The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Strange designs
Inspired by old buildings, Northeast Ohio novelist D.M. Pulley brings historically based spooky mysteries to masses thanks in part to big contest win
“I think Cleveland’s a great character,” D.M. Pulley says between sips of a hot beverage on a typically frigid Northeast Ohio morning in early February at Deweys Coffee on Shaker Square in Cleveland, not far from her Shaker Heights home. “I love writing this town because she’s gritty. She’s been through a lot. She’s got secrets. She’s got her dark side. She’s such an underdog. ¶ “She’s such a real, authentic city.”
And “she” is the setting for two of Pulley’s three novels — her breakout 2015 Amazon hit “The Dead Key” and “The Unclaimed Victim,” published late in 2017. Her tales have at least a foot — if not two — in the past and flirt with some darker sides of life. (She has settled on the categorization “gothic mysteries but not in the vampire-Frankenstein kind of way but more in the haunted-house kind of way.” While she might be tempted now and then, were she to have actual supernatural elements in her tales, she jokes, her husband would divorce her.)
Pulley didn’t start out in Cleveland or with a plan to become a writer. She grew up in a small Michigan town that, she says, was like a suburb without a bigger city and had “a very planned-community feel.”
“I like to joke around that it’s kind of where I got my obsession with dark, hidden secrets, because everything on the surface of my hometown seemed very idyllic. But, of course, everyone had secrets, and there were scandals and things that stayed out of the papers.
“It always felt like people were hiding something to me.”
(Speaking of hiding things, as with her real name, she declines to name the town for publication.)
She wrote a little bit growing up — mostly “really indulgent poetry and posts about my mother” — and was the editor for her high school newspaper, but, she says, she was more of a reader.
“My older sister, who was five years older, had all the books I wasn’t supposed to read, and I started stealing those when I was about 7,” she says, citing authors including Stephen King, John Saul and V.C. Andrews as early influences.
It was a half-ride scholarship to Case Western Reserve University that led her to Cleveland about a quarter of a century to go. Drawn by the appeal of the problem solving and spatial reasoning involved with engineering, she chose that as her major.
“I spent years climbing the outsides of buildings on swing stages, going up on rooftops, going through service corridors and kind of seeing the underworld of the building. … It was great fodder for my creative imagination because I loved seeing the parts of buildings nobody gets to see.” —D.M. Pulley, novelist, on her time as a forensic engineer in Cleveland
If Case had a journalism program, she may have double-majored, but she settled on a minor in fine arts. Still, she didn’t get much in the way of writing courses — she seems to vaguely recall a poetry class — and, anyway, she had plenty to keep her busy with engineer studies and a part-time job to help pay for school.
Once in the field, she eventually fell into forensic engineering — not surprising given a lifelong fascination with old buildings.
“From the time I was a small child, going into any building, especially an old one, my imagination would just kind of take off and I would feel like I was surrounded by people who had been there,” Pulley says. “I liked thinking about where they walked and what they said and what secrets were whispered behind the door.”
(She adds that as a little girl she would be content to set up a doll house and simply stare at it for a long time.)
She sounds like a woman who loved her job, going all around and deep inside buildings to find out why structural failures had occurred. These experiences eventually would greatly influence her writing.
“I spent years climbing the outsides of buildings on swing stages, going up on rooftops, going through service corridors and kind of seeing the underworld of the building,” she says. “It was great fodder for my creative imagination because I loved seeing the parts of buildings nobody gets to see.
“And growing up in the middle of a cornfield, being on the tippy top of the Terminal Tower and seeing all of Cleveland splayed out in panorama — it was just kind of eye-opening. I loved being the Indiana Jones of engineering. It was great fun, and I did it for eight years.”
So what happened? A few things, all around age 30.
She was promoted into management, taking her out of the field and putting her behind the desk. Also, she and her husband had their first son. She says she greatly admires women who can manage young children and maintain a demanding full-time career, but she struggled.
“I was screaming in traffic,” she says. “I was always late for meetings, and I was covered in baby vomit. I was just stressed out all the time.”
So she planned to be a stay-at-home mom for a couple of years. Problem was that made her stircrazy. She tried to keep busy by taking on some home-inspection work and helping friends with kitchen and bathroom redesigns, but she couldn’t shake this vague story concept rattling around her head since a visit to an old Cleveland bank vault years earlier.
She had noodled with plot ideas and character sketches but not gotten anywhere. Soon enough, there was a second baby boy and more time at home.
“I couldn’t leave the house,” she says. “I couldn’t make noise. I was kind of like a caged animal, and it ended up being a great time to write.”
With advice taken to heart from Chris Baty’s “The No Plot? No Problem! Novel-Writing Kit” — including don’t edit while you’re writing — she hammered out a rough draft of “The Dead Key,” spending two hours a day writing for eight months. That was the easy part. “The hard part was editing and rewriting and getting the book to a form that was marketable,” Pulley says. “I still struggle with that because as a writer it’s hard to disassociate yourself from your work and be objective. It’s hard to know when the story’s lagging. Pacing is a tricky thing to keep up.”
While she wasn’t getting anywhere with literary agents or publishers, it wasn’t until Bouchercon, a convention for writers and fans of mystery and detective fiction, came to Cleveland in 2012 and talked to authors that she grasped her biggest problem.
“I found out I was doomed,” she says. “I found out my book was too long.”
“The Dead Key” — which tells parallel stories centering on two Cleveland women, Iris and Beatrice, connected by elements of the story but separated by decades — was much larger than the 300 pages she learned was the sweet spot, especially for a firsttime writer of genre fiction.
“I had 500-some pages, and I was a big nobody.”
Following struggles that included a failed attempt to split the book into two, each focusing on one of the women, and simply putting “The Dead Key” in a drawer for a while, she stumbled upon Amazon’s Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. She was three weeks away from the deadline and needed to trim it by 100 pages or so for it to qualify, but she got it done.
While there were smaller prizes up from grabs, “The Dead Key” won the grand prize, and a contract with Amazon’s publishing arm followed.
“It’s not the way it’s supposed to happen,” she says. “I put a lot of work in, but there’s a lot of luck in any success story, I find. I was incredibly lucky that readers liked my book. And I think at this moment we’ve sold over 400,000 copies of ‘The Dead Key,’ and it’s been (translated into) nine different languages.”
While some people thought she should pen a sequel next — including, it seems, an agent who left her over her plan for a second book — she followed “The Dead Key” with “The Buried Book.” Set mainly in rural Michigan in the 1950s and centering around a young boy, Jasper, whose mother goes missing, the fictional story was inspired by her father’s upbringing and actual disappearance of his mother for a time. He, like the character, was plucked from his home in Detroit and left to stay at a dairy farm owned by a relative after the mother’s vanishing.
“Why did she leave? He didn’t see her for three years,” she says. “It was part of the mythology of our family.
“I wanted to know more about this woman, but I always wanted to understand my father better.”
While she says Jasper is based more on her brother than her father, the dynamic between him and his cousin Wayne is based largely on that of her two boys.
“The Unclaimed Victim,” while not a sequel to “The Dead Key,” would seem to have much more in common with it than does “The Buried Book”: It is set in Cleveland; focuses on two women, Ethel and Kris, living decades apart; and is inspired in part by a very old Cleveland structure, the Gospel Union Press building in Tremont — a building Pulley walked by countless times while living in Tremont after moving to the city.
“I feel the building itself is a labyrinth of bizarre choices and hidden rooms,” Pulley says. “It’s 15 buildings
they constructed over several decades. It’s over 175,000 square feet with no master planning. You’ve got doors that drop into 10-foot falls on to stair landings.”
Pulley cites Erik Larson’s 2003 nonfiction book, “The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America” — largely about Dr. H. H. Holmes and his efforts to lure people into areas of a building he designed and murder them — as another inspiration for “The Unclaimed Victim.” Pulley’s book explores imagined connections between a religious group operating from the building and Cleveland’s famed “Torso Killer” of the 1930s.
“(Investigators) could never figure out where the killer was operating out of,” she says. “They believed he had a workshop somewhere because bodies would be found in pieces, but no blood would be found on the scene, so he was obviously killing the people somewhere else.”
Of course, Pulley researched the Torso Killer, who was never identified. She doesn’t necessarily agree with some of the established theories and, inspired by murders with similar characteristics that happened after the time the serial killer was believed to be operating, imagined the killer was out there for many more years.
“I kind of got obsessed with the idea of telling this story from a different perspective than has ever been told before,” she says. “I’ve read all the books on the Torso Killer, I believe, and it’s usually told from the investigators’ perspective. I have not read any that have been told by the victims’ perspective.”
Pulley’s next novel, inspired by a 100-year-old house in Shaker Heights and set there, is planned for spring 2019. After taking four years to edit “The Dead Key,” she is cranking out work at an impressive clip. Part of that is due to the fact her work is popular now.
“It’s not a career I’d recommend for stability,” she says of fiction writing. “It’s a very volatile job. You’re only as good as your last couple of books.
“I don’t expect this to last forever,” adds Pulley, who makes sure to keep her engineer’s license current.
She says 90 percent of her book sales are in the Kindle format, which generally is less expensive, sometimes far so, than physical book formats. In fact, someone could go on Amazon right now and buy all three books for less than $10 — and a fraction of that if the buyer is an Amazon Prime member.
“The cost of ebooks is a big, controversial point,” she says. “On one hand, the writers are concerned and the publishers are concerned that profit margins are lower than ever before. And, on the other hand, people are reading more than ever before, and books are accessible to everyday people more and more because they’re affordable. We want to strike a balance for the readers to be able to afford the book and for the writer to be able to live.
“It’s a volume business,” she adds. “To come out ahead, I have to sell tens of thousands of ebooks, and I’ve been lucky enough where that’s been the case so far. But it’s anybody’s guess what’s going to happen in the future.”
Along with writing, she stays busy with appearances, including events in Cleveland and Painesville. She says she loves meeting others passionate about books and writing.
“Cleveland and the region have been awesome,” she says. “I’ve met so many great authors through networking events. Literary Cleveland’s a great organization. We have a great, robust writing community in this town, and the readers have been super supportive.”
She thinks people outside the city enjoy reading about it, too, because the majority of her sales are from outside the area, so she won’t stop writing about it anytime soon.
“I really consider this my home, and I’ve fallen in love with this place.”