Crime writer Cornelia Read acknowledges that 90% of her fiction is based on reality. “Sometimes I'm nicer in real life,” she says, “but not often.” Which is exactly what her sharp-tongued heroine, Madeline Dare, would probably say. “Except I'm a lot lazier,” Read adds, “and I don't think up snappy comebacks immediately like Madeline does.”
In the first Dare novel, A Field of Darkness (2006); the second, The Crazy School (2008); and the upcoming Invisible Boy (Mar.), all from Grand Central, Madeline tangles with more murderers than Read ever has, but still, the tales are “mostly memoir.” She's “morbidly fascinated by crime as the concrete embodiment of the human psyche's dark side” and uses the form of the mystery novel to weave elements of her own life and the lives of her family into compelling whodunits. Having grown up all over the United States, Read, 46, describes herself as an “itinerant diaspora girl,” much like Madeline, who shares her creator's distaste for staying in one place too long. Perpetually searching for “ her people,” Read says the crime fiction community “feels more like home than any place I've lived.”
In Field, Madeline is working for a local paper in Syracuse, N.Y., and becomes fixated on the decades-old slaying of two young women at a state fair. This was a story Read first heard from her father-in-law when she and her then husband were living in Syracuse, just like Madeline and her farm guy husband, Dean. In Crazy, Madeline teaches at a remote boarding school in the Berkshires, just as Read did, though the murder—the suspicious death of one of the troubled students—came from her imagination.
Invisible Boy is Read's most personal novel yet. Her cousin, Cate Ludlam, provided the inspiration for the story, set in 1990. Working for a mail-order book catalogue company in Manhattan (based on Read's own job), Madeline meets her distant cousin—also named Cate Ludlam—who coordinates the volunteer effort to rehabilitate Prospect Cemetery in Queens. Madeline offers to pitch in and during her first day stumbles upon the skeleton of a murdered three-year-old boy. When Read first met the real Cate, who like her fictional counterpart was renovating the cemetery, she heard about the discovery of a child's skeleton and the story haunted her.
If Field and Crazy were whodunits, Invisible is a “why-dunnit.” The murdered boy's identity is revealed early on and it is the trial of his accused killers that drives the action. Intertwined with Madeline's growing obsession with the case is a shocking revelation about past events in her own family. Again, Read's life intruded on her fiction. “When my sister heard that I was writing about a little kid,” Read says, “she told me that I should write about what happened to her,” an event that Read, like Madeline, hadn't known about.
But despite her sister's blessing, Read acknowledges that her family's reactions to the way she depicts the revelation of her sister's secret and their mother's involvement haven't been positive. “I've thought about every sentence three times over,” she says. But Read didn't want to put the book on hold, as her sister suggested, and listen to their mother's grievances. Read is quick to point out that she has tremendous compassion for her mother, who “kept us fed and clothed and as safe as she knew how and then took in a fourth kid who had nowhere to go. I really look forward to being able to show that side of her in future books.”
As Madeline's fictional life slowly catches up to her own, Read says she's struggling with her fourth novel, tentatively set a few years after Invisible in Boulder, Colo. “I'm going back to that year in my life when I thought both my kids were smart and healthy and perfect and my marriage was happy.” By the next year, one of her twins (born in 1994) had been diagnosed with autism, and she discovered her husband was having an affair. Read would love to do a stand-alone novel after this fourth Dare story and then write a fifth Dare novel, where Madeline—whom Read plans to also give twins—is living in Cambridge, Mass., and dealing with her daughter's autism. It's important, she says, to make this autism-centric book a crime story “because I think it could really get to the heart of the ugliness that abounded in the therapeutic community and the history of how mothers of kids with this condition were treated.”
For each novel, Read shaves off a layer of her life and refashions it to fit Madeline's world. “It's weird,” she says, “that often the truest things people say strain credulity to the point that only dogs can hear.”
