a lower-case m.
Covid-19 has created new uncertain times. There are no guarantees; we don’t know where we’re headed, or what the world will look like when the pandemic ends. Meantime, we all live with ghosts—the stories we’ve wanted to tell, the ones we haven’t found the right format for, the ones we don’t know how to end. An ending can start a new chapter, or just tell a damn good story. They’ll outlive us either way.
But one thing is certain: the pandemic will create new ghosts. Now is the time to write the books we wanted to write. To put old ghosts to rest so we can make way for the new.
—
Stephanie Kane is a lawyer and award-winning author of four crime novels. Born in Brooklyn, she came to Colorado as a freshman at CU. She owned and ran a karate studio in Boulder and is a second-degree black belt. After graduating from law school, she was a corporate partner at a top Denver law firm before becoming a criminal defense attorney. She has lectured on money laundering and white collar crime in Eastern Europe, and given workshops throughout the country on writing technique. She lives in Denver with her husband and two black cats.
Extreme Indifference and Seeds of Doubt won a Colorado Book Award for Mystery and two Colorado Authors League Awards for Genre Fiction. She belongs to Mystery Writers of America, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and the Colorado Authors League.
WEBSITE: writerkane.com
COLD CASE STORY BLOG: writerkane.com/blog
FACEBOOK: /AuthorStephanieKane
QUIET TIME
Stephanie Kane does it again. Quiet Time keeps your mind thinking and your heart racing – What a great read!”
– Rikki Klieman, Court TV
“Life’s greatest dramas play out in family life. The end is riveting and a surprise—but that’s what Kane is all about.”
– The Denver Post
“Stephanie Kane is a terrific storyteller who knows how to grab the attention of the audience and keep it.”
– The Midwest Book Review
Inside his picture-perfect home, Warren Scott runs a tight ship. He demands total respect from his family. He’ll accept nothing less. The Scotts are quiet, they keep to themselves–and to the neighbors, they seem like any other family. Then the Scotts’ facade shatters one sun-drenched morning in May.
Sari Siegel is engaged to Tim Scott when his mother is found murdered. Sari barely knows the Scotts, but even she can sense the terrible secrets that seethe below the surface. Sari knows something about Peggy’s murder, but she isn’t telling… at least not yet. For if she does, her own dreams of a perfect life with Tim will shatter.
There are some family traditions no one wants to keep.
Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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