Some of the best ideas are born from a misunderstanding. Like mishearing a song lyric, what we think is there can often be better than what actually is. If we’re lucky, we can use these misinterpretations to create original art. That was certainly my hope for my latest novel, Say My Name.
I’d been reading Jess Lourey’s excellent Unspeakable Things. (And if you haven’t read that book, forget about mine—forget about even finishing this essay—pick up that book, stat. I promise you won’t be disappointed.) Jess kicks off Unspeakable Things with an author’s note, sharing the true crime from her hometown in Minnesota that inspired her writing the book. It wasn’t until I was a few chapters in that I realized Jess’s book was fiction. I’d mistaken her introduction to mean she’d be writing a true-crime novel (not Jess’s fault—I confuse easily). But my misunderstanding gave me an idea: what if a mystery writer were to return to his or her hometown, only to find themselves immersed in a real-life, unsolved disappearance, one so profound it’s what motivated them to become a crime writer in the first place?
Thus, Say My Name was born.
Say My Name tells the story of a mid-list, forty-something, unnamed mystery writer of a somewhat successful series centered around a lonely, irascible handyman in the New Hampshire mountains. Sound familiar? If you’ve read my Jay Porter thriller series, you might be wondering if this author is “me.” Well yes. And no. For our purposes? Let’s borrow a page from the David Bowie songbook and call our narrator “Buddy.”
On the heels of a divorce (a plot point that greatly upset my lovely wife Justine!), Buddy has returned to his hometown of Berlin, Connecticut—Berlin, like the one in Germany, but pronounced with the accent between syllables, like “pearl” and a preposition—and God forbid local residents hear you pronounce it the other way—to teach at his alma mater, Central Connecticut State University, which is where I (not coincidentally studied fiction writing under such authors as Tom Hazuka (In the City of the Disappeared), who also appears in the book. In fact, throughout the book, whenever possible, I use real names for characters, restaurants, and towns. (Though it’s not necessary to have read any of the Jay Porter books, for those of you who have? Say My Name is rife with Easter eggs.)
When the job falls through, Buddy finds himself revisiting an unsolved disappearance that has hung over Berlin since the mid-’80s, when the Rodgers Twins, Annabelle and Ava, went missing from the Meriden Square, their bodies never recovered. This disappearance greatly impacted the Class of ’88 (also the year I graduated), haunting Buddy and his friends like Jack Lotko, Jim Case, and Ron Lamontagne, who are real people, close friends, and instrumental characters in the book. What happens next reads like a true-crime novel, with one massive caveat.
Did this crime actually happen?
Depends on whom you ask.
Are you sensing a blurring of fact and fiction?
That is the point. Say My Name plays with trope and expectation. It subverts genre, stretching the tenets of true-crime past its breaking point.
When I set out to write Say My Name, I wasn’t sure where the story would take me. I deeply respect authors of true-crime (such as Caitlin Rother, whose excellent Death on Ocean Boulevard is a must read), and I have reverence for its governing, unnegotiable precept: to be qualify as “true crime,” every detail must be 100% factual. The author is not allowed to take any liberties. I am also a huge fan of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which is based on real murders that took place on a Kansas farm in the 1950s. But is it true crime? Some say yes. Some no. I’d agree with the latter, since so much of the book is, admittedly, fabricated. Capote didn’t play by the rules.
Or did he? I mean, what is true?
Seems easy enough to answer. Yet, eyewitness testimony is unreliable. We have phenomena such as the Mandela Effect, where audiences swear by iconic movie lines that were never, in fact, actually said. Sam is never asked to play it again, not by name anyway. Darth Vader never uses his son’s name when revealing his true parentage. Even the camera lies. Tom Cruise isn’t wearing Ray Bans during his infamous tidy whities dance in Risky Business. In short, our memories can’t be trusted. This idea of unreliability fascinated me, and it’s at the center of Say My Name, a work that owes a massive debt to mind-bending television and films such as The Twilight Zone and Memento, where what you see isn’t always what you get.
If there is one consistent theme throughout Say My Name, it’s the symbiotic relationship between art and life. Without embracing that intimate, intertwined relationship, I wouldn’t have been able to create what has been, thus far, my best-selling book since Junkie Love.
I understand this explanation might be leaving a few of you scratching your head.
At the very least, you’re probably screaming, “Well did this crime happen or not?!”
Depends on whom you ask.
Allow me to leave you with a personal true story, which you can also find in the book (but is not a spoiler), about a health scare that happened to me a few years ago. This anecdote sums up our quandary pretty succinctly.
While crafting one of the Porter mysteries, I hit a plot snag. I needed an injury to Jay’s leg, one that would be debilitating but not lethal, to propel the action forward. After putting those permeameters in a search engine, I settled on the saphenous vein, a vein I’d never even heard of, but one that is apparently pretty important in keeping a man’s leg attached to his body and heart still beating. Honestly, I picked the vein at random because it sounded cool. I have Jay’s saphenous vein severed, which allowed me to set the stage for the book’s climax with its antagonists, the corrupt and crooked Lombardi Brothers.
Fast forward a few years to when doctors inform me that I will need an emergency surgical procedure because a major vein is backflowing into my heart, and that unless this backflow is addressed, ASAP, I could die. Want to guess the name of that vein?
Now, I’m not suggesting I willed a medical condition into existence because I wrote about it. Whatever was happening with my saphenous vein could’ve been going on for a while. Perhaps our bodies are so in-tune and -touch with one another that when I selected the saphenous for Jay, a part of me knew, on some level, that mine was in disrepair. Some neurons or synapses were already aware, communicating with my brain, relaying imperative information, which glommed onto my subconscious, which is why that particular vein caught my eye when I was conducting research.
Who knows?
Probably should ask a doctor.
I’m just a guy who writes mystery novels for a living.
After spending the 1990s as a homeless heroin addict in San Francisco, Joe Clifford got off the streets and turned his life around. He earned his MFA from Florida International University in 2008, before returning to the Bay Area, where he currently lives with his wife and two sons. His memoir, Junkie Love, chronicles his battle with drugs and was first published in 2010 and re-released in 2018. He is the author of the award-winning Jay Porter Thriller Series, as well as several standalones including The One That Got Away, The Lakehouse, The Shadow People and Say My Name.
His bestselling Jay Porter Thriller Series (Oceanview Publishing) has received rave reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among many others. Joe is also editor of Trouble in the Heartland: Crime Stories Based on the Songs of Bruce Springsteen and Just to Watch Him Die: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Johnny Cash. Currently Joe teaches online writing courses for FIU, as well as around the country at various conferences and retreats (or frankly anywhere someone will pay him).
