The reason I started writing about the death penalty is that almost everyone gets it wrong. In the worlds of thrillers, television and movies, the people sentenced to death are either depraved killers, or else innocent and wrongly convicted. Police detectives and prosecutors risk their lives to bring conscienceless murderers to justice. Defense attorneys—young, brilliant, and well-funded—swoop in to save their guiltless clients at the last minute from the death chamber.

The reality is that inmates on death row are about as diverse as people outside prison, and their stories are much more nuanced than a simple up-or-down of guilt or innocence. The death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the worst of the worst, but the processes by which it is imposed sweep up people as young as 18 and as old as their grandparents, people who have long criminal histories and people with no criminal background at all, defendants who committed horrible crimes and others who were minor accomplices—as well as those who were innocent and convicted by a miscarriage of justice. A disproportionate number of them are black or Hispanic, and many are mentally ill or developmentally disabled.  

"The reality is that inmates on death row are about as diverse as people outside prison, and their stories are much more nuanced than a simple up-or-down of guilt or innocence."

Another fact is that yes, there are heroic figures among criminal defense attorneys, but there are a lot of people on death row, and the heroes can't rescue them all. So most of us are more or less footsoldiers in the ongoing war, and we do the best we can for our clients with the skills and resources we have and hope that what we can do will be enough. And a lot of us are not young; capital defense is a complex practice which requires skills that take time and work to develop, and for many lawyers who enter into it, it becomes a calling and a lifetime commitment.  

Real capital cases aren't resolved quickly or dramatically. The years of legal proceedings between conviction and the end of a case are a long march that can take decades; and the reward at the end may not be exoneration, but just a reduction of your client's sentence from death to life in prison. Once a defendant is convicted, attempts to overturn that conviction are obstructed and slowed by laws that create obstacles to revisiting cases the system considers resolved. The courts are often stingy about giving attorneys money to reinvestigate old crimes, so that evidence that might establish a defendant's innocence may take a long time to find, if it is ever found at all.

In Two Lost Boys, I tried to be faithful to these realities in describing my character Janet Moodie's experiences as the lawyer for a death-sentenced defendant. Her client's case, when she signs on to it, is over a decade old. Even though I compressed Janet's part into a shorter-than-usual timeline, her work on the case has gone on for nearly two years by the time the novel ends.  

When I try to understand the impulses that moved me, as a young lawyer, to criminal defense and then capital work, I keep coming back to one of my favorite childhood fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. It is a story of rescue, of a young girl, Gerda, who makes a long and hazardous northward journey to find the place where the Snow Queen has taken her friend Kai, and, once she has found her way into the Snow Queen's ice palace, solves a puzzle of ice pieces that frees Kai from the Snow Queen's spell. Two Lost Boys incorporates elements of that story, but infused with the ambivalence of adult experience.

Janet makes her home in a place I love, the rugged coast of northern Sonoma County, California, where the isolation and natural beauty help her heal after her husband's suicide. Her life up there is a bit of wishful thinking for a part of me that would like to settle there myself some day. The highway to the north coast, a twisting two-lane road with steep hills on one side and the Pacific stretching to the western horizon on the other, is beautiful and dangerous, but in the book it is a part of Janet's journey toward peace.

L.F. Robertson is a defense attorney in California who has handled death penalty appeals for two decades. She is the co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Unsolved Mysteries, and her short stories have been included in the anthologies My Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: the Hidden Years and Sherlock Holmes: The American Years. Her first novel, Two Lost Boys, is the story of a recently widowed attorney who struggles to represent a mentally challenged man who's been sentenced to death in a murder case.

When I was five months pregnant with my second son, I spent most of my days interviewing special operations officers. It was fall 2011, a Navy SEAL team had killed Osama bin Laden that May, and in August a helicopter crash had resulted in the greatest loss of life in special operations forces history.

I was writing a novel about a mother whose son goes missing in Afghanistan, and while a lot of people far more knowledgeable than I were also trying to understand what had happened in May and in August—whether May was linked to August, would this “forever war” ever end—I was interested in something different. I wanted to know what it felt like inside the mind of a special operator.

When I met members of the community, I didn’t ask about the bin Laden raid, or any raid. I asked about how their bonds with mothers and children and spouses survived under the radical pressures of multiple deployments. I tried to understand the concept of risking your life to save someone. And then I remember thinking that if you ask any mother whether there is someone she’s willing to die for, of course she’ll say yes.

Two months after that book, Eleven Days, was published, I was at the beach with a former CIA case officer, a family friend who had read the novel and asked me to lunch to talk about it. I remember he used the phrase “shiny things” that day. He said something like, “Everyone in Washington is chasing shiny things.” He explained how in the context of the Agency, a “shiny thing” is a plum recruit. He explained this with a level of cynicism, implying (I thought) that in a way a shiny thing is a chimera. I had the sense that while his own experiences had been broad and exceptional, there was something else, something existential, in his view of life in that line of work. Maybe he was getting at the idea that hunting shiny things could wear a person down. It was our talk that convinced me to try and write about the CIA. Of course the intelligence world, like the world of special operations, is defined by an ethos of discretion. If you meet someone from these worlds who wants to tell you all their stories, chances are, they’re not going to have the best stories. Chances are, the people with the finest stories are the people you will never meet. But I tried.

As I did with Eleven Days, I started by placing a woman at the center of my narrative. In Red, White, Blue, my main character is not a mother who has lost her son but a daughter who has lost her father. As I talked to more and more people currently or formerly in the intelligence world, it struck me that the fundamental skill required isn’t firing fancy weapons or jumping out of airplanes or mastering the art of surveillance. It’s far more human and complex. It’s empathy. You can teach someone how to load an M4 far easier than you can teach them to be empathetic. Empathy is the ability to look at another person and understand why they do what they do. Sometimes the other person is an asset you want to recruit. Sometimes it’s a foreign officer who wants to recruit you. And sometimes it’s someone about to commit an unimaginable crime. The radical end of empathy, I came to believe, is understanding why someone would do that. And then perhaps convincing them not to.

Chances are, the people with the finest stories are the people you will never meet. But I tried.

The training, the Farm, the art of recruitment, dead drops, brush passes, spotting and assessing and developing an asset—I learned all these things. Anyone can. Only then I concluded that, while not exactly dull, these things are not exactly new either. I concluded that telling a reader how to recruit as asset was far less compelling than trying to make a metaphor of things spies do and then, as John le Carré put it, “mirror the big world in the little world of spies.” As I did with special operators, I set out to understand the emotional make-up of someone willing to assume not one but several new identities, in doing so risking the loss of whomever they were underneath it all. Someone I interviewed told me about lining up mobile phones on a table, each one linked to a distinct, separate identity he inhabited at the time. I thought, a tableful of phones is not a life. I wrote that line into the novel.

What is and is not a life is, I think, what my family friend was really trying to describe that day at the beach. I think he was, if gently, even without meaning to, cautioning me away from glamorizing “tradecraft,” away from the typical tropes of the genre. He was trying to encourage me to look at the people, as he felt I had done with the prior novel. Maybe he thought I could illuminate another community that had endured unimaginable loss over more than almost two decades of perpetual combat. After he read a galley of Red, White, Blue, he wrote me a note. Its simplicity made me smile, as I now know spies rarely write anything down. “You did it,” he said.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Red, White, Blue.

Screenwriter and author Lea Carpenter was a founding editor of Zoetrope magazine and is currently a contributing editor for Esquire. Her first novel, Eleven Days (2013), is an affecting portrayal of maternal love during a time of war and was inspired by her father’s career in Army intelligence during World War II. Her latest novel, Red, White, Blue, is a haunting modern-day spy story that plumbs the depths of American espionage through the story of a daughter grappling with the truth of her late father’s secret life. Carpenter lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Author photo by Michael Lionstar.

Elizabeth Fremantle’s historical thriller The Poison Bed fictionalizes the story of King James’s favorite, Robert Carr, and the poisoning scandal in which he became embroiled. The term “favorite” could mean anything from a close friendship to an intimate sexual relationship, and as The Poison Bed dances back and forth between Robert’s rise to power and his imprisonment in the Tower of London along with his wife, the beguiling Frances Howard, the author explores the complicated, murky ways in which homoerotic desires and relationships were expressed in early modern England. Here, Fremantle discusses the difficulty of defining a historical figure’s sexuality, and what that meant for her characterization of James and Robert.

Rubens’ glorious ceiling in the Whitehall Banqueting House, one of the great artistic legacies of the Stuart era, depicts the heaven-bound figure of King James I surrounded by the flickering wings and dimpled flesh of a host of cherubs. Not long ago, I sat beneath it in the company of several towering drag queens trussed into a corsets, heels, bum-rolls and a good deal of flesh-toned hosiery, while one announced in a booming voice, “Yes, darlings—our new king is a bit of a queen!” The evening was a gender-bending performance, part of the Historic Royal Palaces LGBT events program, telling the story of James I and his male favorites.

The gay community has long claimed James I as their royal poster boy, and why not? He was, after all, well known for having had a series of beautiful male favorites, including one whose heart he kept in a box after his death. Given there was no term for homosexuality at the time (only the illegal practice of sodomy), we cannot judge James’s behavior by the standards of today. And it is important to remember that when it comes to the private behaviors of kings, much evidence is based on little more than slander and supposition.

We do know, however, that James was not thought to have had any liaisons with women prior to his marriage. Indeed, it was rumoured that his close relationship at an early age with an older male cousin, Esmé Stuart, was a physical one, and Stuart was forced to leave Scotland because his influence over the young king was becoming problematic. To add to this, once there was an heir, a spare and a daughter all in good health, James chose to live separately from his wife from 1607 onwards. While this in itself was unremarkable, it was unusual in that he didn’t subsequently take a mistress, as was expected behaviour for a king at the time. James certainly preferred the company of men and there is a good deal of anecdotal evidence suggesting he actively disliked women, although many deem his marriage to have been a happy one.

In my mind, some of the most compelling evidence to suggest James had deep and passionate feelings for the men in his life is the abundance of surviving letters between him and his favorites. These texts are strikingly intimate. Take this, for example, to George Villiers:

I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

                                  James R.

Two men, close friends, who call each other husband and wife, offers little ambiguity from our modern perspective. We would assume them gay on that evidence alone. But, as many historians have pointed out, the language of friendship between men in early modern England tended to be uninhibited and overblown with terms like “love” thrown about liberally. Masculinity was differently defined at the time—one only has to consider the clothes men wore at the Stuart court: festoons of pearls and lace and pom-poms on their shoes the size of cabbages, none of which would seem out of place on the main stage of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” So, the letters, though compelling, are not sufficient evidence to prove James’s sexual preference.

The recent discovery of a secret tunnel at Apethorpe House, one of James’s favorite residences, between his and George Villiers’s bedchambers caused a flurry of supposition. But this too has a plausible and mundane explanation. Corridors between bedchambers were commonplace in palaces of the period. Privacy, as we recognise it, didn’t exist in such buildings, which were designed to house a court of hundreds. The bedchamber was as much a place for political activities as for sexual. Corridors such as this would have allowed access to the king’s close circle, including the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, of which Villiers was one. All early modern kings had Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, young courtiers who had close access to the monarch and were required to sleep in his room on a rota, as a security measure.

The role of the historian is to seek evidence, making for a sticky problem when it comes to the intimate sexual practices of a monarch, when the only proof of sex was a bloody sheet or a pregnancy. The fact that James fathered children is irrefutable evidence that he had sexual relations with his wife. Beyond that we have only hearsay to go on. There was much contemporary gossip about James, whose pacifist policies with the old enemy Spain were deemed “feminine” as compared with those of his predecessor Elizabeth. Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have joked that, “King Elizabeth had been succeeded by ‘Queen James.’” This pointed more to James’s style of foreign policy, though we cannot discount the possibility that its subtext was aimed at the new King’s rumored sexual proclivities. After all, his preference for the company of beautiful men was no secret.

Three men held particularly significant roles in James’s life, both public and personal: the aforementioned Esmé Stuart, Duke of Lennox; George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. All were privileged in much the same way as a royal mistress, the latter two rising from obscurity to greatness by way of the king’s favor. It is a matter of historical record that courtiers schemed to place beautiful young men in the King’s path in the hope of creating some advantage out of it, in much the same way pretty daughters were dangled under Henry VIII’s nose. It was a weakness to exploit. Huge political capital could be gained to those in league with a royal favorite. James bestowed honours and promoted these men to the highest offices, giving them excessive political responsibilities and power, though they were not always suited for such roles.

In the case of Robert Carr, James’ goodwill was stretched almost to breaking point. Carr became mixed up in a poisoning plot, for which he and his wife were convicted, which forms the central plot of my novel The Poison Bed. There is reason to believe that James’ actions around the trial indicated his fear that Carr, were he to be condemned, might have revealed personal details about his private habits in his scaffold speech. One could suppose that James had something to hide.

I have read more than one indignant tirade directed against those who choose to accept James as homosexual, stating that to do so casts negative aspersions, or “outs” a man who is no longer able to speak for himself. This pre-supposes that to call someone homosexual is an insult and that to be homosexual, and in this I include bisexual, is degrading. This, I refuse to accept. I do however understand historians’ reluctance to take a firm stance on James’ sexuality. Stuart historian Dr. Samantha Smith is clear as to why:

“There is no denying that James I was fond of his favorites, who happened to be young men, but we cannot say for certain if this attraction resulted in sexual relations. There is no actual evidence to support such claims and the act of sodomy was in fact illegal and deemed a sin in 17th century England and James was a man who feared sin.”

The assumption that male homosexuality can be defined by penetration precludes other sexual practices between men that don’t involve sodomy. It was sodomy, specifically, that was the legal and religious infringement at the time. The law had nothing to say about most other intimate acts. It is possible to imagine, then, even considering his fear of sin, that James may have indulged in practices we might nowadays consider homosexual but not in the act of sodomy itself.

Seventeenth century historian Rebecca Rideal comes at the question from a subtly different angle, focusing on the romantic aspect of love. We know, she says, “he had romantic relationships with men which is evidenced by his correspondence. Whether this was sexual, we will never know, but it was romantic nonetheless.” It is clear she accepts the letters as proper proof of an intimacy that escaped the bounds of ordinary friendship, and I tend to agree with her.

For the purposes of telling the story of Robert Carr’s relationship to James in The Poison Bed, I have made the assumption of both men’s bisexuality. This may be audacious and certainly might put some noses out of joint. But fiction is the mode by which we can explore the liminal space between the lines of the historical record. It allows us to imagine what happened behind closed doors and weave a plausible version of the past from what we know and what we can never know.

Jeremy Finley’s superb debut, The Darkest Time of Night, was a political thriller that morphed into something much less down-to-earth (if you’ll pardon the pun). As Lynn Roseworth searched for her missing grandson, she was forced to come to terms with her work as a secretary for a professor devoted to extraterrestrial research, and the terrifying possibility that it may have something to do with her family’s crisis.

In Finley’s sequel, The Dark Above, Lynn’s grandson is now an adult and desperate to put what happened to him as a child behind him. But after his identity is exposed, he must find others who have had his same experiences to prevent a dark future.

While there are certainly elements of “The X-Files,” “Stranger Things” and other sci-fi thrillers in Finley’s books, the main inspiration came from a surprising place: his mother-in-law.

She was the last anyone expected to be responsible.

After all, my new novel, The Dark Above, is a supernatural thriller that begins 15 years after a child vanished in the woods under mysterious circumstances. As disasters begin to unfold across the world, the fractured family of that boy must overcome their own internal struggles to uncover the sinister reasons of the global epidemic.

As the book releases this month, I anticipate the question that I got last year, when the first book in the series, The Darkest Time of Night, was released. People would ask where the idea for all this came from, and I’d just nod in the direction of an elegant woman, Sudoku stashed in her purse, her fingernails expertly cleaned to remove the dirt from her garden.

“Your mother-in-law?” was the usual response.

After all, Linda (last name withheld because she shies away from attention) is, perhaps, the absolute last person on earth you would ever think to inspire novels based on terror from the stars.

You’ll find her curled up with Ann Patchett’s latest novel, not with a Stephen King paperback. And as far as dark obsessions go, she does tend to vacuum when her house isn’t dirty. She enjoys quilting and baseball and politics.

And she also once worked for one of the nation’s foremost experts in UFO research.

I delight in telling people that fact, just to see their eyes bulge out of their heads.

At least mine did when I first heard it, all those years ago standing in her kitchen surrounded by her collection of primitive antiques.

Nonchalantly, loading the dishwasher, she mentioned how when my father-in-law was in law school, she needed a job, and fast, to make ends meet. There was an opening for a secretary at the university’s astronomy department, and she scored the job.

She talked about how nice the professors were, but remarked how strange it was to take messages for one of them. The calls, she recalled, were bizarre, from people who saw things in the sky and swore that they, or others they knew, had been taken.

I scraped my jaw off the floor as she told of how that professor would later have a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, as Spielberg used him as a consultant, then later as an extra in the final scene when humanity makes contact with alien life.

That professor was none other than J. Allen Hynek, who would become one of the country’s most famous UFO researchers, whose notoriety would including coining the phrase “close encounters of the third kind” to describe people seeing creatures inside a craft.

My mother-in-law’s life would veer in a different direction after leaving that job, raising five children, establishing her own successful small business and ultimately becoming a grandmother of 18.

But her brush with something truly otherworldly got my creative juices flowing. What if an unassuming grandmother had knowledge about missing people that not even the FBI or police were aware of? What if she, and only she, could unravel what happened to her vanished grandson?

When I called to tell her and my father-in-law about the book deal, they both cheered. I then let on that the idea for the books came from her days as a secretary for a UFO researcher.

“Oh,” she laughed. “Oh my.”

Camilla Bruce’s debut novel, You Let Me In, is a haunting, fairy tale-esque thriller about a reclusive novelist’s final request and the terrible secrets unearthed after her death. Bruce, who was born and lives in Norway, came to writing fiction in English through a corner of the internet that has become increasingly influential—the wonderful world of fan fiction.

This spring, my debut novel, You Let Me In, comes out in both the U.S. and the U.K. What is a little bit unusual about my debut is that I am a Norwegian, born and bred. I have never lived outside of Norway, and have also not, ever, published a single piece of fiction in Norwegian. Through special circumstances at first, and later by choice, I write all my stories in English.

When I first embarked on the road to this moment, I had just turned 22. I was a student, single and had just given birth to my son. Though one would think I was somewhat prepared, I had not really understood just how limited my world would become with a baby. I used to have a very active social life before I became a mom, and though I loved my son dearly, it did not take long before I realized I had to find new ways to entertain myself at home.

Two things came to my rescue: the first was nightly reruns of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the other thing was a fairly new thing called the internet. I have my dad to thank for that. Not only did he give me my first computer, but he threw in a dial-up modem as well, and suddenly, the small world I inhabited was not so limited anymore.

The computer got me online—but it was Buffy who got me writing. Since I had just fallen in love with a TV show, it did not take long before I discovered the wonderful world of fandom, and fan fiction in particular, since I have always been all about words. Before long, I was merrily typing away and finding new friends all over the globe. We all wrote in English, of course.

Throughout my 20s, I wrote a lot of fan fiction, visiting several fandoms on the way. I honestly believe it made me a good writer; the feedback was instant and the possibilities felt endless. For a long time, fan fiction was enough for me, and it got me through many challenging situations. As I entered my 30s, however, the desire to write my own stories grew. I also started dreaming of making a career of my words. I did consider switching language at that time—it would have been the right moment—but by then I was so used to writing in English that it felt unnatural not to do so.

There is also the fact that, though there are a lot of great books coming out of Norway (especially literary and crime fiction), we are not at present a powerhouse for speculative fiction. For someone like me, who finds it hard to color inside the lines, other markets seemed wiser choices, and so I kept writing in English.

As it turns out, that was clever of me.

Author photo by Lene J. Løkkhaug.

In Ivy Pochoda’s new thriller, five women are connected by a serial killer—but he doesn’t get to tell the story.

Five years ago, I was convinced during after-­dinner drinks (always the best time to get me to do anything) to run for a seat on my local neighborhood council. Grassroots politics and community organizing had never been on my radar. But I live in a neighborhood called Harvard Heights, a small subsection of a much larger neighborhood called West Adams that sweeps across South Los Angeles for many miles, and I care deeply about my community. It’s a conflicted place of pride and neglect, home to families who have generational roots as well as newcomers. West Adams, which is filled with grand Craftsman homes and Victorian mansions, was one of the first places in Los Angeles to permit nonwhite homeownership, and for that reason, when the city decided to build the 10 Freeway, they placed it smack-dab in the neighborhood’s middle, creating a roaring gully and ghettoizing the area south of the 10.

I have to admit, I didn’t last on the council very long, only half of my four-year term. (I travel too much.) But what I saw and absorbed there became the basis for These Women. My council was called the United Neighborhoods Neighborhood Council (yeah, I know), and it was comprised of a handful of underserved communities at the eastern and northern edges of West Adams. The council members fell into two categories: long-term African American residents who wanted to see the neighborhood thrive economically without falling prey to the perils of gentrification and middle-aged white people devoted to the historic preservation of the state homes in the community. Many issues brought before the council broke along these lines: make things better for the residents or preserve the important historic charm of the United Neighborhoods.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of These Women.

The board was predominantly female—outspoken and articulate women from different races and cultures who brought a wide range of views, perspectives and intolerances to the table. Everyone saw the community, its potentials and its problems differently. I knew that I wanted to write about this cultural divide in my section of West Adams. I wanted to write about the women who cared about it and who were rooted in it.

One of the issues that commonly cropped up in front of the council was prostitution. It was a subject that united everyone: Get rid of the “hookers,” shame them, blame them. Western Avenue, the major thoroughfare that runs north-south through our section of West Adams, is a hotbed for prostitution. This has never bothered me. I lived in Amsterdam for many years and have what I hope is a liberal or humanizing take on the industry. I was horrified that a group of civic-­minded women could be so intolerant of the sex workers in their midst. I was baffled by their inability to see them as not just people, but people most likely conscripted into their line of work. And then I knew I had my story.

I always think that the best way to write about a community—to examine one—is to make a crime occur in its midst. A crime gives everyone something to react to. It teases out deep cultural fissures and challenges loyalties. With the premise of someone killing sex workers, I knew I had a way to explore my section of West Adams. And I knew I had something people wanted to read—a serial killer story. But therein lay a problem.

We already have many books about serial killers. And I didn’t dare add my name to that list. There are many great ones that influenced me: Michael Connelly’s The Poet and Jess Walter’s incredible Over Tumbled Graves, as well as Dan Chaon’s remarkable Ill Will, to name a few. These books are paragons of the genre. Connelly’s is more conventional but nonetheless brilliant and accomplished. Walter takes a larger swing, peppering his story with a critique of our fascination with serial killers and the cottage industry they inspire. And Chaon, well, he hits it out of the park with his beyond-category psychological thriller that plunges the serial killer mythos and our perception of it into incredibly dark waters.

Instead of fetishizing him, as other books might, I punched a serial killer-size hole in my narrative, shifting the focus to the women at the nexus of his crimes.

We’ve also had too many books (and TV shows) that fetishize such murderers, almost glorifying them, granting them genius status simply because of the number of killings they got away with. And I certainly didn’t want to enter that fray.

What interested me was not the killer but the women touched by his crimes—the women like those on my neighborhood council. I was interested in the obvious victims, sure, those he killed and those related to the women he killed. But I was also compelled by the victims usually overlooked in crime fiction, those close to the murderer who have lived in the shadow of unspeakable violence. As I began to write, I realized the serial killer in my book had little to do with my story. So instead of fetishizing him, as other books might, I punched a serial killer-size hole in my narrative, shifting the focus to the women at the nexus of his crimes.

Never before has it been so important to listen to women, to hear our stories, to put our perspectives first. Never before has it been so important to understand the amount of disregard that has been dumped upon us, to consider how often we are written off as victims, sluts, hysterics, embittered and emotional wrecks. Never before has it been so important to see a crime from the female perspective and for once to put the criminal where he belongs: in the background.

Which is why I wrote These Women—to celebrate my neighborhood and the women who live there who are overlooked but shouldn’t be.

Author photo by Maria Kanevskaya