An ability to blend page-turning plotting with literary ambition has made Karin Slaughter the 'next big thing' in crime fiction, writes John Connolly.
It is, it must be said, a pretty cool name to have. Admittedly, if your stock-in-trade is petcare books or childcare manuals, then a name like "Slaughter" might be a millstone around your neck. Quite frankly it would put some people off, and might lead you to reconsider your vocation in life. On the other hand, if, like Karin Slaughter, your field of expertise is dark yet compassionate crime novels in which blood flows and people suffer, novels in which a trio of flawed characters attempt to strike out against the evils that inhabit the fictional Georgia locales of Grant county and Heartsdale, then you're pretty much quids in on the name front. Short of opening an abattoir, you're never going to find yourself in a more suitable profession.
The lucky possessor of the Slaughter name is a petite 32-year-old native of Georgia and is also, by general agreement, the next big thing in crime fiction. Blindsighted, her début, which deals with a serial killer with a penchant for crucifixion imagery, received the kind of reviews for which most authors would happily commit a string of serious crimes. Her recently published second book, Kisscut, is even better, tackling the issue of child abduction and abuse with unusual sensitivity.
While her plotting is exemplary, it is the carefully drawn relationships between the three individuals at the heart of both books - Sara Linton, Heartsdale's medical examiner; her former husband, and the town's chief of police, Jeffrey Tolliver; and Lena Adams, a police detective - that give them much of their emotional power and resonance. Unusually for the genre, the three central characters receive roughly equal weight in the narratives; Slaughter is nothing if not democratic in her allocation of suffering.
Seated in a Dublin hotel, she looks slightly lost in a baggy sweater and jeans (her airline has mislaid her baggage somewhere over the Irish Sea.) Her face is very small, topped by the kind of blonde hair that appears to have a mind of its own and that, right now, has decided to make a break for freedom in a number of different directions. She is very softly spoken, although very funny, and describes herself as quite shy. That may be true, but even a short time spent in her company offers glimpses of steely determination and focus. She is, you feel, going to be around for a long time. Cross her, though, and you might not be.
Slaughter grew up in the town of Jonesboro, about 20 kilometres south of Atlanta. "It's a very small town, or it was when I was living there. Now it's been sucked into Atlanta, like most suburbs. There was a main street, very much like the one I write about, with a courthouse and an ice-cream parlour and the law office. I always knew if I did something wrong and someone saw me, then my parents would find out by the time I got home, which is a horrible way to grow up."
Following her parents' divorce, she moved to the university town of Morrow, eventually going to college there before dropping out when she was told she could not keep taking English literature courses alone. (Slaughter is, it's worth noting, very southern, explaining how a lot of "Yankees" have come to Georgia to study, attracted by the state's lottery-funded scholarship programme. "Subsequently, the standards at our state universities have dropped considerably," she concludes, and it's hard to tell if she's joking or not.)
After dropping out of college she supported herself by working as a signwriter while completing a succession of novels destined, it seems, never to reside on a bookstore shelf, among them If Cats Had Thumbs (about a man who loses both thumbs in a boating accident) and Spit In One Hand (a title that comes from a southern colloquialism, "Spit in one hand, want in the other, and see which one fills up fastest").
The latter book secured her an agent and, by combining her love of crime books with her southern literary heritage - she says the two books that most influenced her during puberty were Helter Skelter, the story of the Manson family murders, and Gone With The Wind - she eventually produced Blindsighted.
When asked why southern writers appear to have a very distinctive voice, and a very strong influence on those who fall under their sway, she replies, with a hint of tongue-in-cheek, "we're just better".
"When Walker Percy won the Pulitzer prize, people asked him what made southern writers better than other American writers, and he said because we've had 'the Fall'. We lost the war. We also have a very strong sense of oral history. There's always a story behind even the simplest of things. The whole way that southern writers focus on characterisation in the story comes from that oral history.
"I think that every writer is a regional writer, and to deny that, denies who you are as a writer. I mean you really have to stay where you're from and write what you know. It's really popular now for writers to move to the south and say that they're southern writers but, as we say, just because a cat has kittens in the oven it doesn't make them biscuits."
While her first-hand knowledge of life in small southern towns adds authenticity to her work, Slaughter has been criticised by some of her more squeamish detractors for the way she approaches violence in her books, and particularly violence towards women. The criticism is probably a little unfair. Blindsighted opens with the discovery of the body of a raped and murdered blind woman, but the murder itself is left largely to the imagination of the reader. Similarly, Kisscut never dwells on the abuse of children, once again leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.
While such violence is a subject common to both male and female crime writers - and one which is prevalent in a great deal of writing in the genre - Slaughter believes that the sexes approach it in quite different ways.
"I think to a large extent we are writing about our own demons, and as a woman I'm going to write about violence against women, because that's a demon that a lot of women deal with," she says. "I believe women need to write about it in addition to men, and to give a different viewpoint on the subject matter. I hate when people say that men can't write convincingly about violence against women, because they do bring a different perspective to it. To me it seems that women are interested in the survival aspect of it - and this is just a very general response, you understand? A lot of men, by contrast, are interested in the actual act, and if a character has something awful happen to him or her then that character is scarred for life and basically can't go on.
"I really love writing the character of Lena in the novels, because she's sympathetic sometimes and at other times you just want to slap her," she adds. "She's had horrible things happen to her, and you can feel sympathy for her, but she's not a typical victim, where a saintliness is conferred upon her because something horrible has happened to her, or the writer manipulates your emotions so you feel sorry for her. She's a survivor and she does things that a lot of women do in response to these situations. Faint Cold Fear, the third book, is about her making a lot of stupid choices, the kind that a lot of women make who find themselves victimised at some point in their lives.
"I liked writing about that, but it's going to piss some people off. I think that's one of the problems that some people have with women writing about violence, because we write about it in an extremely realistic way, and to me it's the opposite of being irresponsible, because these are horrible crimes and you shouldn't flinch when you write about them. I'm interested in not just the violence, but how people react to it andtranscend it, how they survive it."
With the third novel featuring her central trio complete and a fourth, Indelible, in progress, Slaughter seems set to consolidate her reputation. While a futuristic novel called The Recidivists is planned, and she is editing a short story collection, Like A Charm, she shows no signs of abandoning the crime genre.
"I think that literary fiction, particularly in America, has got to the point where the less it is about, the more it is lauded critically, and you have to tell a story. What's the point if you're not telling a story? If you're not asking a question at the beginning that's answered by the end, then what purpose are you serving? It's not telling me anything new about the human condition, and I think that crime fiction is doing that. It is asking, and attempting to answer, a lot of the difficult questions in society at the moment. Violence is such a part of our culture, and people want to know why."
Kisscut (Century) is available in hardback. Blindsighted (Arrow) has just been published in paperback.
Crime writer John Connolly's new book, Bad Men is due out later this year