Guest Post : On "Nowhere To Run" - Lee Murray

 

Today is a wonderful day as it marks the release of Nina D'Angelo's debut novel

"Nowhere to Run" to the world.

It can be found for sale at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BDRVGY8 

 

To Help Celebrate the release of the novel , fellow Authoress Lee Murray - author of "A Dash of Reality" and "Battle of the Birds" available for sale at http://www.oceanbooks.co.nz/ has written an amazing piece for us at The Phantom Paragrapher.

 

 Profile of a Crime Writer

By Lee Murray

With the recent release of Nina D’Angelo’s psychological crime thriller Nowhere to Run, her chilling debut novel, I’ve been pondering the make-up of this strange breed of writers whose genre of choice is one of suspense, murder and gore. Why go for tales of darkened rooms and trails of blood when there are so many other equally-entertaining lighter genres to stick one’s teeth into, and without the need to trawl the net for lessons in where to best slide one’s blade in order to prolong a victim’s death? Who are this special breed who delight in the macabre? Perhaps it is an inherent trait, a dark kernel gently nurtured over time. Perhaps these were the children who picked the wings off flies and whose birthday Barbie dolls would be discovered in the bottom of the toy box, legs twisted and their heads removed.

Take Juliet Hulme: in 1954, the teenager and her friend, Pauline Parker, carried out the brutal murder of Parker’s mother (since the subject of Peter Jackson’s acclaimed 1994 film Heavenly Creatures). The two girls plot the murder in advance, Hulme recording the details in her journal.  Then, while on a walk in Christchurch’s public gardens, when Parker’s mother bends to retrieve an ornamental stone the girls have placed on the path, the pair bludgeons her to death with a brick stuffed inside a stocking. It took close to four dozen blows to kill her, so the scene would not have been pretty.  Yet, after serving time, Hulme went on to become Anne Perry, the highly successful writer of 47 crime novels.

 

Does a successful crime writer need to be slightly off-balance? Does some angst and suffering help? Certainly, Hulme’s early life in New Zealand was plagued with illness and isolation, a fact that may have lead to her distorted perception of the world. And rather than face that reality, Hulme preferred to immerse herself in the imaginary. Together, she and Parker had established a fantasy world named Borovnia, which consumed them so much that when Hulme suffered tuberculosis and the pair were separated, they would write letters to each other as if they were characters from that place. The problem was Hulme and Parker took their fantasies too far: it all went horribly wrong.  

Perhaps the same is true for the ‘King of Macabre,’ writer Stephen King. In Lisa Rogak’s 2009 biography, Haunted Heart, the author reveals how King was compelled to write blood-curdling stories in order to allay his own fears and phobias, including a dark desire to harm his children. Abandoned by his father, King’s childhood, like Hulme’s, was one of loneliness and depression, which he further fuelled with drink, drugs and other demons. Rogak maintains that King wrote away his terrors. It is as if climbing into an imaginary world saved him from himself.

So, it seems there is a type. Brooding, obsessive, genius. Is Nina D’Angelo one of these? Nothing in her author biography suggests a horrific childhood and nor has she been convicted of any bloody murders that I can tell, although she does confess to the occasional blinding headache, and seeing serial killers in shopping centre Santas. That she is keenly intelligent is without question. Perhaps abandoning herself to a fantasy world of blood-curdling crime fiction keeps Ms D’Angelo from going out and doing the same? Well, if Nowhere to Run is anything to go by, perhaps we had best hope that she keeps the books coming!