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.
• Little Deaths by Emma Flint is published by Picador (£12.99). To order a copy for £10.65 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
