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Dear Elizabeth:
I enjoyed reading Children of the Savage City and a copy of the review I will be publishing in a few days is at the end of this email.
I thought about the Amanda Knox case while reading the book.
Monica Lissom and Kami Washington in your book and Knox were attractive young American women charged with murder in Italy.
It is always convenient for police and the public to think of an outsider, preferably someone from another country, as the killer. In the Knox case, both Knox and the actual killer were not Italian.
Knox, unlike Monica and Kami, had no defence counsel beside her when she was aggressively questioned over four days.
I thought if Knox had a liaison unit like Phoenix Seven assisting her defence counsel she would not have been caught up in the Byzantine Italian criminal justice system and, if there had been a trial, would have been found not guilty.
Was the Knox case at least a partial inspiration for Children of the Savage City?
Reading about Knox’s trial I thought she should never have been convicted. I considered the evidence against her weak, especially when the real killer was convicted. It took an appeal for Knox to be freed. As ultimately found by the appellate judges, the authorities charging her had tunnel vision ignoring and/or contorting the evidence that showed Knox was innocent.
Do you have any thoughts on that case?
There was an aspect of the Children of the Savage City that troubled me.
I regretted the number of bodies. I neither think a noir thriller nor a noir mystery needs double digit bodies to be effective but I have come to believe it has become expected of American published thrillers.
I believe that you and S.A. Cosby are two of the most talented and skilled crime fiction writers of the 2020’s.
I struggle with the many bodies in his books and now with the body count in Children of the Savage City.
After reading King of Ashes and posting my review I added a second post on the meaning of life in thriller noir fiction. A link is below. That post explores some of my regrets over a high body count.
I am confident each of you can create abundant drama without double digit bodies and hope your publishers are not encouraging you to have lots of bodies.
I would be glad if your next book has fewer bodies.
I appreciated your response to my review and email on May the Wolf Die. If you are able to reply to this email and willing to share your response I will post it when I post this email on my blog in about a week.
All the best.
Bill
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Dear Bill,
Thank you for your letter. You're right, I didn't catch it earlier - although I suspect this had more to do with the hectic book tour than a mistaken address. Thank you also for the generous review of Children of the Savage City. It means a lot that you read my books so closely and ask such sharp questions.
On Amanda Knox: I don't think I deliberately set out to write her case into the book, but I do remember being struck by it at the time, and I suspect it was somewhere in my mind as Monica and Kami's story took shape. What stayed with me (and what you put your finger on so well) is how quickly an outsider becomes the convenient suspect, how an unfamiliar system can sometimes swallow a person, and how few protections exist once cognitive biases take hold.
On the body count... that's something I genuinely wrestle with in my writing. I agree with you that this has become somewhat expected of the genre. But I'm less interested in writing towards a particular expectation. Rather, I want to serve the story - never the spectacle. I believe that fiction is one of the best ways we have to tell the truth. It is the primary reason I write - and I think it's my job as an author. If I deliberately misrepresent the world (e.g. if I glorify violence or shy away from it), I do a disservice to the truth.
Thank you again for the care you put into these reviews, Bill. Please do post this, and I'll look out for your next piece on meaning in noir fiction.
Warmly,
Elizabeth
Elizabeth Heider
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