Contemporary Authors

• Little Deaths: A Novel Hachette Books (New York, NY), 2017

1. Little deaths : a novel https://lccn.loc.gov/2016037331 Flint, Emma author. Little deaths : a novel / Emma Flint. First U.S. edition. New York : Hachette Books, 2017. pages cm PR6106.L55 L58 2017 ISBN: 9780316272476 (hardback)

• Emma Flint - http://emmaflint.com/about/

  Emma Flint grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne, and has been writing fiction since she knew what stories were. She graduated from the University of St. Andrews with an MA in English Language and Literature, later completing a novel-writing course at the Faber Academy. She worked in Edinburgh for four years, and now lives in north London.
  Since childhood, she has been drawn to true crime stories, developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of real-life murder cases. She is equally fascinated by notorious historical figures and by unorthodox women – past, present and fictional.
  All of these themes informed and inspired Little Deaths, a heady blend of sex, murder, obsession, noir and a femme fatale. Set in 1960s suburban New York, the novel re-tells a horrifying true story with a modern feminist slant.

• Publishers Weekly - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bea/article/70182-bea-2016-emma-flint-little-deaths-big-buzz.html

  BEA 2016: Emma Flint: ‘Little Deaths,’ Big Buzz

  By Bridget Kinsella | May 11, 2016
  Comments subscribe by the month

  Photo by Jonathan Ring
  Growing up in the north of England, Emma Flint was 10 years old when she wrote her first fiction, an Agatha Christie pastiche replete with a thickly mustached French detective. As a teen she became interested in true crime stories. One particular case, she recalls, which occurred “in Queens, New York, of all places,” piqued her curiosity—the 1965 trial of a young mother, Alice Crimmins, accused of murdering her two young children. Crimmins was maligned by the police and the press for being a woman separated from her husband, who lived unconventionally and maintained a stylish appearance, all of which, they claimed, undermined her innocence. “She refused to play the [typical disheveled and distraught] victim and looked absolutely perfect,” says Flint about the case that led her to explore the fate of a similarly prejudged mother in her debut novel, Little Deaths (Hachette, Jan. 2017), named a BEA Buzz book. “I was intrigued by this woman wearing this cosmetic mask,” says Flint, who is a technical writer in London. She began writing Little Deaths about five years ago, driven largely by a discrepancy in the forensic evi­dence in the real case that made her want to explore further her fictional creation, Ruth Malone: why would a mother accused of killing her children lie about what she served them for their last meal before they went missing and were found dead? “At the heart of all crime novels is the question of who’s lying and why,” says Flint. “[Dinner] is a really weird thing to lie about—why would she lie about that? It was so satisfying when I worked that out.”

  Briefly, Flint thought she might change the time or setting of Little Deaths, but Queens 1965 proved a fascination for her. It was a time when women’s rights and feminism were still rare, Flint says: “Like the real character, Ruth is the kind of woman who likes to drink and consort with men, and the fact that she is doing this in what was then a quiet outer borough of New York made her stand out.”

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  “I think everything that I write is going to be based on real crimes,” she says. Her next book is set in 1970s London Soho, near where she lives. “It’s going to be so different being able to just go there,” says Flint, who used YouTube and Google Maps to wander around 1960s Queens from her London home. As for bringing Ruth and her story in Little Deaths out into the world at BEA, “it’s the most surreal thing that will ever happen to me.”

  Flint is part of today’s “Adult Editors’ Buzz” panel in room 1883, 4:15–5:30 p.m. Tomorrow, 3–4 p.m., she is signing at Table 2, in the Autographing Area.

• Jo Unwin Literary Agency - http://www.jounwin.co.uk/portfolio/emma-flint/

  Emma was born and grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. After graduating from the University of St. Andrews with an MA in English Language and Literature, she embarked on a career as a Technical Author: firstly in Edinburgh and now in London.

  Away from her day job, she’s developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of real-life murder cases and of notorious historical figures, as well as a fascination with unorthodox women – past, present and fictional. In her writing, she likes to poke around the darker reaches of the human mind, and to explore what people are capable of under extreme circumstances.

  Little Deaths will be her first novel.

• Oh Comely - http://ohcomely.co.uk/stories/2017/1/18/meet-the-author-emma-flint-discusses-little-deaths

  QUOTED: "It’s a book about love, morality and obsession: I wanted to explore the capacity for good and evil in everyone, and how most people have a sense of morality that isn’t clearly black and white."
  "What drew me to the story was the sense of injustice that pervaded it, and my impression that the real-life Ruth was condemned for who she was, rather than what she’d done. I’m not sure that society, particularly certain areas of the media, has moved on a great deal in that respect over the past fifty years: I wanted to highlight how women are often still judged on their appearance and their sexuality more than anything else."

  January 20, 2017
  Meet the author: Emma Flint discusses Little Deaths
  Frances Ambler Books

  If we’ve got dark circles under our eyes, it’s because we’d been staying up all night to read Emma Flint’s compulsive debut novel, Little Deaths. It’s a story of love, morality and obsession set against the backdrop of 1960s New York. We spoke to Emma to discover more about the book and her experience of being a debut author, as well as gleaning some advice for aspiring novelists.

  Could you tell us a little about the plot of Little Deaths and why you wanted to tell this story?

  It’s set in suburban Queens, New York and is based on the true story of a woman who was accused of killing her children in the summer of 1965.

  My narrators are Ruth Malone, recently separated from her husband and juggling single motherhood with shifts as a cocktail waitress, and Pete Wonicke, a rookie reporter from Iowa who’s desperate for a big story to make his name in New York.

  One hot July morning, Ruth wakes up to discover a bedroom window wide open and her two children missing. After a desperate search, the police find the body of her four-year-old daughter the same afternoon, and then the body of her five-year-old son weeks later.

  The police take one look at Ruth’s perfectly made-up face and provocative clothing, the empty bottles and love letters that litter her apartment – and leap to the obvious conclusions, fuelled by neighbourhood gossip. Covering the story as his first big break, Pete Wonicke at first does the same thing – but the longer he spends watching Ruth, the more he learns about the darker workings of the police and press, and the more he begins to doubt everything he thought he knew: about Ruth and about himself.

  It’s a book about love, morality and obsession: I wanted to explore the capacity for good and evil in everyone, and how most people have a sense of morality that isn’t clearly black and white.

  What drew me to the story was the sense of injustice that pervaded it, and my impression that the real-life Ruth was condemned for who she was, rather than what she’d done. I’m not sure that society, particularly certain areas of the media, has moved on a great deal in that respect over the past fifty years: I wanted to highlight how women are often still judged on their appearance and their sexuality more than anything else.
  Emma Flint
  Emma Flint

  With the true story in mind, how much did you feel you had to stick to ‘the facts’, and how much did you allow yourself artistic freedom?

  I stuck to the true story as much as I could, and the basic facts of the case are the same as in Little Deaths but I’ve condensed the events between the murders and Ruth’s arrest into four months. In reality, the case stalled for over two years as two grand juries failed to indict her for murder. Then in November 1966, one of Ruth’s neighbours sent an anonymous note to the prosecutor’s office, saying she had witnessed relevant events on the night of the children’s disappearance. When interviewed by the police, she gave essentially the same story recounted on the witness stand in Little Deaths.

  Most of the key characters – including Ruth Malone and the children – are based on real people, but I’ve changed their names and embellished them with fictional details. The police officer, Charlie Devlin is a composite of several officers involved in the initial investigation. Pete Wonicke and a few others are my own inventions.

  I think writing about a real crime is similar to any other historical fiction: it’s my job as a novelist to take the basic facts and breathe life into them so that the reader can experience them in a new way. The key is to make the characters real, and the past immediate and familiar, by writing about situations and experiences that the reader can relate to. We all know what it is to experience sadness or loneliness or fear: as a writer, you need to make what your characters are going through vivid enough that readers feel it too.

  Of course, I had to select which facts to include and which ones to leave out, and I found it interesting that there were some things that happened in the real investigation that my editors felt weren’t believable enough, which I then had to leave out and work around!

  The book finishes (without giving too much away) without the satisfaction of justice done. Why did you want to end on a note of ambiguity?

  Partly because that’s how I felt about the real case on which the book was based. Although there was a conviction, there were three trials before a final verdict was reached, which indicates in itself that the evidence wasn’t cut and dried.

  And also, that’s how real life is: it’s rare that all the ends are tied up neatly, and it’s rare that the bad guys get their just desserts and the good guys live happily ever after. Whatever the legal outcome in a murder case, the family of the victim are still left dealing with their grief and with the absence of their loved one: I imagine that any feeling of justice is always tempered by that sorrow.

  You capture the claustrophobic atmosphere of a New York summer in the 1960s perfectly. Can you tell us about the research you did to get the period right?

  Thank you very much. I read two excellent books about the original case, as well as dozens of relevant newspaper articles, but most of my research was done online. I used Google Maps and Streetview to ‘walk’ down the streets in Queens where the story is set, to look up at the buildings, and try to get a sense of the neighbourhood where Ruth lives. I listened to Queens accents on YouTube, and I looked at thousands of photos of suburban America in the mid-60s.

  I also kept thinking about my own childhood: I grew up in a quiet and sometimes claustrophobic suburb on the outskirts of a city. I think anyone who grew up in an environment like that will understand the closeness of that kind of neighbourhood, and how anyone different stands out.

  The public hear about the murders – and by default Ruth – via newspapers and gossip. How would you think the judgement on her would play out today, with rolling news and the internet?

  I imagine it would be similar, but more intense. News changes more quickly now – we can see photos within minutes of them being taken, or hear news as it happens. I think you only have to look at how Kate McCann or Amanda Knox have been judged on social media to see what would have happened if this particular story had played out fifty years later.

  Little Deaths is your debut novel. How did you fit writing it around ‘regular’ life? What does it feel like to have it out in the world?

  It took a long time and a lot of sacrifices. I started writing in 2010 and I gave up my permanent job in 2013. I was lucky that I worked in an industry with a lot of contract opportunities, so I could work for 5 to 6 months, then take time off to write. I didn’t have a holiday for six years, and I had to pass on a lot of evenings out and weekends away. It was hard. Writing can be very isolating – you’re the only one living in your fictional world for a very long time.

  Seeing Little Deaths out in the real world is incredible – and quite surreal. I never believed it would be published, but I was determined to finish it. I knew if I gave up I’d regret it. And now it’s out there, existing independently, and being read and thought about by people I’ve never met. It’s the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me, and I can’t imagine ever getting used this feeling.

  On your blog, you write about the experience of being able to declare yourself ‘a writer’, and the associated insecurities in doing so. What gave you the confidence to believe that about yourself?

  Recognition and acknowledgement from other people whose judgement I respected: other writers, my agent, and then my editors.

  What advice would you give to any aspiring authors?

  Read, read, read. Read as much as you can, as often as you can. Find writers you love and work out why you love them. Find writers you don’t like, and work out why. Read other books in the genre you’re working in, and read outside your area of interest. Read poetry to find new ways of using language. Read drama to understand dialogue. Read non-fiction to give your fiction credibility and authenticity.

  Find a writing group. It’s impossible to write a first novel in isolation: you need support and you need feedback from readers you trust. I also needed the accountability of writing a certain number of words for my writing groups by a certain date. Most people write a first novel about something they’re passionate about, and you need the objective judgement of others to tell you whether that passion translates to the page.

  Find a routine that works for you – whether that’s writing 1,000 words a day, or 5,000 words a week, or spending ten hours a week with your novel. Work out when you’re most productive. Set aside lunchtimes or two evenings a week or find childcare for half a day each weekend – but carve out the time and then use it.

  And don’t give up. Writing is a long slow process – it took me three years to write a full first draft, and there were eleven more drafts before it was finished. To make time for that amount of work, you have to believe in what you’re doing and that you feel you have a story to tell that only you can tell. That belief will get you through the rejections and the lack of free time and the slog and the utter exhaustion. Belief in what you’re doing will also help you decide whether the criticism you’ll get is fair or not: only you can know if changes that others suggest are right for your book.

  There’s a long tradition of women writers being the masters of the crime/thriller genre – Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and through to today – do you have any thoughts on why that might be? Why are you drawn to it as a genre?

  Recently we’ve seen a rise in domestic psychological thrillers, which are mostly written by women, and I think this is down to two things: firstly domestic settings and events are now seen as ‘valid’ subjects for novels, and secondly, I think women are becoming more open about the fears and threats they experience. We now have spaces where we can talk about how it feels to walk down the street and be catcalled, or how it feels to be stalked, or how it feels to be afraid to end a relationship. We’re all more aware of the existence of domestic abuse, and most people know that two women are murdered every week by a current or former partner (ironically, awareness is increasing at the same time that refuges are closing down and domestic violence charities are losing funding). Of course men are abused and killed by women as well – but specifically in relation to female crime writers: more than 80% of crime novels are bought by women, so it makes complete sense that a lot of crime novels focus on the deepest fears of women – being hurt or killed by someone close to them.

  I think most of us like to experience extreme emotions ‘safely’: whether that’s terror when we watch a horror film, or falling in love / lust when we watch a rom-com, or a creeping sense of unease when we read a psychological thriller. It’s the same for writers: a lot of us choose to explore extreme emotions, or emotion in extreme situations, and I happen to like writing about the darker stuff! I’m interested in the point where love becomes obsession, or fantasy takes over real life, or when someone chooses to act on one of those moments of fury we’ve all had. I guess I’m interested in how someone gets to that point of no-return – and what happens afterwards.

  Who are some of your favourite writers?

  My favourite writers are ones who write about crime and about history: those are the subjects that interest me most, which is why I read about them and why I write about them.

  I love Megan Abbott and Tana French, who write novels about crime, but who I don’t think are crime writers in the traditional sense. And I’m a huge admirer of Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel who both excel at recreating history and making it immediate and real.

  What are you reading at the moment?

  I’m working on my second novel, which is set in England in the 1920s, so I’m reading lots of fiction written in that period and non-fiction about that period. I’m trying to immerse myself in the social conventions and language of a very different time, and understand a society that was still reeling from the aftermath of the First World War.

  Looking forward to reading it! Thanks Emma.

• Tiny Letter - http://tinyletter.com/thecrimelady/letters/the-crime-lady-073-talking-with-emma-flint-author-of-little-deaths

  QUOTED: "There were two decades between reading about the crime and starting to write Little Deaths. I first read about it when I was sixteen, and found that I couldn’t forget Alice Crimmins or the story of what happened to her."
  "There were two things in particular that stayed in my mind: firstly, the discrepancy between her statement of what she fed the children for dinner the night they disappeared and what was found during the autopsy on her daughter – it always struck me as a very odd detail to lie about. And secondly, I had an image in my head—a memory of a photograph—of a striking, petite woman, perfectly dressed, eyes cast down, surrounded by tall bulky male figures."
  "I read a sentence about how important make-up was to Alice’s identity, and that triggered what became the first scene in Little Deaths."

  The Crime Lady #073: Talking with Emma Flint, Author of 'Little Deaths'

  by Sarah Weinman
  When the book deal for Emma Flint's debut novel Little Deaths was announced in September 2015, I felt more than a little odd. Just two months earlier, I published an essay at Hazlitt to mark the 50th anniversary of the Alice Crimmins case, one that when I first learned of it many years before, I could not get out of my head, to the point where I ended up holding actual, tangible, evidence that might have held the ultimate solution, had the case not been closed and had anyone cared to preserve it properly.

  Needless to say, I felt some trepidation upon reading Little Deaths, which was released earlier this week. It is, just like the real-life case, a story I cannot get out of my head. Ruth Malone, Flint's fictionalized version, is a woman of great contradictions and fierce independence. She won't apologize and won't explain her life, and in mid-1960s New York, that's perhaps a greater crime than whether she killed her children.

  Flint and I discussed where Alice Crimmins ends and Ruth Malone begins, the intersection and deviation of crime fiction and true crime, her research methods, and much more in our Q&A, conducted earlier this month by email. It's been edited for clarity, though Flint's anglicized spelling remains, since she's British.

  **

  The Crime Lady: The timing of the announcement of your book deal was particularly significant to me. How did you first learn of it and why did you think it would make the basis not only for a novel, but for yours, and that this was the material you wanted to work with?

  Emma Flint: I saw your essay while I was editing a late draft of Little Deaths and was struck by how the case still haunts people fifty years later. When I went to Chicago for BEA in May 2016, I spoke to people from New York who told me they remembered the crime. It made me realise that there’s something about the story – or perhaps about Alice herself – that makes it live on in the memory for decades.

  In my own case, there were two decades between reading about the crime and starting to write Little Deaths. I first read about it when I was sixteen, and found that I couldn’t forget Alice Crimmins or the story of what happened to her. There were two things in particular that stayed in my mind: firstly, the discrepancy between her statement of what she fed the children for dinner the night they disappeared and what was found during the autopsy on her daughter – it always struck me as a very odd detail to lie about. And secondly, I had an image in my head – a memory of a photograph – of a striking, petite woman, perfectly dressed, eyes cast down, surrounded by tall bulky male figures.

  Those details stayed with me until one afternoon in July 2010. I can’t remember exactly what sparked my interest in Alice Crimmins again, but I know I began thinking about her and then started reading about the case in more detail online for the first time in twenty years. I read a sentence about how important make-up was to Alice’s identity, and that triggered what became the first scene in Little Deaths, where Ruth applies her mask before she can face the day. I wrote 6,000 words that afternoon, and some of that first draft forms part of the opening scene, almost word for word as I first wrote it.

  At the time I wrote that, I didn’t realise I was writing a novel: I thought it was an interesting idea for a character study and it wasn’t until weeks later when I couldn’t get Alice / Ruth out of my mind, that I understood I needed to tell her story.

  TCL: You mention having read the two main books on the Crimmins case by Kenneth Gross and George Carpozi. What other research did you do? And while I understand you did not visit Kew Gardens Hills, the Queens neighborhood where Alice lived and where her children were murdered, how much did you know of the city and the neighborhood at the time?

  EF: It was a deliberate choice not to visit the neighbourhood while I was writing. A quick glance at Google Street View compared with photos from 1965 showed me how much it had changed, and I felt that if I went there fifty years later, I’d be hampered by the modern feel. Because the setting is so integral to the story, I chose to stay at a distance and focus on how it was in the 1960s.

  I looked at thousands of photos of suburban America in the mid-60s, and listened to Queens accents on YouTube to try and get the dialogue right. I also kept coming back to my own childhood: I grew up in a quiet and sometimes claustrophobic suburb (in the 1970s), and I think anyone who grew up in an environment like that will understand the closeness of that kind of neighbourhood, and how anyone different stands out and becomes the subject of gossip.

  TCL: Obviously Ruth Malone is at the center of Little Deaths by virtue of the heinous crimes she is accused of committing. And I feel like, though the book takes place in the mid-1960s, the underlying crimes Ruth is accused of -- being independent, promiscuous, defiant, putting her own pleasure first -- are leveled at women today and, sadly, will continue to be leveled. Was inhabiting Ruth's fictional skin difficult because of the difference in time, or almost disturbingly easy because of the parallels between her story and more contemporary women?

  EF: It was astonishingly easy to inhabit her skin. She became very real to me – and I’m obviously talking here about my creation, Ruth Malone, not about the real Alice Crimmins. I had conversations with Ruth, arguments with her, and I was able to know instinctively what her opinion would be on various subjects.

  I think this is at least partly because she feels very contemporary in terms of her independence and her sexual identity, but it’s also because a lot of her emotional journey is one that was easy to relate to. I think most people have experienced grief and loss, loneliness, self-consciousness about their appearance – those feelings aren’t particular to any era, they’re universal.

  TCL: Many of my favorite sections of Little Deaths involved the journalist, Pete Wonicke, who tries to keep objective (if slightly disapproving) distance of Ruth but finds he does almost the exact opposite. There' a strong hardboiled feel in his scenes, and I wondered if that came naturally to you -- there's a sense of, dare I say it, fun and crackle that suggests it did.

  EF: I’m thrilled that you spotted that! I had a lot of fun with the scenes set in the newspaper office in particular – Janine and her crush on Pete, Friedmann and his fish tank – those scenes were the most fun to write. I actually wrote (and edited) Ruth’s scenes and Pete’s scenes separately – once I was inside their heads, it was easier to stay there for days or weeks at a time, then come out and enter the other’s head. Ruth’s voice certainly came far easier to me – but once I had a couple of key sentences in that ‘hardboiled’ tone, the rest of Pete’s narrative flowed.

  TCL: If I have one nit to pick about Little Deaths it is that in some instances, the details hew a little too closely to the Crimmins case. (It takes place in the same neighborhood on the same dates, for example; I'm curious as to why.) But that is a complicated subject, to know when to deviate from known facts and let the imagination fly freely and when to be as scrupulous as possible with the truth. How did you make your own imaginative decisions as you worked through your story of Ruth Malone to keep it distinct, but still suggestive of, what happened to Alice Crimmins?

  EF: My first drafts of Ruth’s narrative stuck more closely to the real case than the final draft, and I changed some details at the request of my editors. Where I’ve adhered to the true historical details – as with the dates and the location – it’s because I didn’t feel there was any reason to change them. It had to be set in an ordinary suburban setting which the liberated mores of the 60s hadn’t really touched yet (other than Ruth herself). It also felt important that the suburb was just far enough from a big city that it would be glittering on the horizon but not actually effecting the day-to- day lives of the women in the neighbourhood.

  I think writing about a real crime is similar to any other historical fiction: I tried to stick to the basic facts and breathe life into them through the emotions and reactions of the characters, so that the reader can experience them in a new way. The key is to make the characters real, and the past immediate and familiar, by writing about situations and experiences that the reader can relate to. We all know what it is to experience sadness or loneliness or fear: as a writer you need to make what your characters are going through vivid enough that readers feel it too.

  TCL: For years, at least in America, there has been a truism that people who read and buy crime fiction are not the same as those who read and buy true crime. I feel that is in fact not true at all! (Certainly crime writers have been obsessed with and mining real-life crime stories as far back as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.) But I also think the line's more blurred than ever and certainly Little Deaths crosses that line many times and back again. How do you look at the similarities and differences of crime in a nonfiction versus fiction context? Do you read them differently? Or it is all the same pleasure?

  EF: I agree with you that this isn’t true at all – I’m often struck by the parallels with real cases when I read Agatha Christie, for example.

  I do read true crime and crime fiction differently: when I read true crime my thoughts are far more with the victim and their family. I find it far harder to read the details of a real murder or the effect of a disappearance, because you know you’re reading something that actually happened and it's not difficult to imagine the grief and anguish that a violent or sudden death leaves in its wake.

  However, authors of crime fiction often invite us to empathise with the criminal and there’s a certain guilty pleasure about exploring a dark and twisted mind that acts on those impulses we all have but that most of us suppress in seconds. We’ve all felt anger or jealousy or hate, but most of us rationalise those emotions or are able to move on from them. I’m very curious about those who don’t, but rather act on them – and how they then cover up those acts.

  TCL: Without spoiling it, the ending of Little Deaths managed to surprise but also be utterly inevitable, and I still l think about it. Ruth's story ends as it does, but do you still think of her and how she may have gotten older in the face of all that has happened?

  EF: I'm glad you felt that way – that’s exactly how I wanted the reader to feel as they closed the book: a sense of surprise but also a sense of ‘oh, of course!’ I knew how the book would end a long time before I even finished the first draft, and I couldn’t have written the ending any other way.

  When I was writing, I thought about Ruth all the time, as she is in Little Deaths: in her twenties, attractive, objectified, afraid, lost. Funnily, I rarely think about Ruth beyond the ending – I feel that what happened to her after I left her in that final scene is her story and not mine to tell.

  Now that I’ve finished writing, I think about Alice more than Ruth, and wonder if she’s heard about the book, and what she thinks about it.

  TCL: By the same token, what, if anything, do you wonder about Alice Crimmins today? I once asked Mary Higgins Clark, whose breakout 1975 novel Where Are the Children? was also based on the case, if she ever wanted to meet her, and she was emphatic in saying she did not. Do you feel similarly if that chance was offered to you?

  EF: I do. I’m curious about her, of course, but purely satisfying my own curiosity would be a very selfish motive for wanting to meet her. I imagine it would be very difficult to meet her privately, and she’s spent so long maintaining her privacy and refusing to give interviews, that I want to respect that.

  And of course, Alice Crimmins is not Ruth Malone: she’s not the character I spent years creating and developing.

  **

  It's been good to keep TCL on a semi-regular schedule to start 2017, so I'll return before January is over with more links and recommendations. Till then!

• Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction - http://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/reading-room/in-conversation-with/6921

  QUOTED: "Ruth and Alice are the same age, physically they’re similar, and the facts of their lives are the same: both are separated from their husbands, both have low-wage jobs that require them to work shifts, both are very attractive. Each has two young children who disappear from their bedroom and are later found dead—and both Ruth and Alice become the main suspects in the subsequent murder investigation."

  A Q&A WITH EMMA FLINT
  Emma Flint has been longlisted for this year’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut Little Deaths. Read on to find out what it was like to write the character of Ruth Malone, based on the real-life controversial figure of Alice Crimmins, why Emma usually finds herself writing in the British Library and who her literary heroines are.

  Your character Ruth Malone is based on the real-life figure of Alice Crimmins, an American woman charged in the 1960s with the murder of her two children. What are the main similarities and differences between Ruth and Alice?

  Ruth and Alice are the same age, physically they’re similar, and the facts of their lives are the same: both are separated from their husbands, both have low-wage jobs that require them to work shifts, both are very attractive. Each has two young children who disappear from their bedroom and are later found dead – and both Ruth and Alice become the main suspects in the subsequent murder investigation.

  But Ruth Malone is really a work of imagination like any other fictional character.

  Because of the way that Alice looked and the things she was quoted as saying, I built up a picture in my mind of a strong, stubborn and defiant individual – but how those characteristics manifest themselves in Little Deaths is purely imaginary.

  In addition, I gave Ruth a different ending to the one that Alice chose. It’s difficult to explain why without revealing the end of the novel, but I wanted to give her as much autonomy as possible.

  What research did you do to enable you to write this controversial character so convincingly?

  Alice’s biographical details were fairly easy to find online, and I did a lot of reading about the case, particularly of contemporary newspaper articles that gave me an insight into how she was judged even before she was charged.

  I also read modern newspaper accounts of women who’ve been involved in more recent crimes, such as Amanda Knox, Kate McCann, Amy Fisher and Andrea Yates. I wanted to see how women like these – either accused of or linked to violent crimes – were treated in the media today.

  I’m delighted that you feel Ruth is convincing: she certainly felt very real to me, to the point that I had daily conversations with her for years, and I could tell instinctively what her opinion would be on most subjects. It’s been difficult to let go of her and to let her move beyond my writing and out into the world.

  Do you have a particular place where you like to write?

  I’d love to be able to write at home, but I have two very energetic kittens who see my laptop keyboard as their personal playground. So on writing days I’m usually somewhere in the British Library, taking inspiration from the work going on around me and from the portrait of Hilary Mantel.

  Who are your literary heroines?

  Excellent question. I’ll start out with Jo March and Jane Marple – firstly because of their respective interests in writing and in crime, but also because of the unconventional paths they took in life, and the way they carved out their own versions of contentment. I’ve always had an enormous affection for Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, for Anne Elliot (of Persuasion), for Dorothea Brooke (Middlemarch), and of course for Jane Eyre. In more modern fiction, I like Sarah Waters’ characters very much, particularly Nan Astley, Margaret Prior and Frances Wray, largely because they’re very flawed and very human. Sarah Waters writes with such depth, giving extraordinary insight into how those characters think and feel, to the point that they seem very real.

  When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer?

  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. I wrote my first ‘novel’ at the age of ten: it wasn’t very good! I’d recently started reading Agatha Christie, and my book was about a French detective with a huge moustache, his upper-class English sidekick and a series of murders in a country house.

  I wrote throughout my teens and twenties: mostly terrible poetry and an awful novel that will never see the light of day. I started writing seriously in my mid-thirties, and began writing what became the first scene of Little Deaths just before my 36th birthday.

QUOTED: "Sharply rendered literary noir, compelling enough to forgive a slightly left-field resolution."

Flint, Emma: LITTLE DEATHS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Jan. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Flint, Emma LITTLE DEATHS Hachette (Adult Fiction) $26.00 1, 17 ISBN: 978-0-316-27247-6
One hot summer in New York, 1965, a sexy, troubled cocktail waitress is suspected of murdering her children.Flint's debut novel begins in a
prison cell, where Ruth Malone struggles to awaken from a dream of her old apartment building in Queens--putting on her makeup in the
bathroom, smoking her first cigarette of the day, "the blast of Gina's radio overhead, Tony Bonelli's heavy tread on the stairs....Nina Lombardo
yelling at her kids next door." This is where it happened, where one morning in July she unlatched her children's bedroom door to find them gone.
Cindy and Frankie, ages 4 and 5, not in bed with a storybook, not snuggled together under their blue blanket, but disappeared. Within days their
bodies are found in a dump and a nearby woods, strangled, decomposed. Having heard the story from Ruth's point of view, the reader is assured
of her innocence, though a self-righteous belief in her guilt is shared by many of her neighbors, the media, and, most importantly, the lead
detective on the case, who is absolutely determined to "crack that whore." She is believed to be a bad mother, a woman who goes to too many
bars, sees too many men, drinks too much booze, a woman who has recently dumped her husband even though he was ready to forgive her for
cheating on him. Her only significant ally is a young newspaperman who at first sees the case as the key to launching his career but becomes so
obsessed that he quits the paper to try to prove Ruth's innocence. Since we know where it begins, it seems we know how it must turn out--but
there are a few surprises left. Sharply rendered literary noir, compelling enough to forgive a slightly left-field resolution.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Flint, Emma: LITTLE DEATHS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242535&it=r&asid=6c7243c9209dda8ba3194782100cf61e. Accessed 1 June
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242535

---
QUOTED: "This accomplished debut novel will intrigue fans of both true crime and noir fiction."

6/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1496346003533 2/5
Flint, Emma. Little Deaths
Gloria Drake
Library Journal.
141.18 (Nov. 1, 2016): p74.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text: 
* Flint, Emma. Little Deaths. Hachette. Jan. 2017. 336p. ISBN 9780316272476. $26; ebk. ISBN 9780316272490. F
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Alluring Ruth Malone lives an unconventional life for a single mother with two young children. In her tiny apartment in 1965 Queens, NY, heavy
smoking and hard liquor abound, and her ex-husband is concerned about her succession of lovers. With her short skirts and low necklines, Ruth, a
striking cocktail waitress, doesn't present well in the court of public opinion. When her children go missing and are found dead, detectives believe
Ruth committed this horrific crime. Only a rookie reporter is convinced that the cops might be on the wrong track. A harsh, overbearing detective
builds the case against Ruth, and tension painfully saturates the investigation as inflammatory evidence slowly comes to light. When the story
reaches its quiet yet stunning denouement, this strangely sympathetic heroine will earn reluctant readers' respect. Inspired by true events, Flint
explores how people respond to extreme circumstances and how quick observers can be to judge. VERDICT This accomplished debut novel will
intrigue fans of both true crime and noir fiction. Flint, a technical writer in London, is a welcome addition to the world of literary crime fiction.
Readers of Megan Abbott may want to investigate. [See Prepub Alert, 7/11/16.]--Gloria Drake, Oswego P.L. Dist., IL
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Drake, Gloria. "Flint, Emma. Little Deaths." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467830335&it=r&asid=6fbc8b27f1445f6360fa365d8ab3e464. Accessed 1 June
2017.
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1496346003533 3/5
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467830335

---

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Little Deaths
Publishers Weekly.
263.41 (Oct. 10, 2016): p59.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* Little Deaths
Emma Flint. Hachette, $26 (336p) ISBN 978-0-316-27247-6
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
One of New York City's classic tabloid crime cases--cocktail waitress Alice Crimmins's controversial conviction for the 1965 murders of her two
young children--becomes the springboard for British author Flint's affecting, achingly beautiful debut. That Ruth Malone, a separated single
mom, leads an active sex life, including trysting with married men while her five-year-old Frankie Jr. and four-year-old Cindy remain home
alone, locked in their bedroom, makes her the only suspect police seriously look into after her estranged husband reports the youngsters missing.
And yet the deeper that fledgling crime reporter Pete Wonicke digs into the story, the more he becomes convinced that while Ruth may be guilty
of many things, killing her kids isn't among them. Eschewing easy answers or Perry Mason miracles, Flint focuses squarely on Ruth's stiflingly
straitened life in working-class Queens, close enough to gaze at the bewitching lights of Manhattan yet distant enough to feel marooned in
another galaxy. This stunning novel is less about whodunit than deeper social issues of motherhood, morals, and the kind of rush to judgment that
can condemn someone long before the accused sees the inside of a courtroom. Agent: Jo Unwin, Jo Unwin Literary Agency (U.K.). (Jan.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Little Deaths." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 59. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616156&it=r&asid=71ea5c6b22d5b3b6df91ea0de8bd8ba3. Accessed 1 June
2017.
6/1/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1496346003533 5/5
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466616156

"Flint, Emma: LITTLE DEATHS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242535&it=r. Accessed 1 June 2017. Drake, Gloria. "Flint, Emma. Little Deaths." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467830335&it=r. Accessed 1 June 2017. "Little Deaths." Publishers Weekly, 10 Oct. 2016, p. 59. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466616156&it=r. Accessed 1 June 2017.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/27/little-deaths-emma-flint-review
  Word count: 938

  QUOTED: "The ending may or may not convince you, but that is perhaps immaterial: Little Deaths is a strong and confident addition to the growing trend of domestic dystopias—novels about flawed, angry, hurt women navigating hostile social and intimate milieus that turn viciously punitive when those women rebel."

  Little Deaths by Emma Flint review – the presumed guilt of a flawed woman
  This assured crime debut was inspired by a notorious child murder case in New York
  Queens New York 1960s
  Flint pulls the reader into the finely observed working-class neighbourhood … Queens, New York, in the 1960s. Photograph: L. R. Legwin/Getty Images
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  Margie Orford
  Tuesday 27 December 2016 04.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.31 EDT
  In July 1965, during a scorching New York summer, two small, cherubic children disappeared from their mother’s apartment. The little girl was found dead a few days later, her body dumped in a rubbish-strewn lot. A week or so after that her brother’s body was found. The police descended and with them came the tabloids. The case – as cases of missing blond children continue to do – riveted the public. Two years after the murders, the mother was arrested and convicted, but the evidence was flimsy and circumstantial.

  This is the crime that has inspired Emma Flint’s accomplished debut novel. Hers is the 10th fictional reworking of this harrowing case – there have been novels before, plays and films. It is a reimagining that is deftly done and centres on the vivid portrait of Flint’s version of the mother, Ruth Malone. Flint pulls the reader into the finely observed working-class Queens neighbourhood, where the heat shimmers on the crowded apartment buildings and the social surveillance of women is palpable. This is a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business and judgment is quick and brutal.

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  The attention of both the tabloid press and the detectives focus on Ruth from the beginning. She is divorced, she is louche, she works as a cocktail waitress; she was embroiled in a custody battle with her ex-husband; she wears makeup, she drinks, she chain smokes, she does not express grief in a way that the police or the public expect. Her housekeeping is haphazard and she has lovers. Flint captures the misogyny of the detectives, who are convinced that she – like some cheap suburban Medea – has murdered her own children in order to prevent her ex-husband gaining custody of them.

  The strongest sections of the novel allow us behind Ruth’s brittle mask of makeup and pride. Flint describes her grief, loss and loneliness with a tough delicacy that is both exact and heart-wrenching. Her haphazard, nicotine-drenched good-enough mothering is wonderfully written, as is her ambition to escape the confines of the small town she left: to lead a better life, a bigger life than the one allotted her because of her sex. Whatever accusations the cops throw at her, Ruth maintains: “They knew nothing of guilt. They were not mothers.” This guilt – the one that a mother, innocent of murder, feels at her failure to protect her children – tortures her.

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  Ruth is watched, and judged, by everyone around her, particularly the press, and Flint makes excellent use of this. The narrative alternates between Ruth and an ambitious young tabloid journalist, Pete Wonicke, who covers the story. Flint recreates newspaper articles, police and forensic reports, blending the genres of true crime and literary fiction. The journalists and their editors make Ruth into the type of monstrous femme fatale that sells newspapers: the ways in which the prurient gaze of the press turns a woman into a witch have not changed much in the 50 years that have elapsed since the events that inspired this novel occurred.

  The social disapproval of Ruth’s blatant sexuality and her glamour makes her guilty in the eyes of everyone except Wonicke. He becomes fascinated by her. He is, with good reason, suspicious of the police handling of the case and, like some misguided chivalric knight, he takes up her case, determined to prove her innocence. Flint uses his character to evoke both Ruth’s doomed allure and the fact that her mask of makeup, her obsession with looking right, serves as a screen on to which social fantasies are projected. I thought of Ruth– and the tragic woman who inspired her – as a cheap facsimile of Marilyn Monroe, all candyfloss hair and illusion. A screen on to which male desire is projected; a screen that permanently hides the woman that might exist beneath the performance of femininity.

  The opening chapters are gripping but there is a lag in the tension in the middle section. Flint writes powerfully of Ruth’s stunned grief, a grief she deadens with alcohol and sex. The last third of the book, her trial, is absolutely riveting. The ending may or may not convince you, but that is perhaps immaterial: Little Deaths is a strong and confident addition to the growing trend of domestic dystopias – novels about flawed, angry, hurt women navigating hostile social and intimate milieus that turn viciously punitive when those women rebel.

  • Margie Orford’s latest book is Water Music (Head of Zeus). Little Deaths is published by Picador. To order a copy for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/19/little-deaths-emma-flint-review-alice-crimmins
  Word count: 691

  Little Deaths by Emma Flint review – murderer or good-time girl?
  Guilt, loneliness and trial by tabloid are explored in this fascinating debut based on the killing of two children in New York
  Alice Crimmins, whose murder trial inspired Little Deaths, leaves a courthouse in New York, May 1968.
  Alice Crimmins, whose murder trial inspired Little Deaths, leaves a courthouse in New York, May 1968. Photograph: New York Post Archives/The New York Post via Getty Images
  Alison Flood
  Monday 19 December 2016 02.30 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.31 EDT
  Emma Flint isn’t the first novelist to be gripped by the case of Alice Crimmins, the woman whose two children went missing from her Queens apartment in 1965 and who were later found dead. Tried in the media, for her looks and for sleeping with men who were not her estranged husband, as much as for her kids’ deaths, Crimmins was found guilty of murder, although later released. The story formed the basis for the book that launched the career of Mary Higgins Clark, Where Are the Children?, and now inspires Flint’s debut, Little Deaths.

  For Flint, Crimmins becomes Ruth Malone. Like her inspiration, she is in the middle of a custody battle with her husband over their two small children. Like Crimmins, too, she is an “attractive, red-headed cocktail waitress”, struggling to keep the money coming in and square life as a mother with room for herself. And again like Crimmins, she wakes up one morning to find her children, Cindy and Frankie, missing.

  Steaming with the heat of a New York July, Little Deaths is redolent of 60s noir. “It was a Wednesday when the call came into the Herald. A Wednesday morning in the hottest week of July, and Pete Wonicke was sitting at a desk that didn’t feel like his,” writes Flint, introducing a new character, an ambitious junior reporter who soon becomes obsessed with cracking the story, and with Ruth herself.

  Flint carefully, alarmingly, lays out Ruth’s trial by public opinion; how she is “judged and pronounced guilty in the beauty parlours, the backyards, and the kitchens of Queens”. “Soon as I saw her, I knew there was something wrong. The way she looked: makeup an inch thick, hair just so, clothes that showed everything the good Lord gave her. That’s not a grieving mother. That’s a woman who wanted to get rid of her children because they got in the way of her partying and drinking,” says one character. The detective in charge of the investigation, Devlin, is determined to bring her down. “You get to know how to smell guilt. And I smell it on her like cheap perfume,” he says, a little heavy on the noir.

  As Wonicke delves into the way both the tabloids and the police are handling the investigation, and becomes increasingly disturbed by what he finds, Ruth continues to go out drinking and dancing as the web closes around her. Flint is cautious to give nothing away, but she can’t help this from becoming a story sympathetic to a working mother, one who is shown things no mother should ever have to see, one who feels endlessly, terribly guilty, whether or not – and Flint comes up with an intriguing solution to the murders – she’s committed a crime.

  By the end, it’s hard not to feel a little wearied by the analyses of Ruth’s makeup and clothes and choices, and by Wonicke’s obsessions. But where Little Deaths excels is in its portrayals of different kinds of loneliness – Wonicke is desperate to make his way in a city that’s not his own, while Ruth tries to find someone who will appreciate her. “Everyone got their own story. Ain’t nobody got time for someone else’s sadness,” says one character with a particularly heartbreaking story to tell.

  Flint promises that her next novel will “also be literary fiction inspired by true crime”, and this fascinating debut suggests it will be one to watch out for.

• Chicago Tribune
  http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/sc-crime-fiction-roundup-books-0201-20170129-story.html
  Word count: 843

  QUOTED: "It has been a long time since a novel captured a time and place as powerfully as Emma Flint's shattering debut."

  Emma Flint’s shattering debut, ‘Little Deaths,’ leads crime fiction roundup
  'Little Deaths'
  “Little Deaths” by Emma Flint, Hachette, 336 pages, $26 (Hachette)
  Lloyd Sachs
  Chicago Tribune
  "Little Deaths" by Emma Flint, Hachette, 336 pages, $26

  It has been a long time since a novel captured a time and place as powerfully as Emma Flint's shattering debut, "Little Deaths." Inspired by real-life events, the book imparts a poisonous nostalgia in evoking working-class lives in Queens, N.Y., in 1965 — a year after young stabbing victim Kitty Genovese, a bar manager, had her screams for help ignored outside her apartment in that borough's Kew Gardens neighborhood. In "Little Deaths," 26-year-old cocktail waitress Ruth Malone suffers from a different but no less loathsome kind of neglect. This single mother is prosecuted for the killing of her two small children based less on hard evidence than conjecture — and her refusal to conform to people's image of the grieving mom. With her drinking and carousing, and her unthinkable need to go clothes-shopping in the aftermath of her kids' disappearance, she was "the very picture of a scandalous woman." But while she may have strayed from her estranged airport-mechanic husband Frank, rookie reporter Pete Wonicke discovers, she is hardly the creature of low morals and icy veins who is driving tabloid sales. Her devastating inner monologues reveal quite the opposite: Her grief "was black and hungry and huge like an open, roaring mouth. ... And inside it: the loneliness, the loss, the lost-ness." In portraying '60s New York culture with all its boozing, corruption and sexism, Flint goes where "Mad Men" dared not go. That the author is British makes her achievement all the more amazing.

  'Everything You Want Me to Be'
  “Everything You Want Me to Be” by Mindy Mejia, Emily Bestler/Atria, 340 pages, $26.99. (Emily Bestler/Atria)
  "Everything You Want Me to Be" by Mindy Mejia, Emily Bestler/Atria, 340 pages, $26.99

  The curse of "Macbeth" meets its match — almost — in Hattie Hoffman, the young femme fatale in Mindy Mejia's cheeky sardonic thriller, "Everything You Want Me to Be." The star thespian of her Minnesota high school, Hattie isn't timid about uttering the name of that Shakespearean tragedy, in which she is to play Lady Macbeth. Nor, with her seductive ability to be all things to all people, is she afraid about employing deceit to get what she wants. But just as she's on the verge of pulling off an unlikely romantic getaway with her romantically obsessed teacher, Peter Lund, she's murdered. Alternating narrators — Peter, the local sheriff and Hattie herself — lead us through a maze of possible scenarios. Did Peter stab his underage student to death because she threatened to tell his wife about their relationship? Or did Tommy, the hapless classmate Hattie made her boyfriend for the sake of appearances, do the bad deed? What about Peter's wife, Nancy, whose single-mindedness in caring for her ailing mother drove him to Hattie? Whoever killed Hattie, the victim couldn't say she didn't see it coming. "I became cold, too cold to feel," she says of reading lines with Tommy. "By the time he cleared his throat to say his first line, I could taste my own death." Life and art: You just can't keep them apart.

  'Snowblind'
  “Snowblind” by Ragnar Jónasson, Minotaur, 320 pages, $25.99. (Minotaur)
  "Snowblind" by Ragnar Jonasson, Minotaur, 320 pages, $25.99

  In "Snowblind," the first installment in a popular series by Icelandic writer Ragnar Jonasson to be translated into English, a theater-related death shocks the fishing village of Siglufjoerour. The day before the opening of the local drama society's latest show, the venerated old writer who ran the company is found dead at the foot of a staircase in the theater. Was it an accident? (He was reeking of booze.) Or was it homicide? (He had argued angrily with director the day before.) Between this case and the discovery of a half-dressed young woman in her garden, unconscious from a brutal attack, 24-year-old rookie cop Ari Thor Arason has his work cut out for him. When he jumped at the rare job offer, leaving his girlfriend and his religious studies behind in Reykjavik, he was told that Siglufjoerour was a town where nothing happens. Exposing that lie even further, an avalanche strikes, shutting off the town. Reykjavik has never looked better. Emulating the classic whodunits of Agatha Christie, more than a dozen of whose novels he has translated into Icelandic, Jonasson has fun with a wide array of suspects and narrative voices. What sets "Snowblind" apart is the deep melancholy pervading the characters. Most of them, including Ari, have suffered a tragic loss. That's bad for them, but along with the 24-hour darkness closing in, it makes for the best sort of gloomy storytelling.

  Lloyd Sachs is the author of "T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit."

• Entertainment Weekly
  http://ew.com/books/2017/01/13/little-deaths-emma-flint-ew-review/
  Word count: 286

  QUOTED: "As a whodunit, Little Deaths is standard-issue. As a character study, it’s a killer."

  Little Deaths by Emma Flint: EW Review
  LEAH GREENBLATT@LEAHBATS

  UPDATED JANUARY 13, 2017 AT 1:00PM EDT

  WE GAVE IT A
  B+

  Ruth Malone is no upstanding citizen’s idea of an ideal mother: Her lipstick is a little too bright, her skirts a little too tight, her hair a shamelessly unnatural shade of strawberry blond. She’s an unapologetic smoker and Scotch drinker, a part-time cocktail waitress willfully estranged from a loving, respectable husband. So when her two young children go missing from their beds one hot July night in a working-class neighborhood of Queens in 1964, the court of public opinion doesn’t take long to render a verdict: She is selfish, shameless, reckless. And when the small broken bodies of Frankie and Cindy are found separately in abandoned lots, strangled and already decomposing in the summer heat, they add one more: murderer.

  Inspired by a real-life case, the outlines of Emma Flint’s debut summon every classic noir chestnut: the vixen, the patsy, the shady detective, the cub reporter determined to set the record straight. Her actors are strictly familiar, and rarely surprising; they come and go and mostly play their parts. The exception is Ruth: In lean, palpable prose (Flint is British, though her New York vernacular never slips), she comes vividly alive—a flawed, complicated woman with thoughts and demons and desires that the prescribed world she lives in offers hardly any framework for, and even less forgiveness. As a whodunit, Little Deaths is standard-issue. As a character study, it’s a killer. B+

• Newsday
  http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/little-deaths-emma-flint-s-novel-fictionalizes-a-notorious-1965-queens-murder-case-1.13105589
  Word count: 810

  QUOTED: "What is dynamite is first-time novelist Flint’s ability to strike a match on page one and keep the flame burning for the next 300 pages. She salts the book with plenty of characters and details ... which may or may not prove critical in identifying the killer."

  ‘Little Deaths’: Emma Flint’s novel fictionalizes a notorious 1965 Queens murder case
  Updated February 14, 2017 6:00 AM
  By Barbara Vancheri Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  + -
  Emma Flint, author of
  Emma Flint, author of "Little Deaths." Photo Credit: Jonathan Ring

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  REVIEW
  LITTLE DEATHS, by Emma Flint. Hachette Books, 320 pp., $26.
  In Emma Flint’s “Little Deaths,” a tabloid editor insists that readers want three things: “They want to see the money. Or the lack of it. To feel envious, or superior.

  “They want sex. There’s always a hot dame. Or a dame we can work up into hot. There’s always an angle we can use. And every story needs a bad guy. Every story needs fear.”

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  Rookie reporter Pete Wonicke wheedled his way into a story that had a “hot dame” and bad guy (or, here, gal) in a strawberry blond cocktail waitress suspected of murdering her 5-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter. It’s 1965, long before DNA evidence and security cameras on every corner, and all the cops have is Ruth Malone’s word that she put her children to bed in their Queens apartment and woke to find their room empty.

  “She don’t look how a woman should look when her kids go missing,” a detective sneers, noting her lack of tears and dismissing her fainting as a ploy for the cameras. Ruth, 26, is separated from her husband, and everything about her — throaty voice, figure-flattering clothes, carefully applied makeup, teased hair, and taste for drink and the company of men — angers and appalls the police who consider her the lone suspect.

  “Little Deaths” charts Ruth’s life under surveillance — by cops, reporters, nosy neighbors and others — even as it tracks Pete’s obsession with the case. A veteran reporter tells him: “I know it ain’t that big a story yet. But it will be. You got two dead kids, no witnesses, and a hot broad who’s slept with half of New York. If it ever goes to trial, it’ll be . . . dynamite.”

  Books
  10 best books of 2016

  What is dynamite is first-time novelist Flint’s ability to strike a match on page one and keep the flame burning for the next 300 pages. She salts the book with plenty of characters and details, such as the box and stroller under the siblings’ bedroom window and the passing mention of the nearby New York World’s Fair, which may or may not prove critical in identifying the killer.

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  She doesn’t stiff readers, but Flint does make them wait, almost until the end, to reveal the who, what, when, where, why and how. It may not make you gasp, but it likely will shock or surprise you, even if you’re a seasoned mystery fan.

  That is just one mark of a skilled storyteller and Flint, a native of northeast England working as a technical writer in London, proves that herself — tapping into her lifelong fascination with true crime accounts, murder cases and unorthodox women.

  Among them, acknowledged at book’s end, is Alice Crimmins, whose young son and daughter were murdered after they went missing from their ground-floor bedroom in 1965 Queens. Called “shapely and flame-haired,” she was vilified and tried in her children’s deaths. The crime inspired movies, plays and other novels, including Mary Higgins Clark’s “Where Are the Children?”

  Flint dramatically describes the damaging disconnect between how the world sees and judges Ruth and the emotional storm raging inside. At her daughter’s wake, mourners greet the composed woman in a black dress, half veil, black heels, and with a voice “harsh from smoking and from the effort of keeping the tears back.” In reality, though, “She wanted to break down. To fall to her knees, to scream, to beg, to bargain.”

  “They’re all I’ve got. You can’t have them both — They’re all I’ve got!”

  @Newsday

  The fledgling reporter, meanwhile, undergoes his own transformation as he weighs his ambitions, assumptions and an ethical minefield of fake or distorted news, grievous loss and prejudiced punishments.

• Lonesome Reader
  http://lonesomereader.com/blog/2017/1/8/little-deaths-by-emma-flint
  Word count: 622

  QUOTED: "cleverly makes us question our own assumptions about people based on superficial impressions, ask how much our society has changed in the past fifty years and wonder how much our opinions are guided by inherited misogynist notions. It's a forceful story which skilfully builds a feeling of suspense all the way to its gripping conclusion."

  Little Deaths by Emma Flint

  Something about the dark month of January makes me enjoy getting caught up in a good thriller. Last year I read Fiona Barton's “The Widow” about a missing child and a mysterious woman hovering near the centre of the case. Emma Flint's debut novel “Little Deaths” is similarly about a case involving missing children and a misunderstood woman, but it's also about so much more than that. Ruth Malone is a 26 year old woman who is separated from her husband and raising two children by herself in Queens during the 1960s. One morning she opens the door to her children's room to discover they've vanished. A police investigation gets under way to discover what happened, but the default assumption is that Ruth is at fault. The police and public don't consider her to be a conventional mother. She enjoys drinking. She's promiscuous. She doesn't seem to give a damn about society's opinion of her. She's condemned even before they interview her. Flint gets at the shocking and sexist way moral judgement supersedes fact in this tragic case.
  Ruth's story is based on the case of Alice Crimmins who was wrongly imprisoned after her children were murdered.
  Ruth's story is based on the case of Alice Crimmins who was wrongly imprisoned after her children were murdered.

  It's fascinating the way the author portrays Ruth's sense of self consciousness. She's scrupulous about her appearance and she feels the process of putting on make up is “the routine that would bring Ruth to life in the mirror.” At the same time, she feels an inward sense of disgust and takes fierce possession of her own habitat and sense of being: “The dirt in the apartment was her dirt, it was her sweat, her smell, her looseness, her leaking wet body that had betrayed her.” This harsh sense of criticism for her bodily functions and surroundings reminded me somewhat of Ottessa Moshfegh's protagonist in her novel “Eileen” but Ruth is more accomplished at appearing beautiful and serene despite inwardly breaking down. She's overcome by grief, but because she doesn't express it in conventional ways it makes people extremely suspicious. More than simply subjecting a grieving mother to endless accusatory interviews, the police shockingly interfere with her personal life contacting potential employers to warn them against hiring Ruth and sabotaging her personal relationships.

  Although the reader frequently gets flashes of Ruth's perspective, the story is primarily told through Pete Wonicke, an ambitious young reporter. At first I wished the story would focus more exclusively on the complexity of Ruth's view point, but as the story progressed I saw how essential it was to see it from Pete's perspective. He gradually understands how unfairly Ruth is persecuted and fights for her justice. Not only does he get a clearer understanding of her life, but also the lives of other women forced to live on the margins and who've been horrendously mistreated for going against the grain of social norms. This cleverly makes us question our own assumptions about people based on superficial impressions, ask how much our society has changed in the past fifty years and wonder how much our opinions are guided by inherited misogynist notions. It's a forceful story which skilfully builds a feeling of suspense all the way to its gripping conclusion.

• Independant
  http://www.independent.com.mt/articles/2017-02-16/books/Little-Deaths-by-Emma-Flint-is-mesmerizing-6736170421
  Word count: 346

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  >'Little Deaths' by Emma Flint is mesmerizing
  'Little Deaths' by Emma Flint is mesmerizing
  Thursday, 16 February 2017, 14:36Last update: about 5 months ago
  "Little Deaths" (Hachette Books), by Emma Flint

  "Little Deaths," Emma Flint's mesmerizing debut, works well as a look at misogyny, gossip, morals and the rush to judge others when a child goes missing.

  The novel opens with Ruth Malone in prison, convicted of killing her two children, Frankie, almost 6 years old, and Cindy, age 4. Ruth was the immediate suspect - single mothers were an anomaly in 1965, especially those who work as a cocktail waitress.

  Most neighbors in her working-class area of Queens, New York, shunned Ruth for defying convention by leaving her seemingly hard-working, faithful husband, Frank. The police, especially Sgt. Charlie Devlin, are even more dubious about Ruth when they find her trash overflowing with empty liquor bottles, a suitcase full of letters from men, many of them married, and provocative clothing strewn around her apartment. That she's out drinking and dancing days after the deaths of her children further cements their disgust and their belief that she's guilty.

  ADVERTISEMENT
  After Ruth's conviction, cub reporter Pete Wonicke begins to wonder if she was convicted because of her character, rather than real evidence.

  Author Emma Flint captures the loneliness, struggles and ennui of the residents of working-class Queens in the mid-1960s, especially the women who, for the most part, are stay-at-home moms.

  While Flint bases her novel on the real case of Alice Crimmins and her controversial conviction, she turns "Little Deaths" into a poignant look at a woman fighting for her emotional independence, who keeps her grief, heartbreak and frustrations deep inside her soul.

• Concord Monitor
  http://www.concordmonitor.com/Review--Little-Deaths--by-Emma-Flint-is-mesmerizing-7649011
  Word count: 313

  Arts-Life > Books
  Review: ‘Little Deaths’ by Emma Flint is mesmerizing

  This book cover image released by Hachette Books shows "Little Deaths," by Emma Flint. (Hachette Books via AP)
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  By OLINE H. COGDILL
  Associated Press
  Friday, February 10, 2017
  0 Print
  Little Deaths, Emma Flint’s mesmerizing debut, works well as a look at misogyny, gossip, morals and the rush to judge others when a child goes missing.

  The novel opens with Ruth Malone in prison, convicted of killing her two children, Frankie, almost 6 years old, and Cindy, age 4. Ruth was the immediate suspect – single mothers were an anomaly in 1965, especially those who work as a cocktail waitress.

  Most neighbors in her working-class area of Queens, N.Y., shunned Ruth for defying convention by leaving her seemingly hard-working, faithful husband, Frank. The police, especially Sgt. Charlie Devlin, are even more dubious about Ruth when they find her trash overflowing with empty liquor bottles, a suitcase full of letters from men, many of them married, and provocative clothing strewn around her apartment. That she’s out drinking and dancing days after the deaths of her children further cements their disgust and their belief that she’s guilty.

  After Ruth’s conviction, cub reporter Pete Wonicke begins to wonder if she was convicted because of her character, rather than real evidence.

  Author Emma Flint captures the loneliness, struggles and ennui of the residents of working-class Queens in the mid-1960s, especially the women who, for the most part, are stay-at-home moms.

  While Flint bases her novel on the real case of Alice Crimmins and her controversial conviction, she turns Little Deaths into a poignant look at a woman fighting for her emotional independence, who keeps her grief, heartbreak and frustrations deep inside her soul.

• The Reader
  https://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2017/02/27/book-review-little-deaths-by-emma-flint/
  Word count: 487

  Book Review: Little Deaths, by Emma Flint
  Posted on February 27, 2017
  Available in bookshops nationwide.

  cv_little_deaths.jpgBeing someone with a love of the USA as it was in the fifties and sixties, I had high hopes for Emma Flint’s book, Little Deaths. Set in the summer of 1965 in New York, it featured the disappearance of two young children from their home and focused on their non-conventional mother.

  The book begins in prison and in a series of flashbacks we learn of the life Ruth Malone had on the outside. The freedom, the men, the stresses of caring for two children on her own, and the resentment for how her life has turned out.

  Next Ruth is now being questioned by the police, and we soon learn that she woke up one morning to find her two children, five-year-old Frankie and four-year-old Cindy, missing from their apartment. She is separated from the children’s father, Frank, and the couple are embroiled in a custody battle. Ruth assumes he’s taken the kids; he denies it.

  The police focus on her as their chief suspect, mainly because of the way she looks and acts. Ruth is a bright, vivacious woman who works in a bar and wears too much makeup and too-short skirts. She also has a number of male friends, something USA in the 1960’s was not always ready to accept.

  In the hands of someone who knows their location well, a book set in this era in the USA is a magical thing. Emma Flint is a UK writer who lives in London. I don’t know if she’s spent much time in the USA but the scenes lack colour and atmosphere and seem forced. The parts with the journalist who takes on Ruth’s story are a bit more believable, but even then, there are some moments when you’re reminded it’s definitely a work of fiction.

  I didn’t find out until after I’d finished the book that Little Deaths was based on the true story of Alice Crimmins. Out of curiosity I looked for more information on the real case and found Flint had followed the facts – very closely. I also discovered hers was the 10th fictional account of the case.

  As an avid reader of true crime magazines as a teenager and with the book being based on a true story, I should have loved Flint’s book, but I didn’t. I found the book not quite satisfying and the ending disappointing, and I also felt cheated that the book was not really the work of a talented and imaginative author, but one who reworked an old story.

  Reviewed by Faye Lougher

  Little Deaths
  by Emma Flint
  Published by Pan Macmillan
  ISBN 9781509826599

• The Real Book Spy
  https://therealbookspy.com/2017/01/23/a-book-spy-review-little-deaths-by-emma-flint/
  Word count: 580

  QUOTED: "While still a mystery at heart, Flint’s novel has a lot of soul. Little Deaths is a fast, compelling read that will leave readers questioning far more than just who did it and why."

  A Book Spy Review: ‘Little Deaths’ By Emma Flint
  Emma Flint Little Deaths.jpgBased on a true story, Emma Flint’s novel focuses on two children who are found dead, with all the evidence suggesting their mother–who lives a somewhat questionable life–is the murderer.

  Set in the 1960s, two young children go missing from their quiet neighborhood in Queens. Cindy is found first, strangled to death not far from the home she shared with her mother and brother. Then, soon after that, Frankie Junior’s body is found too, so decomposed that an exact cause of death cannot be determined. An investigation into the children’s deaths begins, but only one suspect emerges.

  The police have made up their minds. To them, Ruth Malone, a single mother who earns a living as a cocktail waitress who’s known for being very “friendly” with customers, is obviously guilty. A quick deconstruction of Ruth’s life reveals a woman who shows signs of making questionable decisions and who’s been struggling just to stay afloat in a sea of problems.

  Inside Ruth’s home, multiple empty alcohol bottles are found. So is an address book that’s filled to the brim with the phone numbers of different men. And that’s not all, as each new discovery seems to reinforce the police’s theory that Ruth was anything but a caring and loving mother before she allegedly had enough and snapped.

  Adding a new narrative to the story is Pete Wonicke, a young reporter who, while trying to make a name for himself, decides to investigate Ruth’s case. Almost immediately, Wonicke becomes fascinated with Ruth, her lifestyle, and the lead detective’s theory. Initially, he sets out to discover why Ruth made the decision to kill her children. But the more he learns about the mother, the more he wonders if she did, in fact, commit the crimes she’s been accused of.

  More than anything, Emma Flint analyzes the stigma that people who make edgy decisions and women who live more promiscuously than others are somehow bad people. This in turn forces readers to put themselves under the microscope, too. People aren’t cookie cutters, and some individuals choose to live differently than the normal status quo. Some, for that matter, are forced to due to circumstances out of their control. Then again, who determines what’s considered “normal” anyways?

  Throughout the story, multiple characters lend their take and affect the way readers will view Ruth as a mother. Aside from Wonicke, a veteran crime reporter, the lead homicide detective, and multiple neighbors all shed new light on the case in one way or another. Even Frank Senior, who comes across differently than many readers will initially expect him to, adds to the conflicting accounts.

  While still a mystery at heart, Flint’s novel has a lot of soul. Little Deaths is a fast, compelling read that will leave readers questioning far more than just who did it and why.

  Book Details
  Author: Emma Flint
  Pages: 320 (Hardcover)
  ISBN: 0316272477
  Publisher: Hachette Books
  Release Date: January 17, 2017 (Order Now!)

• The Sydney Morning Herlad
  http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/little-deaths-review-emma-flint-reimagines-a-famous-murder-case-in-new-york-20170106-gtmzke.html
  Word count: 213

  Little Deaths review: Emma Flint reimagines a famous murder case in New York

  Kerryn Goldsworthy
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  http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/little-deaths-review-emma-flint-reimagines-a-famous-murder-case-in-new-york-20170106-gtmzke.html
  Little Deaths, by Emma Flint.
  Little Deaths, by Emma Flint. Photo: Supplied
  Little Deaths

  Emma Flint

  Picador, $29.99

  In the late 1960s a 28-year-old red-haired cocktail waitress called Alice Crimmins, resident of the working-class borough of Queens in New York City, was convicted of the murders of her two children. Emma Flint is the latest in a string of writers to base a book, play or movie on this notorious case. The two best things about her novel are the glimpses she gives into the state of mind and emotions of her heroine, here called Ruth Malone, and the vivid recreation of the time and place. Readers who remember the Lindy Chamberlain case will immediately recognise the rhetoric and the implicit sexism of police and media and the fact that she refuses to cry makes her, in their eyes, an unnatural woman. All of these things arouse suspicion. The book is heavy-handed, but the story itself is strong enough to survive that.

• Paper Trail Podcast
  https://papertrailpodcast.com/articles/2017/4/review-little-deaths-by-emma-flint
  Word count: 486

  Review: Little Deaths by Emma Flint

  In the run-up to the winner of the 2017 Baileys Prize being announced on June 7th, Becky Lea reads her way through the longlist and offers her thoughts.

  Ruth Malone is separated from her husband Frank, attempting to juggle looking after two children, a dead-end job, and a life that finds her at the centre of most local gossip. It’s July, 1965; Brooklyn is in the middle of a heatwave and the fragile hold that Ruth has on her life is about to loosen as her children vanish in the middle of the night. With her not-very-proper-for-1965 lifestyle, she finds herself as the chief suspect with only an eager young reporter, Pete Wonicke, on her side.

  Emma Flint’s debut is, without doubt, an interesting book. There’s a real style to Flint’s prose and her descriptions of the story’s setting are continually evocative. The oppressive heat of the summer practically seeps through the pages and creates a clammy, disquieting atmosphere as the investigation into the Malone kids’ disappearance unfolds.

  Taking her cues from real life criminal cases and weaving a story of her own, Flint isn’t content with just rolling out a traditional ‘whodunnit’. Instead, she uses the disappearance of the Malone children to examine the way in which gender and social stereotypes can warp a case and blind those investigating it to other possibilities. Flint doesn’t hold back in her depictions of misogyny, nor does she attempt to defend or sugarcoat.

  My problem with this, however, is that it’s all a bit one-note. The vile, misogynist police detective is never anything but. Ruth is a figure of tragedy right from the very first chapter, painting a face on to present a mask to the world, rather than demonstrate her true pain. As such, there’s very little nuance in the portrayal of these characters and that stops Little Deaths achieving the kind of ambiguity needed in a did-she/didn’t-she story.

  The only character who really approaches the kind of depth needed for the kind of examination that Flint wants to conduct is that of the reporter, Pete. Initially using Ruth’s story as his big break, he finds himself consumed by the idea of Ruth and discovering the truth around her. Pete’s arc throughout the book functions as an exploration of male entitlement and obsession, peeling back the layers of Pete’s intentions to tease out the real reason for his determination to stick by Ruth.

  Little Deaths makes for a solid thriller and one very much founded in the melting pot of misogyny, male privilege, and the unconventional woman in the middle of it all. As a stylish mystery, it works particularly well, but feels like a wasted opportunity for a more incisive social critique.

• Bookpage
  https://bookpage.com/reviews/20928-emma-flint-little-deaths#.WTByoxMrJR0
  Word count: 490

  QUOTED: "As a thriller, Little Deaths succeeds as a fairly run-of-the-mill crime story with the usual collection of ... characters. However, as a psychological study of the subtle terror visited on a woman who is alone and essentially a victim herself, it’s superlative."

  Web Exclusive – January 17, 2017

  LITTLE DEATHS
  Presumed guilty
  BookPage review by Barbara Clark

  The atmosphere, attitude and ambiance in Emma Flint’s debut thriller, Little Deaths, tunes right into the era in which it’s set—that of 1965 New York. It’s a time full of female stereotypes, where law enforcement, juries, the press and the general public frequently pre-judge women on appearances, eager to denounce those who deviate from mom-and-apple-pie images of Norman Rockwell fantasies.

  Ruth Malone is a single, working mother who discovers one morning that her two young children have gone missing from their beds. When their dead bodies surface days later and the case turns into one of murder, Ruth’s look and lifestyle immediately render her a prime suspect. She works long hours as a cocktail waitress; her makeup is heavy glam; she’s been known to sleep around and keeps a notebook of male “friends”; she’s not good at socializing with other women; and she dreams of finding that rich lover who’ll rescue her from her meager surroundings.

  Local reporter Pete Wonicke gets assigned to the murder case, and he becomes increasingly obsessed with the case and attracted to what he believes is the real person beneath Ruth’s caricature of a surface. Lead detective Charlie Devlin is also obsessed, though in his eyes it’s “cherchez la femme”—for him, she is the obvious perpetrator to the exclusion of all other suspects. He’s a cop with a past, and he’ll do everything in his power to see that she’s found guilty of murder.

  Ruth’s ex, Frank, was with his children shortly before they disappeared. He adds another voice to the narrative as the search for the guilty party heats up and readers sift through the stories and opinions from multiple sources.

  As a thriller, Little Deaths succeeds as a fairly run-of-the-mill crime story with the usual collection of suspects, bad guys and sympathetic characters. However, as a psychological study of the subtle terror visited on a woman who is alone and essentially a victim herself, it’s superlative. The book effectively delivers a convulsive look at a woman trapped by circumstance and gender, skillfully tuned by the author to convey Ruth’s claustrophobic sense of fatalism.

  There’s an unfinished feel to the end of the book, and some readers will consider the conclusion a cop-out. But in another way—and more effectively than a slam-bang finale—the final pages will embed readers in the real drama of Ruth’s descent—and perhaps her hope.

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