interviews
KARIN SLAUGHTER B Y J AY M AC D O N A L D
© ALISON ROSA
Busting the all-boys club on the Atlanta police force
I
n a meteoric career that has produced two series and 13 crime novels in as many years, Georgia native Karin Slaughter rocketed to international bestseller status by granting women their rightful place at murder scenes and morgues.
Yet while her growing fan base eagerly awaits each new installment of her Atlanta series featuring Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent Will Trent (Triptych, Fractured, Broken) and its country cousin starring Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton (Faithless, Indelible, Blindsighted), the restless Slaughter has kept busy crafting her new novel, exploring time travel—and bracing herself for space flight. What!? Time travel? Space flight? Whose genre is this, anyway? Slaughter admits her unquenchable thirst to break new ground has prompted a mid-career interest in exploring neighboring galaxies, literary and otherwise. How did a small-town Southern girl wind up doing weightless somersaults aboard the infamous suborbital “vomit comet,” much less set her sights on a future space flight aboard the Virgin Galactic?
COP TOWN
By Karin Slaughter
Delacorte, $27, 416 pages ISBN 9780345547491, audio, eBook available
THRILLER
14
More about that later, though in a way, the process accelerated with Cop Town, her first standalone novel, which takes place Slaughter back in mid1970s Atlanta interviewed when cops six retired were men and officers to get women weren’t a feel for the welcome. Slaughter first challenges wrote about the period faced by in Criminal female cops (2012), in in the 1970s. which she united characters from her two series. “I had so much fun that I wanted to visit that time period again,” she explains. Just one problem: “I couldn’t come up with a good reason to put my characters Will and Sara back there, mainly because they would have been children then,” she says. Slaughter herself was only 3 years old at the time. So she created two very different protagonists: veteran patrolwoman Maggie Lawson, whose brother and uncle are part of the all-male good-ol’-boy network on the Atlanta force, and her new rookie partner Kate Murphy, a Jewish neophyte from a privileged background whose husband was killed in Vietnam. Together, they battle the blatant racism, sexism and cultural ostracism of the day, while working their way into the search for a serial killer who is targeting their ranks. Slaughter called upon the best possible resource to bring her characters to life. “I talked to six female police officers who are now retired and
in their 60s. If you want to get the truth about something, talk to a 60-year-old retired woman!” she chuckles. “I thought it would be really interesting to explore the lives of patrol officers, because that’s something I haven’t really done before; normally, they’re detectives. And because there was so little structure to Atlanta policing at the time, a lot of patrol officers did detective work. Sometimes they had to, because the detectives were passed out drunk in their cars. Honestly, that was a real problem!” To prepare for her immersion into the disco era, Slaughter chose her bedside reading accordingly. “One of the books I was reading while working on Cop Town was Fear of Flying by Erica Jong,” she says. “Reading it now, this line stuck out to me: ‘An unmarried woman is taking a vow of poverty.’ And for a lot of women today, that’s true. When you combine households and you have someone—a spouse or partner—it makes things easier. If you look at the number of
single mothers who are trapped in poverty, it really resonated for me.” So did the changes America was facing back then. “It definitely mirrors what we’re going through today: coming out of a very disastrous war, the economy was in the toilet, women’s pay equality, homophobia, racism. It’s easier to talk about these things in the past, because if you talk about them in the present, then you’re kind of a whiny bitch. But if you say, hey, look how bad it was in the ’70s, then you can let people draw their own conclusions,” she says. She was shocked to hear firsthand accounts of the outright sexism of the day, which was slowly crumbling, in large part due to federal intervention. “It was a huge change, and like any change, most of the guys didn’t want it to happen,” she says. “In Atlanta, they were also dealing with the fact that the good-ol’-boy network wasn’t white anymore; it was black, and [women] were excluded from it. As Maggie says in the book,