How Does that Saying Go About Art and Life?

I have to confess, I wasn’t familiar with New Mystery Reader Magazine until just the other day, but already I’m plugging one of its stories. In connection with the release of Alafair Burke’s new novel, Dead Connection--a New York City-set departure from her District Attorney Samantha Kincaid series (Judgment Calls)--New Mystery Reader presents an interview with the author in which she reveals just how her life can influence her fiction. Asked to explain the plot of Dead Connection, Burke says that it

introduces NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher. Ellie has been a detective for only a year when a more seasoned but controversial and publicity-hungry detective in the homicide squad taps her to help him track down a killer. The killer is using an online dating service to target young women. Ellie fits the profile of the victims, and she herself is haunted by thoughts of a serial killer who she believes killed her detective father where she grew up in Wichita, Kansas.

A bit later in this exchange, and in relation to a question about why, after writing three successful novels with a Portland backdrop, she decided to depart from that formula with her new book, Burke says (boldface added):

DEAD CONNECTION turned out to be the right book to make the changes. When I met my husband online a few years ago, I knew the experience was great crime fiction fodder, and the story was perfect for both a Manhattan setting and a police procedural.

Well, fiction-writing instructors are always advising that you ought to write about what you know best. And that no experience is ever really wasted on a novelist. It would seem that both of those axioms hold true in this instance.

You can read the whole interview here.

READ MORE: “The Page 69 Test: Dead Connection,” by Alafair Burke.