ON PATROL
Bestselling crime author Karin Slaughter talks to Sue Green about her new crime series and why female cops still do it tough.
Atlanta, Georgia, in the 1970s was a city exhausted by civil rights battles, a city in which counterculture activists were settling into jobs and mortgages and were tired of being ‘‘mad at society’’.
For Karin Slaughter – a toddler then, though she remembers the music and the commercials – it was a fascinating time for her city and a rich source of material for her latest novel, Cop Town, the first in a new series.
‘‘As a city, people were extremely apathetic so when it came time for women’s rights it was like, we cannot fight one more battle,’’ Slaughter, now 43, says. ‘‘It seems like women are always told, it is not your time.’’
Slaughter’s key new characters are female cops – Kate Murphy, a Vietnam war widow on her first day in the force – and Maggie Lawson, whose brother and uncle are also cops. Tough at work, she is the victim of her sexist, racist, homophobic uncle’s violence at home.
‘‘There is a higher rate of domestic violence among women police officers than in the general population,’’ says Slaughter, citing a statistic discovered while researching Cop Town. ‘‘Women can be two different people – one person at home, another at work.
‘‘I thought, what a great challenge to create two new characters and talk about a part of policing I had never talked about before, which is patrol officers.’’
Her research included talking to Atlanta’s now-retired policewomen about their experiences in the 1970s. ‘‘This was not a time when it was easy for women to stand up and say, we are not taking it any more,’’ she says.
‘‘It was a very radical thing for a woman to stand up for herself,’’ she adds, mentioning the vilification of American feminist Gloria Steinem.
Many things which happen to Maggie and Kate – fellow officers groping them, a locker filled with faeces, urine in purses – actually happened to the women Slaughter talked to.
It was a tough time – a fact acknowledged when you talk about women in the 70s today, Slaughter says. ‘‘If women today bitterly complain people say, you are a whiney bitch. But if you mention the 70s people say, yeah, it was bad.
But issues for women’s rights back then– reproductive rights and pay equality, for instance – are still issues today, she says.
So has society gone backwards? ‘‘In many ways it has. Now if someone says something that is sexist, racist or homophobic people say something. Whether they do anything about it is another matter, but they say something.’’
She read Erica Jong’s seminal feminist novel Fear of Flying at college and hated it, but re-read it for her research and was struck by a particular line: ‘‘There is a line in there which says, a single woman is taking a vow of poverty. To some extent that is still true, especially if they have children. I thought, that is interesting that that has not changed.’’
Kate and Maggie are very dear to her, she says, and she needs a break before resuming their story: ‘‘I feel a very real connection with these characters and want to make sure that next time I write about them I am clear on what I want to say. I like them, the potential that they have.’’ But fans of her long-running series featuring Sara Linton and Will Trent need not worry – unlike some writers who tire of their series and need a break, she is keen to resume their story.
Fourteen books ago – and that is not counting the various novellas, e-books, books she has edited – Slaughter began her Grant County series, set in smalltown Georgia where she grew up. It featured paediatrician and coroner Dr Sara Linton and her husband, cop Jeffrey Tolliver. But when Slaughter killed off Jeffrey she moved Sara to Atlanta.
She had also begun a new series featuring damaged Special Agent Will Trent, his partner Faith and dysfunctional friend, then wife Angie. Four books ago, she brought Will and Sara together.
‘‘I have to go back to writing my Will and Sara books or people will kill me,’’ Slaughter says of her ardent fans. She is not exaggerating – she has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. ‘‘I really feel like now they are going to go into that next stage of their relationship, but they need to get rid of Will’s wife Angie.
‘‘I have a story for it but I need to do some really hard thinking about that.’’
Meanwhile, her next book will be a stand-alone, one to ponder during international tours to promote Cop Town. There’s just one downside: a herniated disc from a yoga class which makes flying uncomfortable.
But her trip down under will be worth the pain, she says. The much-travelled Slaughter says New Zealand is ‘‘the most beautiful country I have ever seen’’.