Helllllllo and welcome to the Read.Sleep.Repeat’s stop on the blog tour for Caleb Roehrig’s 2018 release, White Rabbit. This is one of mine and Shelly’s all-time favorite books, so naturally we jumped at the chance to feature Caleb (who is the most delightful human on this planet) here on the blog.
We asked Caleb what stories inspired him to write murder mysteries and he was kind enough to share with us how he got his start in murder.
Murder and Me
Most kids I know have fond memories of story time, snuggling up close to hear a book read aloud that’s a bit too sophisticated for firsthand consumption. As kids, my sister and I listened to all the fairy tales and Middle Grade adventures our library had to offer, until one evening my dad chose to read to us from an ancient hardcover that once belonged to one of my aunts. My love of mysteries probably began right then, when I was six years old, listening to The Clue in the Jewel Box—volume twenty in the original Nancy Drew Mystery Stories.
As soon as I could handle them on my own, I consumed the entire Nancy Drew oeuvre with a vengeance. Written in the forties and fifties, the early novels were chaste and fairly tame. Other than the occasional ghostly sighting or heart-pounding abduction, probably the scariest thing about those books was Nancy’s regular propensity for getting seriously concussed at least once per case. But times change, and with them, so did Nancy.
My first murder, I guess you’d say, was Secrets Can Kill, volume one of the Nancy Drew Case Files. Launched in 1986, the updated series enthusiastically cast off Nancy’s old-school image, modernizing the character’s look and feel, and giving her more dangerous cases to pursue. In that first entry, halfway through an investigation into a series of random thefts, one of the top suspects turns up thoroughly dead at the bottom of a staircase. To put it mildly, I wigged—until my dad pointed out that a fictional corpse was no less scary than the plastic skeletons I loved so much at Halloween. After giving that a few minutes of thought, I realized he was right. And from that moment on, I was hooked on murder.
From Nancy Drew, I graduated to Agatha Christie (And Then There Were None is still perhaps my favorite murder mystery of all time,) and then to paperbacks from my mom’s collection: Mary Higgins Clark’s All Around the Town; Patricia Cornwell’s Postmortem; and the legendary Sue Grafton’s A is for Alibi—the book that finally, truly gave me the itch to write a thriller of my own. Her protagonist, Kinsey Millhone, was smart, sly, funny, and dishonest in a way I hadn’t seen before. She was a character that made me feel seen, and made my perspective feel like an open window for the first time.
When it comes down to it, Nancy Drew and my parents are equally responsible for my love of murder.
