Hey, ladies! Have any dark, murderous thoughts? Ken Corday thinks you do, even if you’re loathe to admit it. In fact, he’s sure you do. From his perch in Hollywood, where he produces NBC’s daytime soap Days of Our Lives, he knows that it’s common for wives, especially wronged wives, to want to murder their husbands. And he’s dreamed up a book, Ladies of the Lake (Beaufort Books, June), where they do.

The novel, a first for Corday, features six wives, six dead husbands, a number of offspring, and the L.A. police department. His favorite character is one of the husbands, who dies on page one. His favorite female character? All of them, because they are “beautiful, wealthy, and lethal,” but his most favorite is a grande dame named Margaret, modeled after actress Maggie Smith.

“It’s easy in the affluent community I live in to find models for my characters,” he says. “I was at a barbecue at a house near a lake, and I looked at the wives present and thought, they are the ladies of the lake, and it dawned on me I had the germ of a novel.” But, he adds, “Nobody I know would do anything monstrous.”

The son of Ted and Betty Corday, who created Days of Our Lives 50 years ago (there is a big celebration of the show this fall), Corday wrote a memoir about his parents and their successful odyssey in show business (Sourcebooks, 2010).“I enjoyed writing the first book so much, and I’ve always wanted to write a novel,” he says. “In fiction you don’t have to be proper, you can say things that are titillating. With my first book I couldn’t go outside the box.”

In writing Ladies Corday “borrowed” a page from Stephen King, one of his heroes, and Raymond Chandler, whose Lady of the Lake he greatly admires. Those two authors are pillars of his writing, he says.

On the difference between producing a show for TV and writing a book for publication, he says, “A TV show is all-encompassing. The job is to watch the shop from top to bottom. With writing, it’s all on you. You don’t have a team. I found it very refreshing. A mental health break.”

Ken Corday signs ARCs today at noon at the Midpoint Trade Books booth (1357). At BookCon, he will sign on Saturday at noon at Midpoint’s booth (3174). 

This article appeared in the May 29, 2015 edition of PW BEA Show Daily.