1–What is the title of your latest release?
2–What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
A Lovely Girl is the true story of a scandalous 1958 murder case filled with eccentric people, bumbling killers, and dark humor, set against the backdrop of 1950’s family life. Think Dave Berry meets Ann Rule in Fargo!
3–How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
Because my book is a true-crime memoir, I didn’t have a choice about the setting. The story takes place in Santa Barbara and Ventura, California where the murder and trial occurred. I liked time traveling back to my 1950s hometown and reliving a part of my childhood while researching the book. My father was a crime reporter and columnist for the local newspaper, so his stories about the murder and columns about our family helped bring the 60-year-old murder back to life for me. As I wrote the book, I heard my father’s voice speaking to me from his old, yellowed news clippings authenticating that wonderful 1950’s coastal town I remembered so well.
4–Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
I enjoyed hanging out with the protagonist— my ten-year-old self— in the coming-of-age memoir chapters of my book. Reliving young Debby’s obsessive worries about the crime and insistence on justice for the victim’s killers helped me gain a new perspective about why I am such a devoted true crime fan today. But I would never associate with the murderous mother-in-law who is the protagonist of the true-crime portion of the story.
5–What are three words that describe your protagonist?
I would describe Elizabeth Duncan, the mother-in-law from hell, as a murderous jealous liar. Young Debby can best be described as fearful and single-minded.
6–What’s something you learned while writing this book?
I learned that some of the lore in my hometown that has swirled around the story of Olga’s murder for over sixty years and continues to persist today in is just that, lore. I spent years researching trial transcripts, articles, and interviews from four newspapers and the unpublished memoir of the DA who prosecuted the accused killers. I verified the facts and I’m confident that I’ve sorted fact from fiction.
7–Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
Before I began to write each day, I always re-read the pages I’d written the day before, and as I read those previous pages, I couldn’t resist doing a little editing. I eventually learned to keep the edits to a minimum or I would never have been able to produce any “new” writing. But I eventually wrote ten drafts of A Lovely Girl. I believe it was Ernest Hemingway who said, “All writing is re-writing.” I very much agree with that idea. Revision is the very essence of good writing.
8–What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
GHIRARDILLI CHOCOLATE SQUARES!
9–Describe your writing space/office!
I work in a converted bedroom on the bottom floor of my home. I use the bed as a big table to lay out the research materials I need. The closet has drawers and shelves to store the huge binders full of trial transcripts and folders with press clippings organized by date. There are framed photos of Olga Duncan and my reporter father sitting on the built-in desk next to my computer. I sometimes talked to their pictures or asked them questions as I wrote about their far-away long- ago pasts. I needed a lot of advice! There is a window with a great view of the walking court in front of my house, and I enjoy watching the world pass by my window when I need a break from writing.
10–Who is an author you admire?
Michael Connelly is my favorite author. I LOVE his crime fiction series featuring Harry Bosch. The stories are terrific police procedurals with Detective Bosch—his motto is everybody counts or nobody counts—at the heart of every story. Harry has become a real person to me. And Connelly is a wonderful writer. I sometimes stop reading to admire one of his sentences or his descriptions of the LA setting.
11–Is there a book that changed your life?
In 1965, I found a copy of Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD on a shelf in my father’s bookcase. The murders of the Clutter family that Capote wrote about occurred exactly one year after Olga’s senseless killing. When I first read In Cold Blood, Elizabeth Duncan had been executed a few years earlier, and Olga’s story was still very much on my mind. Over the years, I read and re-read Capote’s book, and the idea that I wanted to write about Olga Duncan’s tragedy began to grow.
12–Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
My wonderful agent, Charlotte Gusay, pitched my book for almost a year. When Charlotte called to tell me that Pegasus Books wanted to offer me a contract, I thought the top of my head was going to blow off and that confetti would scatter all around me. Later that evening, my husband and I went to our favorite restaurant to celebrate the amazing news.
13–What’s your favorite genre to read?
I’m an eclectic reader. I love true crime, cozy mysteries, historical fiction, crime fiction, WWII spy stories, and literary fiction. For a change of pace, I sometimes read Jane Austen repeatedly. I call her novels my comfort books. It’s hard to pick a favorite genre, but I think that crime fiction stands out. It’s what I look for first when choosing a new book to read.
14–What’s your favorite movie?
So many movies so little time… I think Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest is my all-time favorite.
15–What is your favorite season?
Summer. I grew up in a California beach town and I currently live in Mission Beach in San Diego. I love the brilliant sunlight shining on the ocean and sand. Everybody’s happy at the beach in the summer.
16–How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
I’m not big on birthday celebrations, so it’s usually pretty low key. Mostly, I go to a nice restaurant for dinner with my husband and our two sons. I’m very lucky that both my adult children have returned to San Diego after graduate school and travels, so I get to see them regularly.
17–What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I highly recommend British crime dramas like Shetland and Vera, which are streaming series based on the novels of Ann Cleeves.
18–What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
I love Mexican food and living so close to the border here in San Diego we have lots of delicious options.
19–What do you do when you have free time?
I enjoy walking on the boardwalk along the beach, going to the gym, and doing retail therapy. My husband and I tend to watch streaming TV shows, so we don’t go to the movies as often as we used to.
20–What can readers expect from you next?
I need time to decompress from the huge undertaking of researching and writing A Lovely Girl. After that, I’d love to write a cozy mystery set in a small mountain community like the one where I worked for over 30 years as an elementary school teacher and principal. I already have a rough outline of a plot, and I’ve written a few chapters. Or sometimes I think I’ll use the plot to begin the first book in a series of young adult novels, similar to the Nancy Drew books I loved to read as a child. But whatever I write I can guarantee that it will be fiction.
A LOVELY GIRL by Deborah Holt Larkin
The incredible story of a 1958 murder that ended with the last woman to ever be executed in California—a murder so twisted it seems ripped from a Greek tragedy.
Deborah Larkin was only ten years old when the quiet calm of her California suburb was shattered. Thirty miles north, on a quiet November night in Santa Barbara, a pregnant nurse named Olga Duncan disappeared from her apartment. The mystery deepens when it is discovered that Olga’s mother in-law—a deeply manipulative and deceptive woman—had been doing everything in her power to separate Olga and her son, Frank, prior to Olga’s disappearance.
From a forged annulment to multiple attempts to hire people to “get rid” of Olga, to a faked excoriation case, Elizabeth seemed psychopathically attached to her son. Yet she denied having anything to do with Olga’s disappearance with a smile.
But when Olga’s brutally beaten body is found in a shallow grave, apparently buried alive, a young DA makes it his mission to see that Elizabeth Duncan is brought to justice. Adding a wrinkle to his efforts is the fact that Frank—himself a defense attorney—maintained his mother’s innocent to the end.
How does a young girl process such a crime along with the fear and disbelieve that rocked an entire community? Decades later, Larkin is determined to revisit the case and bring the story of Olga herself to light. Long overshadowed by the sensationalism and scandal of Elizabeth and Frank, A Lovely Girl seeks to reveal Olga as a woman in full. Someone who was more than the twisted family that would ultimately ensnare her.
As we follow the heart-pounding drama of the case through Larkin’s young eyes—her father was the court reporter—A Lovely Girl is by turns page-turning yet poingnant, and makes the reader reexamine how we handle fear, how we regard mental illness, and how we understand family as we carve our own path in a dangerous world.
True Crime [Pegasus Crime, On Sale: October 4, 2022, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781639362448 / ]
Buy A LOVELY GIRL: Amazon.com | Kindle | BN.com | Powell’s Books | Books-A-Million | Indie BookShops | Ripped Bodice | Love’s Sweet Arrow | Walmart.com | Book Depository | Target.com | Amazon CA | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon FR
About Deborah Holt Larkin
Deborah Holt Larkin is uniquely qualified to tell this captivating yet horrifying crime story. From a front row seat in her family’s living room, she lived the fear and disbelief that gripped her hometown in 1958.
Larkin holds a bachelor’s degree in American History and Literature from the University of California at Davis, and she studied creative writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has a master’s degree in the Education of Exceptional Children from San Francisco State University.
One of Deborah’s first jobs in education was teaching special education at a small rural elementary school located in the beautiful historic gold mining town of Julian, California. At the time teaching jobs were scarce, and she thought that she could make the sixty-three-mile commute from Ocean Beach apartment for a year until she found something closer to home. But when the year was up, Deborah and her husband Tom moved nearer the school and the “temporary” job turned into thirty-two-year career. She loved the mountain-top school, the students, the other teachers and the community. She became principal for the final fifteen years of her career and Julian Elementary was recognized as a California Distinguished School. It was her dream job!
No Comments
Comments are closed.