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NPR's Book of the Day
Two new murder mysteries: 'Ruby Falls' and 'The Secret Lives of Murderers' Wives'
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. It's a testament to the human imagination that after all these years, people are still making murder mysteries new, fresh and exciting. We've got two for you today. In a bit, a book that turns the murder genre on its head and focuses on the wives of the murderers. But first, a closed door mystery. Well, there's not really a technical door because it takes place in a cave, but you know what I mean. It's titled Ruby Falls, named after the real life underground waterfall in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Author Jen Phillips talks to NPR's Scott Simon about being inspired by the underground and how folks just aren't the same when they're trapped in deep, damp corners of the earth.
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A psychic, his wife, his manager, a Chicago reporter and a couple of guides get stuck in a cave with a massive underground waterfall. Looking for a hat pin? No, this is no joke. There's a murder. How do they get out before there's more? The new novel Ruby Falls is set in 1932 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, shortly after a real life caver, Leo Lambert, did find an underground waterfall and named it for his wife, Ruby. Jen Phillips joins us now to talk about her novel from the studios of WBHM in Birmingham. Thanks so much for being with us.
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I'm very excited to be here. Scott thanks for having me.
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C
And I gather you saw the actual Ruby Falls years ago and that set your mind.
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TRACI yeah, I mean, I think like most people who live in the Southeast and maybe all the way up the coast, I've seen the signs for Ruby Falls my entire life. But the first time I went there was about 2018. You take a elevator down into the middle of the mountain and from the minute I stepped out, I felt like this is a place I really want to set a book. There is something about realizing there is an entire world right underneath you, different animals, different rock, different landscape entirely that has been there the entire time and you never knew about it. That is extremely interesting.
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C
Your central character, Ada, she's Drawn to the caves, isn't she?
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Yes, she, I think for a few different reasons. For one thing, there are some limits above ground of sort of what a woman is expected to do, what template you're supposed to fit. And so, yes, she is, I think, thrilled to realize there is a freedom below ground that she was unaware of. And she is someone who loves the unknown. Someone who sees a 12 inch by 12 inch crack in the middle of a rock, a big dark hole, and thinks I should go in there and see what I find. I mean, to me it feels obvious what's in there is roaches. It's definitely going to be roaches, but. So that was part of Ada too, of sort of. Who is this person who loves leaping into the dark and seeing what she finds?
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Could you read for us, please, your account? Her first solo adventure into the caves?
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Sure. The route in front of her narrows too tight and she veers around it with a kick of her foot. The rock is so clean. No mud or moss or crawling things. She maps the possibilities in front of her. And when she finds a taller space where she can raise onto her elbows, she moves faster. She is only a body, and if her mind exists at all, its only purpose is navigation. She has no thoughts other than left and right and forward and push and flatten and bend. She has no idea how many minutes have passed when she pulls herself into a larger chamber. Shoving her head and shoulders free and then pulling her legs to her chest, she shines her light on what might be a millipede embedded in the smooth rock. Fossilized, the ceiling ripples like a lake. She has found something in this dead end. Her house is still silent and the chairs at the dinner table are still empty. But she has found this.
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C
Wow. She's in love.
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Yes, exactly. I think she is in love with a world she never knew existed. You know, I wanted. When I set up this book, I really liked the idea of a woman in middle age, whose house is empty, who finds the world to be not the end of a narrative of the notion of marriage and kids, but instead sees a narrative unfurling in front of her. And that is adventure and discovery and romance. And a little bit of murder.
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Yeah, little bit of murder. Tell us about the publicity stunt that sets the story in motion. Because by the 1930s, the Depression set in and Leo Lambert, the Leo Lambert of your novel, gets an idea involving a hat pin.
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Right. So the beginning of the novel, the discovery of Ruby Falls, is. Is historically accurate. And it was a very poor time to open a natural Wonder at a point when most people were struggling to put food on the table, there was really not a lot of spare money to spend to have a nice Sunday out and enjoy a walk through the caves. The notion of a mind reader who says he can find a hidden hat pin in miles of caves using only the power of his mind is from a real life publicity stunt in South Dakota at Wind Caves that took place in the 1890s. A supposed psychic came to town and said the exact same thing, although he in real life was blindfolded when he went down into a much larger system of caves. So yeah, I liked the idea of that whole setup of what happens when you get all these people underground, removed from the world as they know it, and the time starts ticking down and the flashlights start going dark.
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C
Your novel reminded me of the fact that decades ago, I'll just refer to them respectfully, of self proclaimed psychics could be taken quite seriously, couldn't they?
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Right?
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I mean, I think we're looking at a time where science is also expanding. So the notion, the notion of talking to the dead, you know, sort of as we learned about germs and all the things we couldn't see that were scientifically believed, there was a lot of gray area there, just what else might be real that we can't see. There was that line, I think, between science and spiritualism that people had not quite figured out. And yeah, a lot of people felt like it was very plausible.
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Did you ever feel claustrophobic while writing this novel?
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Well, thank goodness, no. I did some caving in Raccoon Mountain, which is in Chattanooga. Different set of caves, caves than Ruby Falls. Like you can stand up at first and then pretty early on, the first little pass you come to, you get down on your knees and the guide shines a flashlight and shows you how there's this sort of slot in the rock and it's about a foot and a half tall and you're supposed to get on your belly and you slither and she kind of shows you the map you're going to take and just kind of crawl flat where you can't even lift your head for about two minutes before you pop out the other side. You sort of see the light and not the darkness. You see the space that's there instead of everything that's beyond. And so it would have been a problem, I think, if I'd had a sudden attack of claustrophobia.
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C
But as Ada points out, I believe darkness and tight spaces don't always bring out the best in people.
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No. I have a friend who's a therapist who just finished the book, and she always tells me things that I've done that I was unaware of psychologically. But she talked a lot about about phobia and psychosis and just how this set of circumstance could bring out the sort of deepest, darkest part of you that you are able to mostly keep hidden. And that is what happens. I don't think I knew any of the technical terms for it, but I think, yes, you put people underground in tight quarters for hour after hour, and the parts that they might have managed to tamp down are not quite so tampable. And so Murder in Caves and all the sort of dread and suspense of this, I think are a very nice way of cracking open the characters.
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Gin Phillips, her new novel, Ruby Falls. Thank you so much for being with us.
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D
Thank you, Scott.
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B
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NPR we all know that murderers are generally men, and we sometimes find that they're charming, charismatic men who can hide the fact that they are, well, killers. The novel the Secret Lives of Murderers Wives by Lizzie Pook is about a group of women whose husbands are murderers and the friendships that grow within this fairly exclusive club. Here's NPR's Asia Rascoe.
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British author Lizzie Pook is known for historical fiction, but there's another subgenre that's fascinated her for a long time, even back in college. That's when she told her university advisor that she wanted to do her dissertation on serial killers.
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And he was absolutely appalled. You know, he was really worried for my well being. He made me promise in writing not to contact any serial killers in prison.
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Two decades later, Lizzie Pook is more interested in the women who never suspected their husbands were gruesome killers. Her new novel, written under the pen name Elizabeth Arnott, is a thriller set in 1960s California called the Secret Lives
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of Murderers Wives Criminals wives victims of their husbands indiscretions sometimes had a certain look. Margot could see it in newspaper articles and rolling coverage on the tv, especially those wives who loyally followed their husbands to court, adamant that their Joe Bob Frank could never be responsible for such abominable acts. He was such a kind man. They'd parrot in interviews after trials that laid out in scrupulous, incontestable detail how their husbands had slaughtered multiple people. He never raised a fist at home. We're not simpering wives. We learned the truth. We got mad, we, we moved on, says Margot. Is this really moving on? Beverly asks doubtfully. I just had to relive everything in front of a room full of cops. Well, I'm drinking cocktails at 2:30 in the afternoon. I've moved on, Margot replies. I made melon balls. Elsie shrugs weakly.
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The three characters in the book, they found each other after their husband's crimes were uncovered. And they kind of have this friendship, but it's also like a support group. Can you tell us first about Margot and Elsie?
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Yeah. So these women are part of a club that nobody wants to be part of. Elsie, she's trying to work her way up in a newsroom she's never really listened to, but she's very tenacious. She has reacted to her husband's crimes with action momentum. You know, she's seeking out facts at every opportunity, so she sort of arms herself with knowledge so that it won't happen to her again. And then you have Margot. She loves the Hollywood studio party. She loves dressing up and drinking and sort of putting on a show and a facade. And she wants to be seen as to not care about what happened to her. But really deep down, she is very fragile, very vulnerable and damaged by what has happened.
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And tell us about Beverly, because she seems completely shaken to her core. She's the only one of them that's a mother. How is she coping?
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Beverly, or Bev, is the one character who is really struggling with the duality of the man that she lived with and loved. She finds it very difficult to see the father of her children as a monster. She knows what he has done is terrible. And she has a son, and she's terrible that her son might have inherited the same rotten core as her husband.
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As the women are moving forward with their lives, they become aware of a series of suspicious deaths of several women in the town. And they're, you know, the spidey senses start tingling like they realize something is going on. But they seem more determined to investigate these crimes than the police. Why is that?
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Well, I do think they want to stop it happening to other women and they want to atone. The FBI's Behavioral Science Unit was set up in the early 1970s. I thought, you know, wouldn't it be funny a little joke to women, a little joke to myself to have, you know, three housewives sort of beating them at their game and scooping the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit and starting to profile these. These sorts of men because they've lived through it. They, in hindsight, can see the signs. But also mid-1960s was a time where in some states, women weren't allowed to serve on juries because it was thought that they were too fragile, too sensitive, and too compassionate to be objective. And law enforcement would have probably held those same views, you know, that they were too fragile and compassionate to be able to solve these crimes. But I sort of wanted to give them a chance to get one over on them.
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Well, you know, and I'm not gonna give anything away because it is very twisty as they try to stop this killer. But, you know, something that comes up is that as women, you don't really know where the danger is going to come from. I mean, it could be from a stranger, but often it is from a loved one. And you also have to kind of always be vigilant, and that's a. A hard way to live. But do you think that's why so many women are into true crime?
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F
Yes, I think you're absolutely right there. I think part of our fascination with true crime as women, and it is a genre that many women are drawn to, part of that is about knowing the beast, getting all the information that we can about something that poses a risk to us. Because we are so used to having to plan every step of our lives with a sort of risk assessment. I think we are comforted by true crime stories. There's very often a female victim at the beginning, and then there's an investigation, and then there is closure and justice. And so I do think we find comfort in that.
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E
And all three of these women are dealing with shame, with guilt for the actions of their husbands, which, I mean, they. They weren't a part of it, but they are kind of carrying it. Right. What did you want to examine about that shame that can often come on women because of the actions of the men in their lives?
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Well, I do think it's very interesting that the one question that we often think of, and I say this because I thought it too, how can they not have known? And when I started writing this book, I actually do think that I held a small amount of judgment. You know, I thought they didn't know, but I would definitely know if I was in that situation. I'm sure I'd know. I'm sure there would be something that would give it away. But actually, if you do look at the stories of real women who have been through this, they didn't know. You know, they couldn't have known because forensic psychologists or experts who deal with serial killers, they will tell you that most often serial killers are so skilled at manipulation, so skilled at control, it is almost impossible to know what they're hiding.
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And so you want people to come away from reading this novel to have more sympathy and compassion, not just for serial killers wives, but just to have compassion for women in general who may be caught up in these sorts of situations?
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Absolutely. And I think it's also possibly acknowledging that the very same thing could happen to us. There were serial killers wives who were attorneys. You know, I've spoken to women whose husbands had affairs, and they were so, so, so shocked that they couldn't see what was going on that there was no clue. They always thought that they would have an inkling. But anyone is vulnerable to being controlled, to being manipulated, no matter your background or intelligence level. You know, that is just part of being a human. So, yes, compassion, yes, empathy and yes, the sort of understanding that this can really happen to anyone.
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That's Elizabeth Arnott. Her new novel is the Secret Lives of Murderers of Wives. Thanks so much for talking with us today.
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Thank you so much.
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That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day.
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Let us know what you think you
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can write to us at BOOK OF the day@npr.org I'm Andrew Limbong. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and Ivy Buck and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Emiko Tamagawa, Todd Munt, Adriana Gallardo, Ava Pukach, Seri Handle, Jordan Marie Smith, Justine Kennan, Lena Muhammad, Samantha Balaban, Shannon Rhodes, Melissa Gray and Margo Barline. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.
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