Book Club

One of our recent Expat Book Club books was ‘Little Deaths‘ by Emma Flint. I’m the first to admit that thrillers are not my genre of choice, and I also tend to steer clear of books where children are victims of crimes. Yet this novel, which follows the story of a mother whose two young children are murdered, had me hooked. The reason for this? Well firstly, we already know the horrific fate of the children. We are not left desperately turning the pages hoping they live, and there is no ‘goryfication’ (not a real word but it should be) of the murders. Instead, ‘Little Deaths’ focuses on their mother, Ruth, and the way she is perceived and treated by the police, the press and the people in her neighbourhood.

Secondly, the writing is so assured that I couldn’t believe it was Flint’s first novel. Ruth’s world of 1960s working class New York is brilliantly observed; as a reader you are drawn right in. You can feel the relentless heat of the summer, hear the Queens’ accents, and see how the women in the neighbourhood watch and judge Ruth. I was also intrigued by the fact that the novel is based on a real case which gripped America in the late 1960s. Alice Crimmins was a divorcée and mother of two young children. One night the children disappeared and were later found dead.

Crimmins maintained her innocence but two years later – based on flimsy and circumstantial evidence – she was convicted. This was later overturned, and then she was found guilty again… and later released on parole. Did she do it? Well, she was definitely guilty of being a very attractive woman who flouted the norms of the time – she had affairs, she stayed out late, she drank. It seems the police and the press pinned the murders on her right from the start. In ‘Little Deaths’ Flint shows how Ruth is watched and judged by everyone; we see how the tabloid press reduce her to a femme fatale to sell papers and how she is immediately presumed guilty because she does not fit into the ‘good mother’ mould.

I loved Flint’s evocation of time and place, and how she gradually built up a portrait of Ruth so that we could see behind the ‘mask’ she put on. Ruth’s grief – and attempts to numb her pain with sex and alcohol – are compellingly written. Some of our book club members found it a little slow in parts; I would also say that, for me, this was more

a psychological drama than a ‘thriller’. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed it so much. I was thrilled when the author, Emma Flint, agreed to take some questions from The Expat Book Club. Thank you to Emma for being so gracious with your time and answering every question that we put to you!

The Expat Book Club interview questions with Emma Flint

‘Little Deaths’ is your debut novel; how long have you been writing for?

I’ve always written – ever since I knew what stories were, really – but I started to write seriously in my thirties. I began Little Deaths in 2010 and finished it in 2016.

We have lots of writers as well as readers in the group; do you have any advice for people who are working on their first book?

I believe that the most important thing is to read as much as you can, as often as you can. Read to find which writers you love, and work out why you love them. Find writers you don’t like, and work out why. Read other books in the genre you’re working in, and read outside your area of interest. Read poetry to find new ways of using language. Read drama to understand dialogue. Read non-fiction to give your fiction credibility and authenticity. I’d also recommend finding a writing group.

It’s impossible to write a first novel in isolation: you need support and you need feedback from readers you trust. I also needed the accountability of writing a certain number of words for my writing groups by a certain date. Most people write a first novel about something they’re passionate about, and you need the objective judgment of others to tell you whether that passion translates to the page.

It helps to find a routine that works for you – whether that’s writing 1000 words a day, or 5000 words a week, or spending ten hours a week with your novel. Work out when you’re most productive. Set aside lunchtimes or two evenings a week or find childcare for half a day each weekend – but carve out the time and then use it. Above all, don’t give up. Writing can be a long slow process – it took me three years to write a full first draft, and there were eleven more drafts before it was finished.

To make time for that amount of work, you have to believe completely in what you’re doing and that you feel you have a story to tell that only you can tell. That belief will get you through the rejections and the lack of free time and the slog and the utter exhaustion. Belief in what you’re doing will also help you decide whether the criticism you’ll get is fair or not: only you can know if changes that others suggest are right for your book.

You must have done lots of research into the case of Alice Crimmins and the murders of her children. Do you have any theories on what really happened? I realise this is an unfair question, but it is one we have all been asking each other!

I obviously don’t know the truth of what happened to the Crimmins children – and unfortunately it’s very unlikely that any more will be learned about their deaths, beyond what was uncovered during the investigation and the trial. But my starting point with the book was that it didn’t seem that the police had looked at other suspects.

Because it took so long to get enough evidence to bring Alice to trial, and because it took three court cases to return a guilty verdict, I felt there must be other versions that were at least as plausible as the official version. I wanted to write a book that felt like it could be true, both in terms of the evidence found, and from a psychological perspective – and that’s where the idea for my ending came from.

One of our members gave the following summation of ‘Little Deaths’; ‘It was the patriarchal Madonna/whore dichotomy – women were expected to be either modest, saintly angels to be placed on a pedestal or to be sinful beyond all redemption. That a woman could enjoy her independence and explore her sexuality yet still love her children simply didn’t fit into his world view. Once she was shown to be unfaithful, she was seen as capable of any crime’. Would you agree with this?

Absolutely – I think this is a great way of looking at it. There’s a line in the book: ‘a bitch like that is capable of anything’ – and I had that in mind the whole time I was writing.

Unfortunately some of that attitude is still prevalent today: look at the way the appearance of Kate McCann was analysed in the media alongside the disappearance of her daughter Madeleine. Or the way Amanda Knox’s sex life was discussed in articles about the murder of Meredith Kercher. Appearance and sexuality are clearly irrelevant to guilt or innocence, but they’re often discussed as though they can provide clues to a crime, especially when a woman is the prime suspect.

I was drawn to the story because of the sense of injustice that pervaded it, and because of my impression that the real-life Ruth was condemned for who she was, rather than what she’d done. I’m not sure that society, particularly certain areas of the media, has moved on a great deal in that respect over the past fifty years: I wanted to highlight how women are often still judged on their appearance and their sexuality more than anything else.

The opening chapter of ‘Little Deaths’, where the children go missing, is a frightening scenario, yet the book is attracting lots of interest from our book club (no doubt it includes parents). What made you write about this topic?

I first read about it when I was sixteen, and the details stayed with me until I began to write the book that would become Little Deaths. I was fascinated by a woman who could become the chief suspect in the murders of her children before the police even had confirmation they were dead. Little Deaths was borne out of my fascination with this ambiguous woman: she was a wife, brought up a Catholic and married in a Catholic church – yet she was separated from

her husband and had multiple lovers. She was a mother who claimed to be devoted to her children, yet she worked long shifts in a seedy bar instead of staying home to take care of them, and locked them in their bedroom for hours while she slept late. She was bereaved and supposedly grieving, yet she continued to dress provocatively and to apply her heavy mask of make-up in the days following the discovery of her children’s bodies.

What fascinated me about her was why she behaved the way she did. I wanted to know if there might be another story to tell, beyond the obvious surface details.

I thought ‘Little Deaths’ evoked a very strong sense of place and time, yet you are British, not American. Why did you choose to set it where and when you did? How did you go about doing the research for the background of the story?

Thank you – it’s very good to hear that Little Deaths conveys a strong sense of time and place. It wasn’t a conscious choice to write a book set in America more than 50 years ago, and had I known what a difficult task I was setting myself, I might have thought twice! It was more that I was interested in the story and in the character at the centre of it, and that story happened to be set in New York in the 60s. I read two excellent books about the original case which I mention in the acknowledgments, as well as dozens of relevant newspaper articles, but most of my research was done online.

I used Google Maps and Streetview to ‘walk’ down the streets in Queens where the story is set, to look up at the buildings, and try to get a sense of the neighbourhood where Ruth lives. I listened to Queens accents on YouTube, and I looked at thousands of photos of suburban America in the mid-60s. I also kept thinking about my own childhood: I grew up in a quiet and sometimes claustrophobic suburb on the outskirts of a city. I think anyone who grew up in an environment like that will understand the closeness of that kind of neighbourhood, and how anyone different stands out.

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