Lois Duncan
Author of teenage fiction whose daughter’s murder bore a sinister similarity to one of her novels
LOIS DUNCAN, who has died aged 82, was an American author of fiction for teenagers whose suspense novel I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973) achieved cult status, more than 20 years after publication, when it was adapted into a resoundingly successful film starring Jennifer Love Hewitt.
The film itself, a copiously violent slasher horror, bore little resemblance to the original work. The action had been moved from the original setting of landlocked New Mexico to a fishing village on the East Coast, and the book’s sympathetic treatment of its characters had largely been lost in translation. Lois Duncan was unimpressed – not least because she had always sought to steer the thriller genre away from gratuitous bloodshed.
“Violence is a fact of life in today’s society and therefore it has its place in books and films,” she told an interviewer in 1998. “But I strongly believe that the people who create those books and films have a duty to treat the subject seriously and to show the terrible consequences.”
She spoke from her own experience. In 1989 the life of Lois Duncan and her husband was changed irrevocably when their 18-year-old daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette, was fatally wounded by a gunman driving a Chevrolet Camaro. The murder had eerie parallels with events in Lois Duncan’s novel Don’t Look Behind You, in which a character called April is run over by a hitman in a gold Camaro. Stranger still, the book had been published just a month before Kaitlyn’s death.
The tragedy moved Lois Duncan to begin her own investigation. She hired a private investigator and began making detailed notes, which she turned into a 1992 non-fiction book, Who Killed My Daughter? She also founded a research centre for cold cases, and sought help from William Roll, an American psychologist with an interest in haunting and extrasensory perception. In 1995 she co-authored Psychic Connections: A Journey into the Mysterious World of Psi with Dr Roll, a primer in psychic phenomena aimed at a young audience. She explained: “In dreams, Kaitlyn tells me, ‘Don’t give up, mother.’ It’s not a matter of revenge. It’s a matter of Kait being worth the truth.” Three men were arrested in connection with the shooting, but no charges were ever brought.
Lois Duncan Steinmetz was born in Philadelphia on April 28 1934, the daughter of Joseph and Lois Steinmetz, successful magazine photographers whose assignments involved frequent trips across the country.
The younger Lois and her little brother Billy therefore enjoyed an eventful if peripatetic upbringing. As a behind-the-scenes photographer for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Joseph Steinmetz spent the off-season winter months with the performers in Sarasota, Florida. There Lois learnt to walk the tightrope and made friends with the Doll Family, a troupe of dwarf entertainers. The experience laid the foundations for her 1993 picture book The Circus Comes Home.
She sold her first piece of fiction to a national magazine aged 13, and wrote for Seventeen magazine throughout her adolescence. After graduating from Sarasota High School she enrolled at Duke University in North Carolina, but left to marry a classmate and settled into writing novels full-time.
Her first love story for teenagers, Debutante Hill (1958), was initially rejected for a $1,000 literary prize because it depicted an adolescent character drinking a beer. Lois Duncan therefore substituted CocaCola for beer in her manuscript, and won the contest. Several more romance novels followed under the pen name Lois Kerry.
In 1962 Lois Duncan sought a divorce and moved to Albuquerque in New Mexico with her three young children, where she made a living writing greeting cards. She also submitted lurid accounts of her own – entirely fictional – misdemeanours to “confessional” pulp magazines, which were printed under headlines such as “I wanted to have an affair with a teenage boy”. The work gave her both the experience to land jobs with more upmarket magazines and the money for her own house. She got a position teaching journalism at the University of New Mexico, where she eventually completed a degree in English.
Her breakthrough novel, Ransom (1966), was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award and marked a shift in her focus from romance to suspense. Centring on five students who are kidnapped from their school bus, the book tapped into a prevailing undercurrent of fear among American youth.
Earlier that year, an engineering student at the University of Texas had shot 16 people dead; for many of Lois Duncan’s readers, the future seemed perilous. While her protagonists could be intensely relatable, her fiction was often darker and less concerned with the mundanities of teenage life than that of other young-adult novelists. Abusive relationships, untimely death and child abuse all featured.
She was also unafraid to write characters of moral, or even amoral, complexity. In Killing Mr Griffin (1978), one of her most enduringly controversial books, a group of Albuquerque students kidnap and terrorise their English teacher. The ringleader character, Mark, was a study in psychopathy inspired by the experiences of Lois Duncan’s friend Ann Rule, who had in turn been a friend of the serial killer Ted Bundy. Daughters of Eve (1979), meanwhile, saw a group of high school girls commit acts of increasingly terrible revenge at the urging of their feminist art teacher. Real-life criminals, Lois Duncan was at pains to point out, “weren’t always adults… we’ve got them probably in every school in the nation growing up right around the normal kids.”
In the wake of Kaitlyn Arquette’s death, Lois Duncan swore off the thriller genre. She wrote numerous picture books, as well as two sequels to her 1971 book Hotel For Dogs. Her preoccupation with life’s ghoulish aspects never dimmed. Challenged to produce a two-sentence horror story in 2015, she rose to the occasion: “The dogs were so ravenous they fell upon their meal with gusto. Within a matter of minutes there was nothing left but the bones and the ribbon she’d been wearing in her hair.”
Lois Duncan’s marriage to Joseph Cardozo was dissolved in 1962. She married, secondly, in 1965, Donald Arquette. He survives her, as do three children from her first marriage and a son from her second marriage. Lois Duncan, born April 28 1934, died June 15 2016