On the Shelf <\/p>\n
‘The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives’<\/p>\n
By Elizabeth Arnott
Berkley, 320 pages, $30<\/p>\n
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org<\/a>, whose fees support independent bookstores.<\/p>\n Serial killers grab hold of the public\u2019s attention with their horrific misdeeds and never let go. We can\u2019t help but wonder what could drive someone to commit such heinous acts and try to imagine living next door to Jeffrey Dahmer<\/a> or a real-life Hannibal Lecter. Would we recognize a serial killer if we passed one on the street? What if we were married to one and did not realize it? Elizabeth Arnott<\/a> presents us with three L.A. women who have lived through the last scenario in \u201cThe Secret Lives of Murderers\u2019 Wives,\u201d<\/a> an empathetic and at times bracing mystery tale about unlikely crime solvers circa 1966.<\/p>\n \u201cI loved the idea of taking three wives and putting them into a situation where they had to profile these killers,\u201d says Arnott via Zoom from her pink-walled London writing studio on a cold and dreary winter day, calling the trio\u2019s ability to figure out the killer before traditional law enforcement can \u201ca little joke to myself. These women were scooping the FBI.\u201d<\/p>\n And they were the last people cops or even their neighbors might consider capable of doing so.<\/p>\n The novel, Arnott\u2019s first under her married name and subject to a bidding frenzy at the 2024 London Book Fair,<\/a> reflects her long-standing fascination with murderers. She wrote her dissertation about serial killers decades ago, and as an author gravitates to storytelling about marginalized women. But she couldn\u2019t really imagine what it would be like to be married to a serial killer until the central wife characters guided her through the book writing process.<\/p>\n By the time she had finished penning the propulsive tale, \u201cI almost felt like I owed them an apology,\u201d Arnott admits. \u201cBecause when I started writing this book, absolutely, in my deep subconsciousness, I judged these women. I thought, how on earth could they not have known what their husbands were doing?\u201d<\/p>\n There\u2019s Beverley, a pretty blond mom riddled with self-doubt; glamorous but financially strapped Margot, who frequents Hollywood parties in an Oleg Cassini dress; and demure Elsie, a newspaper editor\u2019s personal assistant who longs to write and report stories of her own but is instead relegated to administrative tasks. When these women hear about unusual murders that summer, they don\u2019t brush them off; instead, following instincts borne out of their own experiences, they investigate as best they can and eventually discover the killer. The story is engaging and ultimately affirming, replete with L.A. references and a reminder how constrained the lives of traditional wives could be six decades ago.<\/p>\n Beverly, Margot and Elsie were raised to be deferential to their husbands on matters big and small. \u201cTheir everyday life is being controlled by men,\u201d Arnott says. \u201cIt\u2019s very easy to say, how could they not have known? But these women are so manipulated, so controlled on a daily basis.\u201d<\/p>\n And they accepted their husbands\u2019 secrecy as something that came with the territory.<\/p>\n By the novel\u2019s 1966 setting, Gloria Steinem had already gone undercover <\/a>as a Playboy Bunny and the second-wave feminist movement was starting to gain traction in certain circles. But it would be another two years before a girdle-ditching protest outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City prompted the New York Post to coin an indelible (and false<\/a>) headline about bra-burning women\u2019s libbers that would define the feminist movement into the 1970s. In \u201cThe Secret Lives of Murderers\u2019 Wives,\u201d a pants-wearing female reporter who encourages Elsie serves as an avatar of the changing attitudes toward women and their role in society.<\/p>\n Setting \u201cSecret Lives\u201d in sunny L.A. at that time enabled Arnott, a wildlife and adventure travel journalist before she became an author, to dive into an iconic period of great change with links to old Hollywood. Beyond kohl-lined eyes and miniskirts, \u201cyou have this really sort of buzzy, thrumming cultural setting,\u201d she says, citing the Civil Rights Movement, space exploration and the Vietnam War. \u201cIt\u2019s also a time where women were facing a lot of prejudice; they were marginalized at home and at work. I wanted to put my marginalized women in this cultural setting and see what stories they could tell.\u201d<\/p>\n To make sure she got the details right, she bought a slew of old women\u2019s lifestyle magazines on EBay, watched old films, a lot of \u201cMad Men\u201d<\/a> episodes and music shows from the era \u2014 \u201cjust anything where I could to get a sense of the music and the clothes.\u201d<\/p>\n Equally as important: researching women in the same boat as Beverley, Margot and Elsie. The novel is set a few years after the Boston Strangler terrorized that New England city, and the same summer as Richard Speck murdered eight nurses in Chicago, with the Zodiac Killer, the Manson family and countless others to follow. To understand how wives of her serial killers might have felt, Arnott watched documentaries about them and read books by daughters and family members of serial killers.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t want to take anyone\u2019s stories sort of wholesale and put them in this book, so there are glimmers of real inspiration in there,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I wanted to be respectful about how much I chose to sort of take from those stories.\u201d<\/p>\n Rather than have Beverley live in Pasadena or Mar Vista, Arnott created the might-be-anywhere suburban town of Berryview as her residence. \u201cI wanted the reader to almost feel like this could happen to them,\u201d Arnott says. \u201cMy intention was for it to be like Wisteria Lane with rotten foundations \u2014 a pretty white picket fenced suburb with blood running.\u201d<\/p>\n By the very nature of its familiar domesticity, Arnott\u2019s latest novel represents a marked shift from her first two books, both set in the 19th century and told from the perspective of young women with no parents in the picture. In \u201cMoonlight and the Pearler\u2019s Daughter,\u201d<\/a> a British-born daughter of a missing pearl boat captain seeks answers about her father\u2019s disappearance in western Australia, while the titular character in \u201cMaude Horton\u2019s Glorious Revenge\u201d <\/a>attends public hangings in Victorian England while searching for answers about her sister Constance\u2019s death on an Arctic expedition. Both required three to four months of research before she could begin writing the books, whereas in this case, she was able to write and research along the way, finishing her first draft in about six weeks, \u201cwhich for me is crazy \u2014 so quick.\u201d<\/p>\n It helps, she notes, that so many books and TV shows have focused on the dynamic period in American history.<\/p>\n The writer\u2019s earlier novels were published under her maiden name, Lizzie Pook. The authorial name change for \u201cSecret Lives\u201d wasn\u2019t initiated by her \u2014 Arnott calls it a publisher\u2019s decision aimed at differentiating her latest, \u201cmore of a book club, commercial thriller\u201d from her earlier historical fiction \u2014 but seems like a natural fit given that\u2019s the name she put on her manuscript from the outset. \u201cWhen I started writing this book, I did put Elizabeth Arnott at the top of the page because I felt that it gave me freedom to do something different,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I think it sort of stuck.\u201d<\/p>\n By the time her agent was ready to shop the book at the London Book Fair, Arnott was nine months pregnant with her first child. \u201cShe was emailing me back and forth, saying, \u2018Oh my gosh, we\u2019ve got this many publishers interested, we\u2019re going to set up calls with XYZ, XYZ,\u2019\u201d Arnott says of her agent\u2019s communications then. \u201cI ended up in hospital with high blood pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n