Hallie Ephron: How the idea for You'll Never Know, Dear crept up on her

HALLIE EPHRON is the New York Times best-selling author of suspense novels including You’ll Never Know, Dear. She is a four-time finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, and her Writing & Selling Your Mystery Novel was nominated for Edgar and Anthony awards. She lives near Boston and was the Boston Globe crime fiction book reviewer for over a decade.

HALLIE EPHRON:
How the Idea for You’ll Never Know, Dear crept up on her


Usually my book ideas grow out of my own experience. Giving birth to my first child and going to yard sales inspired Never Tell a Lie. Watching my neighbor get carried out of her house in the dead of winter, and firefighters going in and finding a hoarder’s den inspired There Was an Old Woman. Growing up around the corner from an infamous Hollywood murder (Lana Turner, Johnny Stompanato…) inspired Night Night, Sleep Tight. I’ve always set my books in places I know well: New England, New York City, Beverly Hills.

My new novel, You’ll Never Know, Dear, is my first book inspired by someone else’s experience and set in a place I’ve barely visited.

The idea came from my friend Mary Alice who told me about helping her mother, Blanche, move out of their family home in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Blanche had always been a talented crafts person. An artist, really. She made porcelain dolls, so her house had been full of supplies for doll making—modeling clay, molds, glazes and paints, a kiln, and of course a battalion of finished dolls with their little shoes and embroidered dresses and panties.

My friend told me that her kids refused to sleep in the bedroom where Blanche kept dolls. They said, “You’d wake up and they’d all be looking at you.” Blanche proclaimed those grandchildren of hers “little sissies.”

No sissy herself, Blanche slept with a pistol tucked into an eyeglass case (the kind you squeeze the top to open) under her pillow. Detail upon detail, I could feel Blanche turning into a character into my head.

As my friend was helping Blanche empty her house, under every bed she found boxes and boxes of doll parts. Arms. Legs. Bodies. Heads. Eyeballs.

 “Creepy,” I said when she told me that.

 “Put it in your next book,” she shot back.

And I did. Blanche is the inspiration for my Miss Sorrel, a 70-something doll maker who suffers no fools in You’ll Never Know, Dear. And those doll parts? They’re a key element in the plot.

The book opens with Miss Sorrel and her grown daughter, Lis, having sweet tea and egg salad sandwiches on the porch of their home. We meet Miss Sorrel for the first time.

Miss Sorrel rocked gently in the glider and sipped sweet tea from a glass dripping condensation. With her powdered face, spots of rouge on each cheek, and lipstick carefully painted on, Miss Sorrel was starting to look like one of the porcelain dolls she so prized. That, despite the un-doll-like creases that ran from the corners of her lips down either side of her chin, the crinkles that radiated from the corners of her eyes, and the skin that had started to lose its grip on her fine-boned skull. 

Forty years ago, Miss Sorrel’s younger daughter, 4-year-old Janey, was taken from their front yard. The special porcelain doll Miss Sorrel had made for her disappeared with her. I knew Miss Sorrel and Lis, the older sister who was supposed to be watching Janey, would carry a burden of grief and guilt over the loss.

In the book’s opening scene, Janey’s doll comes back. A woman who delivers it refuses to tell Miss Sorrel where she got it, interested only in the reward Miss Sorrel is offering. The doll is old and battered, creepy the way old dolls can be. Miss Sorrel is sure it’s the doll that was Janey’s. Lis isn’t convinced.

I wanted to set the book in Beaufort, South Carolina. I’d visited there twice, briefly, but a fresh visit convinced me that I’d have to fictionalize it. My prose could never match native son Pat Conroy’s. Plus, one of my characters had to be the sheriff, and Beaufort had a larger-than-life sheriff who served for decades, called himself a white witch doctor, and was so beloved that they named a bridge after him. Anyone who lives within a hundred miles of Beaufort would balk at my fictional sheriff.

So I invented “Bonsecours.” I hope, a ringer for Beaufort. Gracious homes, live oaks, camellias and wisteria; Spanish moss hanging indiscriminately from tree branches, phone wires, and fences. It’s got a charming downtown with a riverfront park, and shrimp boats (Forrest Gump was filmed there). The riverbanks are thick with sticky mud and the river has treacherous, nine-foot tides.

Writing Southern characters was another challenge. I had to slow down and kept telling myself: We’re not in Boston anymore. The narrative needed to be a bit more leisurely and my characters, bless their hearts, had to have southern accents and have mastered the art of the gracious insult.

After I wrote the opening scenes, I had no idea what happened to Janey. But I knew that doll parts would be the key to unlocking the mystery, and that the river would play a part as well. Somehow. It wasn’t until I finished writing the book that I figured out how

PHOTO: Hallie with one of Blanche’s porcelain dolls

Where Ideas Come From: Guest post by Carl-Johan Vallgren

Carl-Johan Vallgren is one of Sweden's most loved writers. He has been awarded the Swedish August Prize for Best Novel of the Year, and has been translated into 25 languages. He's also a talented musician with Warner Music. 

Carl-Johan Vallgren:

Some five or six years ago I had an experience that changed the direction of my writing. It was a Friday in May, and I’d been working hard the whole week, trying to get a grip on the novel I was writing. This day was no exception. I lost track of time and place, and when I looked at my watch I got a shock. It was 5 p.m.

The kids! I’d been supposed to pick them up from daycare two hours earlier! Twenty minutes later I arrived. My six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son were the only kids left—and exhausted after a long day. I apologized to the daycare attendants, looked at my cell phone, and saw that it was full of texts from my wife: ”Where are you?…Have you picked up the kids?…It´s Shabbas tonight and we need some groceries for the meal.”

I slipped my son into his stroller, grabbed my daughter by the hand, and walked hurriedly down to the Kristineberg metro station. It was late afternoon and the station was full of commuters on their way home for the weekend. I showed my ticket and entered the gate for strollers, stress running through my veins.

At Kristineberg station, the tracks are elevated, and the best way to reach the platform is by using an elevator—at least with two small, tired kids and a stroller. But my daughter had different ideas; she wanted to take the stairs! A quarrel started. I tried to tell her that it was impossible with all the people and her little brother in the buggy, but she insisted, got angry, and started to scream at me. In that very moment, a woman turned up from nowhere. Apparently she had overheard our conversation.

”You can walk the stairs with me if you want,” she said to my daughter with a smile. ”And then we can wait for your father and your little brother upstairs until they come in the elevator.”

She was in her sixties, well dressed, and her voice was soft and friendly. Used to grandchildren, I remember thinking.

And for a moment I was on the verge of letting my daughter go with that friendly middle-aged woman, following the law of minimum possible resistance—until my ”father instinct” kicked in a second later. After all, the person in front of me was a complete stranger.

”Thank you for your sweet offer, but my daughter comes with me!” I said.

I grabbed my little girl by the hand and dragged her into the elevator with her brother, and I pushed the button for the platform level.

The elevator ride took about ten seconds. And in that time the writer inside me ran completely amok: What’s is the situation here? What is the worst case scenario?…What could have happened?…A stressed father leaves his child to walk the stairs with a friendly older woman at rush hour in the subway. And by the time he reaches the platform in the lift, the child has vanished!

I knew it immediately: It was the first chapter of a book—and not just any book. It had to be a crime novel.

I had the whole first chapter in my head before we got home that afternoon. And about a year later, after finishing my other book (a ”normal” novel), I sat down and started to write the first book in the Danny Katz series: The Boy in the Shadows—which starts with the abduction of a child in the Stockholm subway.

Now I’m incredibly proud to present the second book in the series, The Tunnel. Danny Katz is still the main character. And Katz, too, was born that Friday in May. It was Shabbas, and I remember thinking in the elevator: The man to solve the mystery has to be a Jewish guy. I owe that to my children and their mother, because they seem to constantly provide me with literary ideas.