We Were Killers Once
In 1965, Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood, long considered a true crime masterpiece . It described the brutal 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcombe, Kansas, by Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Both men were convicted and executed for the crime.
Another family, the Walkers, was killed in Florida a month after the Clutter family. Capote dismissed the idea that Hickock and Smith killed them, because Perry Smith told him they were somewhere else at the time.
Becky Masterman wonders if Smith misled Capote. She takes a new look at the story, using fiction to reimagine what happened.
She wonders if there was a third man, just a boy at the time, who travelled with Hickock and Smith and was involved in both killings. Someone who evaded discovery but is still alive, and worries that more recent forensic methods (especially DNA analysis) could still convict him.
Masterman’s protagonist, retired FBI agent Brigit Quin, remembers as a child hearing about the Walker family murders. But the Walker case was never solved, and Brigit — now a private investigator — starts wondering again who killed them.
Her husband Carlo, a retired Catholic priest, turns out to have some mementos from his days as a prison chaplain that make him a target of that third man. Brigit’s investigations lead her and Carlo into danger, and she’s desperate to find a way to save both of their lives.
Two things I love about Becky Masterson:
Her first novel, Rage Against the Dying, began as a National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project in 2005. (I love that because my novel, Not Your Child, also began as a NaNoWriMo project, though mine was in 2017.)
Her protagonist, Brigit Quinn, is in her sixties. When Masterson first queried agents, she was told “nobody is interested in a woman over thirty.” But something happened — Helen Mirren at the Oscars, perhaps? — and it turns out there’s a market for a smart, fearless older woman as a leading character.
Brigit Quinn is something of an alter ego for Masterson. For one thing, both are retired (Quinn from the FBI, Masterson from her job as acquisitions editor for a publisher of forensic science and law enforcement books). And both are married to former priests: Quinn’s husband left the Catholic priesthood, while Masterson’s husband was Episcopal.
NaNoWriMo was not Masterson’s first crack at the writing life. She has a graduate degree in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University, and had subsequently written six novels, though none of them sold.
In her fifties, she met and married the Reverend Frederick Masterman. Three months after their wedding he retired and they moved to Tucson, Arizona. She continued working as an editor from there.
Then, on a lark, she challenged him to write a novel for NaNoWriMo. Both of them plunged in, and to her chagrin he was a faster writer than she was. She decided she’d write a mystery, since she knew some top people at the FBI and Scotland Yard through her editing work. And, as a literary novelist (albeit unpublished) she thought a mystery would be easy to write.
It proved to be harder than she expected. That draft took her six weeks (not just a month), but she’d managed to create Brigit Quinn. Masterman’s first effort at finding an agent for this book failed — but a few years later, another agent told her “I’ve been looking for this character for years.” The novel still needed several rewrites before it became Rage Against the Dying, but the effort paid off: published in 2013, it was shortlisted for Best First Novel (the Edgar), Best Crime Novel (CWA Gold Dagger Award), and the ITV Thriller Award.
Masterson’s Twitter profile says she’s “riding the wave of 'boomer noir' with sexy and tough character Brigid Quinn.” She and her husband still live in Tucson.
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