MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Crime fiction queen Karin Slaughter's new book opens on a hot, hot summer night in Georgia. It is Madison Dalrymple's 15th birthday. She's got a big night planned with her best friend. And then both girls disappear. The police find their bikes abandoned, glow-in-the-dark beads still snapped onto the spokes, pink streamers still hanging from the handlebars. Then the police find blood. All that, plus the title, "We Are All Guilty Here," clue you in that there will be no easy or happy answers to what's happened to the girls. Karin Slaughter, welcome.
KARIN SLAUGHTER: Thank you.
KELLY: You have been writing crime novels for how many years now?
SLAUGHTER: Oh, boy, do we have to say? (Laughter) Twenty-five years.
KELLY: Twenty-five years. Is a scene like that one that I just summarized still tough to write?
SLAUGHTER: Well, yes and no. I mean, part of the fun of being a writer is being in the headspace of someone completely unlike you and trying to capture their voice. The other part of the fun is, you know, taking out your own angst as a person. And I clearly remember being that age and wanting to get out of my small town and having incredibly stupid plans of how that was going to happen. So in a lot of ways, it was fun to write. And the bad part doesn't really happen until the end, so I had some fun being in Madison's head for a little while.
KELLY: Yeah. Go back to the setting. This book is set in Clifton County, Georgia. I grew up in Georgia. Am I right in thinking, there is no Clifton County, right?
SLAUGHTER: There is not.
KELLY: You made it up.
SLAUGHTER: We have more counties than any other state but Texas, but that's not one of them. Yeah, I wanted something that was fictional so I could lie and actually not have to worry about people saying I got Main Street wrong, that if you take a left, you're going to be on a different road. But I wanted to capture all the things that I loved and hated about growing up in a small town myself - Jonesboro, Georgia - and talk about that existence. And I'd be lying if I didn't say I was thinking a little bit about the Murdaughs and how you had this one family controlling this town for generations and how that corruption eventually burned the town out.
So I wanted to have a family that was running things. And you have good ones and bad ones in the rich Cliftons and the poor Cliftons. And they're in law enforcement and in the law and all over the place. And so that was really my goal of writing Clifton County, was to talk about this family, sort of like a "Yellowstone" but in the South.
KELLY: Well, my producer who grew up in a small town in South Carolina would like you to know that you completely nailed small Southern town dynamics. She was like, oh, my God, the gossip and the backhanded compliments and the way everybody is in everybody's business - totally accurate.
SLAUGHTER: Well, bless her heart. Tell her I said thank you.
KELLY: Bless her heart is one of those backhanded compliments, usually.
SLAUGHTER: (Laughter).
KELLY: Usually, what....
SLAUGHTER: Well, she did grow up in...
KELLY: ...Follows is not so nice.
SLAUGHTER: She did grow up in the Carolinas, so I am being kind.
KELLY: (Laughter) All right, so stay with the Clifton family and introduce us to Emmy Lou Clifton. She's a cop. Her dad, Gerald Clifton, is the sheriff. I loved her. I thought she was totally tough and also totally relatable.
SLAUGHTER: Well, you know, she's really having a very older-millennial, Gen X existence because she's raising her young son, and she's taking care of her parents who are starting to get into that elderly category. So she's balancing that a lot when we meet her. She's in a bad marriage, and she's really just stuck in very bad places. But one thing she's good at is being a police officer. She's a deputy in the sheriff's department. And she has a really wonderful relationship with her father. It's interesting because a lot of times, when you hear advice or things like that from your parent, your first response is to automatically hate them. And, you know, there's that old saying that as soon as I learn my mother was right about everything, I had a daughter telling me I was wrong.
KELLY: (Laughter).
SLAUGHTER: But Emmy and Gerald have a very good relationship. He's a mentor to her in policing and in life.
KELLY: So if I could get a little bit into your background and what you're trying to do here. I looked. You are the same age as I am, exactly. And I grew up in Atlanta, so, like, it sounds like about an hour west of where you grew up, is that right?
SLAUGHTER: About, yeah.
KELLY: Yeah. I mention it because that means we both grew up with what became known as the Atlanta child murders, 1979 to 1981. And they kept pulling the bodies of children out of the woods and out of the river. It changed my childhood, made my parents less willing just to let me ride my bike around until dark because they wanted to know where the kids were. Did you have a similar experience?
SLAUGHTER: Absolutely. There was a definite before and after. And, of course, the terrifying commercials 'cause we're Gen X - right? - so our parents had...
KELLY: Yeah
SLAUGHTER: ...To be reminded to be parents to their children, saying, you know, it's 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are? Even though, as you said, I was an hour away from Atlanta where most of the crimes were happening, there were some bodies that floated down the Chattahoochee and got as far as into the top part of Clayton County, into Forest Park. And Jonesboro is in Clayton County, so that touched a little bit on our community, but it made us very wary of strangers where we weren't before.
KELLY: Well, and did it make you more of a writer or influence that decision? I'm asking because it - I think it played a role in my decision to become a journalist, to try to understand what was happening in my community, in my town. It sounds like maybe for you, it was part of your becoming interested in crime and also the people who fight it.
SLAUGHTER: Absolutely. And, you know, I read all sorts of crime novels, probably much younger than I should have. I mean, no 10-year-old should be reading "Helter Skelter." It all went hand in hand for me, but definitely the Atlanta child murders were seminal in my development as both a reader and a writer.
KELLY: People who haven't read your books but are listening to us talk about one of them may be surprised to learn your books often end, I won't say with a happy ending, but let's say on a note of hope. How hard is that to pull off when you're writing about such dark, dark things?
SLAUGHTER: It used to be a lot easier. Given where we are right now, it's hard to find hope in places. And I think with Emmy especially, I'm working on the second novel in this series right now, I wanted to leave her in a place where there was a feeling that now her life was really starting, you know? I wrote about her at very different times in her life. And I wanted to talk about what it's like to be a woman in your 30s, in your 40s and then, not that I've gotten there, but in your 60s. I mean, there are things that really bother you when you're 30 that by the time you hit 40, you just don't care anymore, parenting being one of them. You know, are they alive? Can they pay their bills? Are they responsible human beings? That becomes your criteria as opposed to some micromanaging that might take place when you're in your 30s.
KELLY: Yeah, like, the rest is gravy as long as they're healthy and...
SLAUGHTER: (Laughter) Exactly.
KELLY: ...Paying their taxes.
SLAUGHTER: Are they in prison?
KELLY: You did good.
SLAUGHTER: Yeah, exactly. So, you know, Emmy's - her perspective has shifted. I don't know a woman alive who would not be a millionaire if they had a quarter for every time they worried about what a man thought about them in their 20s. And by their 30s, they're just, like, OK, well, what's on Netflix?
KELLY: Karin Slaughter - her new novel is "We Are All Guilty Here." Thank you so much.
SLAUGHTER: My pleasure.
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