Megan Abbott
Here’s all these weirdos like me...I feel like the hooker in the lobby.
Bestselling crime author Megan Abbott never considered herself a writer, but rather an academic. Her goal was to teach college literature, but she was a fan of foreboding noir crime fiction––not exactly the type of stuff found in most literature curriculums.
She especially enjoyed the work of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, James Elroy, and Raymond Chandler. “It’s the way I see the world,” she says. “I know people find them to be dark and filled with dread. I don’t see them that way. I sort of said long ago, that’s just the way I see things. I don’t experience them the way others do.”
“The stuff that always fascinated me was forbidden topics, the taboos,” she says. “It always felt most exciting to me. I wish I could give a better answer than that, but if I’m being honest. I just find it exciting.”
Lucky for her, she found New York University’s graduate program, which she describes as “a pretty liberal place and there were classes on crime fiction. They taught Hammett’s Red Harvest and James Elroy’s novels, and I got to teach about gender in noir literature.”
The first hint she might get the itch to write a novel came when she decided to write her PhD thesis on women and femme fatales in 1930s-50s noir fiction. She was interested in male writers’ point of view on the beautiful, manipulative, seductresses who used their charms to ensnare men into dangerous situations.
“When I talked to my advisors, they worried it would be hard for me to get a college faculty position. At that time there was very little scholarship for commercial crime fiction and teaching it in class. They were right. It was hard to find a job.”
She finally landed as an assistant professorship at SUNY, the State University of New York System. “I wasn’t a good teacher,” she says. “I knew that world, but it never felt right for me, but I loved to read books.”
So, she began writing fiction.
“It was just an outlet. It was my first year of tenure track teaching.” It slowly became something, and she realized she’d completed the first draft of a book she never intended to write. She began to seriously rethink her goals.
Her first noir novel, Die a Little, was set in 1950s Los Angeles. She had to use her menacing imagination because, well, she’d never been there. “I really had to find my way…It sold quite poorly. It never went into paperback, but it did get good reviews. I think that’s what saved me. And it got nominated for an Edgar for debut novel.”
Hollywood also optioned it, but as in most cases, never followed through with a movie.
Megan wasn’t familiar with the crime fiction community, so that year she attended Bouchercon, the mystery writers and fan conference, and finally felt at home. “Here’s all these weirdos like me,” she says. “It was incredible. I made so many friends. I didn’t have to explain who James M. Cain was.”
She doesn’t like to think about hitting it big in the publishing world, although she has. “It’s a bad metric for writers to think about.” Success, she says, “is based on the verities of the market,” and not necessarily on talent or the quality of the work. “I just knew once I started writing I couldn’t stop, whether people would publish me or not.”
She remembers one reader’s email for her fifth book. A woman wrote she had finished reading her novel, took it in her backyard, and burned it. “She finished it! How offended could she be?” says Megan.
She’s had bestsellers and not-so-bestsellers. In the publishing world, she says, “A lot has changed but a lot has stayed the same… I’ve seen everything that’s happened in publishing. It’s happened to me. The one thing I can be proud of is my resilience.”
“I feel like the hooker in the lobby. I’m still here.”
I’m novelist Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.
Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen