Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Should crime authors mix fact and fiction?


Moors murderers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady 
  Myra Hindley and Ian Brady are among the UK's most notorious murderers

From Josef Fritzl to Jimmy Savile, shocking real-life crimes provide rich inspiration for authors. But how heavily should novelists rely on true cases, and when does fiction go from entertainment to exploitation?

In 1975, sisters Katherine and Sheila Lyon, aged 10 and 12, went missing from the Wheaton Plaza shopping mall in Washington DC. They have not been seen since.
Thirty years later, Laura Lippman heard about the plight of the sisters and the story provided the inspiration for her debut novel What The Dead Know.

In Lippman's version, 11- and 15-year-old sisters Sunny and Heather Bethany went missing from a mall in 1975. Then, 30 years on, a woman claiming to be Heather Bethany appeared and police had to solve the puzzle of what really happened.


Lippman, who was a crime reporter on the Baltimore Sun for 12 years, says: "I've been mining the past for stories that aren't famous. I'm interested in these stories that haunt me."
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