“I always wanted to be a working artist and a university professor, that was it, that was my dream.” to be hard to succeed that way because every one of my words certainly isn’t.” And, to that point, Erica keeps an unpublished manuscript in her drawer. She has retitled the effort Fatally Flawed. “That would not be a bad suspense title,” Erica says. “The reason I retitled it was because every time I went back to look at it over the years I kept thinking I really know what I’m doing now. I can take that manuscript, clean it up and sell it. But I finally realized it was fatally flawed. I had literally made every mistake a new writer makes.” Erica and her husband have been on the Northshore since 1992, after leaving New Orleans for a bigger yard and better schools for their young children. Calling herself “kind of a nut” about trees, she bemoans the Northshore’s rapid growth and the loss of green spaces to commercial development, although she says she won’t complain about the great restaurants. “I love the Northshore,” she says. “I love the schools, the teachers, the neighborhoods. It is a friendly place. There are lots of opportunities for the kids.” And then she thinks for a moment and adds, “You know it is awfully
idyllic. We used to joke and call it the Mandeville bubble, and I think it is kind of a bubble for the kids, too. It is a great place to raise a family.” Despite how well she writes about crime, Erica assures me that she has never killed anyone. She says she is as interested in the psychological threads that lead to the crime as the crime itself — and the ideas can come from anywhere. One morning after Katrina, she opened the newspaper to find a story about refrigerator graveyards. “The imagery of it was just startling, and it really called to me,” she says. “It talked about these rows and rows of refrigerators that someone had to go through, and I thought what if an EPA guy opened one and found a serial killer’s trophies?” Most of us would just see refrigerators. Erica Spindler sees a crime and builds a story around it. And, she does it well. So, you might see her on the Northshore, walking her dog or holed up in a local coffee shop. Maybe she is working her way through problems we all have, something to do with family or health, or maybe, she is committing a crime, if only in her mind.
Triple Six, Erica’s new book, came out in November. It is available in hard cover, trade paperback and e-book and can be purchased at online retailers.
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EDGE Dec 2016 | Jan 2017