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Interview with Megan Abbott
0 Playsin 13 hours
Award winning author Megan Abbott joins Brook and Sarah to discuss noir and hard-boiled mystery fiction, sibling relationships, and why mystery is important, as well as her recent release El Dorado Drive. Audio note: Megan lives in an urban neighborhood and listeners will hear the occasional train rumbling by.
Discussed and mentioned
El Dorado Drive (2025) Megan Abbott
Red Harvest (1929) Dashiell Hammett
Beware the Woman (2023) Megan Abbott
Give Me Your Hand (2018) Megan Abbott
You Will Know Me (2016) Megan Abbott
The Fever (2014) Megan Abbott
Dare Me (2012) Megan Abbott
The End of Everything (2011) Megan Abbott
The Turnout (2021) Megan Abbott
For more about Megan
Website: meganabbott.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melizaabbott/
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/meganeabbott
For more information
Instagram: @cluedinmystery
Contact us: hello@cluedinmystery.com
Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com
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For a full episode transcript, visit https://cluedinmystery.com/bonus-interview-with-megan-abbott/
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guest
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke, and we both love mystery. Hi, Brooke. Hi, Sarah. So we're officially on our summer recording break, but we could not pass up the opportunity for this interview. Yeah, we are so fortunate to have...
00:00:31
Speaker
Megan Abbott joining us today. That's right. Megan Abbott is the best-selling, award-winning author of 11 novels, including Beware the Woman, Give Me Your Hand, You Will Know Me, The Fever, Dare Me, and The End of Everything.
00:00:48
Speaker
Her novel, The Turnout, was a New York Times bestseller, ah Read with Jenna book club pick, and a Los Angeles Times book prize winner. It has also earned her finalist recognitions for the International Thriller Writers Award,
00:01:02
Speaker
the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been optioned for TV by the producer of Sharp Objects. Deremy was featured in the New York Times' 10 Best Books of the 21st Century piece.
00:01:14
Speaker
Television rights to El Dorado Drive were recently optioned by A24 with Abbott attached to write. In addition, she's the co-creator and executive producer of the U.S. adaptation of Deremy and was a staff writer on HBO's David Simon show, The Deuce.
00:01:32
Speaker
She's set to co-write and produce a television series based on Laura Lipman's books following private investigator Tess Monahan. She lives in New York City. Welcome to Cluedin Mystery, Megan.
00:01:45
Speaker
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for introducing her, Brooke. And that leads into, I think, a great place to
Hard-Boiled vs. Noir Fiction
00:01:55
Speaker
start. And that's to talk about how, Megan, you've written and spoken about the difference between hard-boiled and noir fiction, two terms that are often used interchangeably.
00:02:07
Speaker
How do you define them? And how does your understanding of that distinction shape your approach to writing? Yeah, it is sort of, they are used interchangeably. In fact, I've probably used them interchangeably too, because they're sort of slippery, because they are connected genres, I think, both coming out of the middle of the last century. But I would say typically hard-boiled novels, you might think of the classic ones of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and their impact, of course, is still felt in particularly detective novels today. but
00:02:43
Speaker
they tend to offer a kind of dark world, certainly a world of corruption, ah a world where you know no one is to be trusted, but they do tend to um resolve things at the end. There does seem to be some kind of restoration of order, even if it's just the detective offering that restoration. We trust the detective. We believe in him um and we feel at least we have him as the sort of moral moral voice.
00:03:12
Speaker
In noir fiction, there is no moral voice. It's a completely um um amoral universe in many ways. It tends to be, i consider it a rather glamorous genre, but it glamorous in its darkness. It's a world where people's primal drives get them in trouble, lust, ah revenge, greed.
00:03:35
Speaker
um And there is there is no order to be restored. um And so they tend to end in in ah in a dark place for that reason. So i think ah noir is definitely the darker of the two um um and doesn't try to tidy things up.
00:03:53
Speaker
And I would say that's had the bigger influence on my writing. I love hard-boiled novels. And I think I love particularly the language of them, which tends to be very stylized and I love having that detective to hang on to. And usually he's not a simple, he's not exactly a hero, but you know I attach myself to him. But I tend to write more about criminals or people who fall into crime or people that are friends or related to someone who who commits a crime.
00:04:25
Speaker
and There tends to be, you're not, the police can't fix things. And in fact, maybe part of the problem, you know, traditional structures of justice can't be, you know, counted on. So it's definitely ah ah maybe maybe a sign of our times.
00:04:42
Speaker
They say noir always comes back in times of social unrest um and in anxiety about the future. And think one could say that we are in in those times a little bit, a sort of confusion about where we're going.
00:04:56
Speaker
No, that was really helpful. Like I hadn't ever had that distinction made like they're tragedies, right? A noir is a tragedy. And that that was kind of a light bulb moment
Building Suspense in Writing
00:05:06
Speaker
for me. So thank you.
00:05:08
Speaker
So Megan, how do you approach building suspense in your books? Are there techniques or narrative structures that you like to use again and again to keep readers turning the page? Yeah, a lot of it is intuitive or instinctual from having read a lot of mysteries, of course, but also having, you know, written a lot of books now, but a lot of it is about taking things away. It's, um,
00:05:33
Speaker
It's really about um when to reveal, what to reveal, and holding things back and letting the sort of reader come in. So you know mystery readers read a lot of mysteries, and they're they're ready to look for things that are going to go wrong. So in some ways, you're just sort of setting off all these little um alarms, these sort of ah um things that like tripwires, I guess. and that And you know that the smart mystery reader is going to pick up on them. So a lot of it is is about holding back, gradually revealing information, letting letting the reader fill in. and
00:06:10
Speaker
And a lot of that comes in the revision. It's ah it's so much about pacing and getting you know my editor to read it to see when things feel like they're slowing down or or when they need to slow down sometimes. And and so it's a lot about, I mean, i end up cutting a lot from every manuscript because you want to keep that propulsion and you also don't want to over determine everything for the reader. You want them to sort of enter the story. So it is really a lot about what you're leaving out, what you're holding back on when you're revealing it. and
00:06:45
Speaker
And it is sort of, I always think of that Hitchcock, the things he said about suspense, which is really that it's much it's much more frightening to the viewer, and in this case the reader, when you have a sense of what's going to happen. So you bring you bring the suspense, and so the reader there has done half the work for you. So that's what it's like a game of cat and mouse I always think of with the reader while I'm writing.
00:07:09
Speaker
Sometimes they're going to get a little ahead of me. Sometimes I'm going to get a little ahead of them. And we sort of play this game together. i like that idea of of that game of of cat and mouse. And, ah you know, you talk about withholding information and releasing it in in pieces in the story. And you you do that really well in El Dorado Drive.
00:07:31
Speaker
You open with how it's going to end. And I almost forgot that that was where we were going in the book. um And so I think you accomplished that that really well.
00:07:45
Speaker
You also delve into the inner workings of relationships between sisters, between friends, between rivals, and and all of the different kinds of relationships that a woman might have with other women.
00:07:59
Speaker
What drew you to explore ah the potential pitfalls in these relationships.
Exploring Sibling Relationships
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah, i I've always been interested in sisters. i don't have any sisters. i just have a brother who's a year older. in ah And, you know, really, i think there's something, you I've written a lot about female friendship, and and that can be very much like sisters or but you don't have that that shared childhood in the family. You don't have those roles in the family that you do with your sisters. So, you know, you're sort of set in your role in the family by birth order very early on. and yeah Are you the troublemaker? Are you the responsible one? and And that dynamic is so fascinating to me, especially with sisters. And
00:08:42
Speaker
You know, i i think sisters, it's just such a ah heady brew of things. It's sort of this kind of competition or rivalry, but it's also this low intense loyalty.
00:08:54
Speaker
There's a lot of microaggressions that outsiders wouldn't notice at all. But the sisters know that she just got a dig from her. And, you know, and then these sort of decades long grudges about, you know, who was the favorite child or who got the better birthday cake or, you know.
00:09:10
Speaker
and how that stuff can emerge at any time. And then this sort of unshakable love, you know, that that is always there, even among that. And maybe be especially among the sisters I've known who fought the most, they're the most loyal to each other and won't fight anyone else from the outside who says anything bad about their sister.
00:09:29
Speaker
So that's so useful for a a crime novel, especially one exploring women and women in and their relationship to money and their relationship to competition and how they deal with other women. it it just sort of set set the stage so well for the book and was fascinating about it. I mean,
00:09:48
Speaker
Having a an older brother just sort of what wishing I had had even though I love my brother, but um that kind of complex relationship with another woman always always is sort of the the thing. you know You're always writing about things you don't have or things you're afraid of or things that you know you you long for. So I think it's a little bit of that.
00:10:12
Speaker
Well, so you mentioned you have a brother. How do you write about siblings without mining your own family relationships? Or maybe you do. Like, how does that work? And and where do you draw the line? And what do you use?
00:10:25
Speaker
Yeah, there is no line. You always write about what like you your own experience is. And it certainly... ah probably could find evidence of my relationship with my brother in there. We certainly were competitive as kids. You know, I grew up in that era when, you know, he was a year older than me. And in elementary school, you would be assigned the same teacher of your siblings. And So I just always remember the first day of school every year, the teacher saying, well, i hope you're as good a good student as your brother. And so I would carry that immediately from the start, this burden to be um the straight A student that my brother was. So that that sort of set us in competition from the start. I think that's certainly in there. In addition, certainly the sisters I've known, they just feed into that. And, you know,
00:11:16
Speaker
you inevitably, even if you don't mean to, you yourself and your own experiences always bleed into the work because you're operating so much from unconscious spaces, so you can't even help it. and And you just hope. I mean, often all writers I know get asked this, you know,
00:11:34
Speaker
do do people ever identify themselves in your book? And of course it happens all the time, but they're always wrong about who they are. um yeah um And there's something big so delightful about that sleight of hand. And it really tells you a lot about them based on who they think they are in the book.
00:11:54
Speaker
Well, I think, you know, you you mentioned that you don't have any sisters, but you do a great job of capturing the dynamic between sisters and the little injuries that they can inflict on each other that you know, maybe it's it's true of of sisters and brothers as well, that they can have those long lasting harms that come from growing up in the in the same household and spending all of that time together.
00:12:21
Speaker
But you capture that really well in the book. Thank you. I'm glad. I i mean, i always do think of siblings as veterans of the same war and the war being one's childhood. And so you there's old stuff that never goes away and that can ah you know emerge at any moment, just like those you know the way you remember your childhood differently too, based on um your birth order or how you hey you know your sensitivity to certain issues. And I think That stuff is both the basis of calamity sometimes with your siblings later, um but also it's what connects you and binds you. Like the sisters in El Dorado Drive all have this sort of precarious relationship to money because they grew up
00:13:08
Speaker
The first several years were in wealth and then the money went away. And depending on how old they were when that happened, they have different views of money and scarcity and what money can give you. So, so it would that, yeah, that's the stuff that's just so useful when you're, when you want to bring the reader into the book, you know, you want them to,
00:13:29
Speaker
bring in their their own experiences, anyone with a sister. I've done so many book events on this tour where people as sisters would come forward after i would give a talk and tell me these stories about their sibling relationships. And so that's that's what you want so that you can you can connect to it. So it it becomes more memorable and meaningful that way. At least that's what you hope.
Writing Process and Current Projects
00:13:51
Speaker
Well, Megan, would you share with us about your writing process, how a book comes together for you? Yeah, it's definitely changed over the years. You know, when I started my first several books, I had a full time job. So it was a lot about writing on the weekend and trying to get a page. I would have like five pages a week or, you know, things like that, that, you know, they they work, they accumulate faster than you would think. But but there But I also didn't really know how to structure a mystery. So there was a lot of overwriting and writing that didn't end up in the book. There still always is. I always cut sometimes as much as 100 pages out of these manuscripts.
00:14:31
Speaker
But now, you know, having written so many and having sort of started to trust my process and um It's really about just making sure that I write every day and that I block out the day to day time to write, which means I never have lunch with anybody.
00:14:48
Speaker
i can't make any plans during the day um because that is an excuse not to write. It's always easier not to write than to write. So I really try to stay in the book all day.
00:15:00
Speaker
And even if I'm not um putting words to screen, oh I'm staying in the head of the book. I'm taking a walk and thinking about plot problems. I'm you know i'm picking up a book that maybe it gives me the feeling I'm looking for and reading a few pages.
00:15:17
Speaker
I'm thinking about the characters. And so that that stuff, pulling out research, that kind of thing, is really keeps you. Walter Moseley has this quote about it that you have to touch the book every day, even if you're not getting five pages, e cetera.
00:15:34
Speaker
You just need to keep touching it. And that's really become the main part of my process now. I like that you, um I think as um more beginning writers think like writing means like you're actually, like you say, putting words down, but you're like saying writing might be reading something that's it um inspirational or taking the walk and thinking like all of that is writing your book.
00:15:58
Speaker
That's right. That's right. and it And some of it, some of it it turns out to be more important. You know, think um all of that, it's really about immersion. And that really then feeds the discipline and routine that you need. You know, if you're if you're in it, it's not so hard to come back the next day.
00:16:15
Speaker
But if you're plotting out words just to plot out, we plot out words, it's much harder to come back. in That's great advice. ah Megan, can you tell us a little bit about what you are working on next?
00:16:28
Speaker
Yeah, I, you know, I do a lot of screenwriting work and that's occupied me a lot right now, though I have started ah the next book. I, you know, I'm working on the adaptation El Dorado Drive for eight twenty four as a series. and And I'm also working on a series with Scott Frank, who did Queen's Gambit and Department Q, which is the new mystery series on Netflix and We're adapting Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which is really sort of the first hard-boiled novel from the 1920s for Netflix. So that that's one um been always been one of my favorite books of all time. So it's been a real, real pleasure to get into that.
00:17:12
Speaker
That's so exciting. You know, Sarah and I have mentioned a few times how we're having this renaissance of mystery films and and series. And so that's really exciting to know that there's a ah hard-boiled series coming down the pipe.
00:17:28
Speaker
Yes. I mean, that between that and the Tess Monaghan series, I'm working on with Laura Lipman, which is is, you know, really one of the great female detective series of the last, well, I mean, really one of the great American female detective stories. um She's, you know, the wave coming after sue Grafton and Sarah Paretsky, but in that vein. And so it's, there's something, it feels like it's exact right moment. All of a sudden, everybody wanted, it you know, all the studios wanted to do it. And I think it's for just the reason you're saying there's, you know, there's just a real,
00:18:03
Speaker
resurgence of interest in these stories. And I think maybe for the, for the, you know, the, the story, their structure, we're very familiar with, it feels very comfortable to us. And it engages us, it it fires up our brain, right, we're trying to solve the mystery, but the form feels and nicely familiar, it feels.
00:18:26
Speaker
It feels like a place we can go and and feel like we're home somehow. So i think that's that's really appealing.
00:18:37
Speaker
Well, and and, you know, I know Brooke and I have talked about this in the past, that one of the things that makes mystery so great is that there's a resolution. Yeah.
00:18:47
Speaker
Right. And that can be comforting as well. Right. Knowing that even if things aren't great for all of the characters, there is someone is going to get caught at the end.
00:19:00
Speaker
That's right. And there's a revelation and there's some sense of justice, even if it's just very small justice. And I think that's really, you know, even in my novels,
00:19:12
Speaker
you know are maybe more noirish i always try to bring the main characters to a place of peace uh which feels even if it's maybe an ambivalent piece you know i always try to do two things at once i try to resolve the mystery definitively and then kind of open another door and i think that feels like a hope of some kind and i I think that's what we're really looking for right now. And I think that that is so much the appeal of these and and staying, you know, with these series, staying with that same character. So we trust them so much. We know they won't lead us astray. They may screw up. They may be, you know, Raymond Chandler calls his hero the tarnished knight. There might be some tarnish there, but they're still going to do the right thing. And that that feels really comforting right now.
00:20:04
Speaker
Mm hmm. Yeah. ah Another um similarity between the 1920s and the 2020s. We really need, I love you used the word hope. We we want that feeling. And um if we can get that from our fiction, it just is, it's very reassuring.
00:20:19
Speaker
Yes. If only our fiction will take it.
Crime Stories and Women's Issues
00:20:25
Speaker
One of the other things I love about mysteries and crime stories in general is that you get to explore other issues, social issues and psychological issues, particularly that women face. I think that's one of the reasons women are the primary...
00:20:41
Speaker
consumers of crime and true crime is that this is where you get to see female issues explored, whether they be, you know, abuse or complicated mother-daughter relationships or, or, you know, um all are sort of, you know, sort of female fear of sexual aggression in general, all this stuff. And in this book, El Dorado Jive, I really wanted to explore women and their relationship to money because,
00:21:07
Speaker
money's never just about money for anyone, but I think for women, it gets really tied up with issues of independence and security and freedom. And I think that this, that that sort of gave me a way to explore that within the structure of a crime story. And and I love that about the genre.
Follow Megan Abbott Online
00:21:26
Speaker
So Megan, where can our listeners find you? Yes, I have a website, so you know, intermittently updated at megadavit.com, but I'm on most of the social platforms, Facebook and Blue Sky and sometimes Twitter, not that much anymore, but ah but especially Instagram, and you can find me there. um always always lurking.
00:21:52
Speaker
Well, we will add links to the show notes so people can can find you on those platforms. Thank you very much for joining us today. Yes, thank you, Megan. It has been such a pleasure. And thank you, listeners, for joining us today as well.
00:22:08
Speaker
But for today, I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery. Clued in Mystery is written and produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers.
00:22:19
Speaker
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00:22:34
Speaker
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