How the Book Came About
Back in 1979, when I was 23, I was a Yankee working as the city editor of a medium-sized daily in northeast Arkansas, in a town of about 30,000 people an hour from Memphis. After a year of my languishing under city council stories and Cub Scout news, the paper hired another reporter, a girl of 22 by the name of Gloria, fresh out of college. She drove a big white Buick LeSabre that never had enough gas in it, was brilliant, and was wild as hell. We were friends instantly.
Two months or so after Gloria was hired, a girl was murdered in town. Somebody called our office to tell us about it and the managing editor sent Gloria to cover it. She drove out to a field, parked, and made her way across dried-up cotton stalks to where the police were standing around the body. The girl was young – not even 18 – blonde, too thin, and dressed in a silver lamé mini-dress (yeah, I know, but it was the seventies). Her throat had been cut, and half her face was gone, dinner for what one of the eloquent cops noted was “prolly a possum.” The police stood around poking each other and grinning as the blood drained out of poor Gloria’s face, Gloria for whom death up to this point had been no more traumatic than a stiff hamster in grade school. When she got back to the office, she was inconsolable, yet somehow a-glitter about it. She wanted to catch the killer, and was the poster child for reckless youth clamoring for fame.
Unbelievably enough, it’s taken me thirty years to write about it. Of course, my account is complete fiction, as I have no idea who actually killed the silver lamé girl. Gloria, on the other hand, I talk to every week, is still brilliant, now drives an Altima full of gas, and was, in fact, the inspiration for one of the book’s main characters.
If Thine Eye Be Evil is not for the faint-of-heart, and most certainly is not a cozy mystery. It is fast-paced thriller, at times funny, at times grisly, and will (I hope) keep you on the edge of your seat.
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