Fresh Blood: Mary McCoy

There are a few things about the me who writes and finishes books that are different from the me who didn’t.

Like most people who make the leap from “I’d like to write a book” to “I wrote a book,” I’m more self-disciplined about writing than I used to be. I have confidence I can finish the manuscripts I start, and I’ve become shockingly unsentimental about making revisions.

But there’s another difference I wanted to write about for my first Sleuths, Spies, & Alibis post, and it’s this:

I ask better questions now.

Since my debut novel, Dead To Me, is a 1940s YA crime noir set in Hollywood, it probably comes as no surprise that I’m a sucker for a true crime story. If it happened at least fifty years ago in Los Angeles and involved a celebrity, BONUS.

At the height of my true crime jones, I wanted to track down the craziest, most notorious, most shocking crimes, and Los Angeles history is full of them - just open up any newspaper. We’ve got vengeful teen lovers, creepy secret attic boyfriends, mysteriously missing starlets, and a rash of celebrity misdeeds.

I ate all of it up, but the more I read, the less interested I was in who did what to whom - or even why they did it. Increasingly, I wanted answers to the kinds of questions that weren’t going to be answered by old newspaper articles or Hollywood Babylon.

I wanted to know what it was like for Lila Leeds to be famous not for her considerable talent, but for a stupid thing that happened in 1948, and why Los Angeles’s most famous murder victim, Elizabeth Short, was so alone during her lifetime. I wanted to know about the people who lingered at the edges of the stories: the kid sisters, mothers, best friends, and favorite uncles. I wanted to see these people as more than the sum of their most notorious parts.

Realizing I felt this way about true stories did wonders for my fiction. When I started asking deeper questions about the characters in my stories - questions that had nothing to do with them being a criminal or a victim - that’s when they turned into the kind of people I wanted to spend an entire book with. That’s when the stories that I wrote began to have something like a heart.

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Mary McCoy
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Mary is a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library, and has been a contributor to On Bunker Hill (http://www.onbunkerhill.org/) and the 1947project (http://1947project.com/), where she wrote stories about Los Angeles's notorious past. Mary grew up in western Pennsylvania and holds degrees from Rhodes College and the University of Wisconsin; she currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Her debut novel is called DEAD TO ME, and will be published by Disney-Hyperion in 2014. It's a YA mystery set in Golden Age Hollywood about a teenage girl who uncovers some sinister business while trying to get to the bottom of her aspiring film star sister's disappearance.