Rosalie Knecht talks to Crime Time
Award-winning novelist Rosalie Knecht has created one of the freshest and most distinctive characters in spy fiction: Vera Kelly.
The genre-busting heroine burst into our lives to glowing reviews in 2018’s Who Is Vera Kelly? This first book in a planned trilogy finds Vera spying for the CIA in mid-1960s Argentina, keeping a sharp eye on a bubbling coup and bungling student revolutionaries.
The imminent follow-up, Vera Kelly Is Not A Mystery, sees Vera start a new life as a private detective – but she’s not above using some of the tricks, and former colleagues, she picked up in The Company.
Insightful, witty, and criminalised by her sexuality, Vera’s also got more layers than a mille feuille; she can be cynical and guileless, sneaky and straight, world-weary then wonderstruck.
Best of all, Knecht writes like a dream, epitomising everything that’s great about hard-boiled noir – energy and piercing clarity, infused with moments of deep sadness and wisdom.
She spoke to Crime Time from her home in New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan.
Life in the time of Coronavirus
We’re quarantined in a hot spot, so we’re only going out for groceries. Sometimes we walk across the street to see a patch of grass. We don’t see friends or family. Normal life has just ceased, completely. I’m a social worker, and recently went into private practice, after years working in foster care and then a mental health clinic. I left that last job in January – not a great moment to leave a job, but it’ll be fine.
Getting started
I didn’t anticipate writing in the spy or crime genre. I consider myself a literary writer, whatever that means – most of my reading is in that area. At college I took some writing workshops, where I learned the kind of short story-focused fiction which is big on the epiphanic moment but not so big on plot. So at first I felt self-conscious about creating a strong plot. I’d think, ‘Imagine if somebody shot somebody else in this scene – that would be crazy! That could never happen, it’s outrageous!’ So I had to teach myself to not be so mannered and precious about plot, and how it drives things along.
Why write about a spy?
What intrigued me was the idea of secrets, a double life. Someone who can’t tell anyone who they are, what their work is. The pressures it puts on a person’s psyche and relationships. And I was curious about my family. My maternal grandfather worked for the CIA. Not in a clandestine capacity – he just happened to work in D.C., they employ a lot of people. But he died in an accident in the early ‘60s, so these things merged in my mind – a recent ancestor who died before I was born, who I wouldn’t be able to pick out in a photograph…the things that are spoken and unspoken, in all families.
Forefathers
Instead of detective or spy fiction, I think of it as noir. I like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, 1940s and ‘50s stuff. Chandler’s work appears to be about toughness, yet all his major characters are emotional wrecks. Barely functioning, incredibly needy, totally oppressed by their own histories and desires. Which is how Chandler himself was, but there’s this hyper-stylized presentation of the suffering person’s psychology. These narrators have a very well-developed façade, which is impressive but, at the same time, transparent. It’s all defensive.
Who is Vera Kelly?
I think of Vera as a sad character. Her mother is not a nurturing person – which is an understatement. She lost a parent young, and in those days you didn’t talk about these things – there was the idea that you didn’t want to remind the bereaved person of their loss, especially the bereaved child. So people had big silences around those losses. Also, Vera’s trying to make a life for herself as a queer person in that era, and she’s lonely. Which is another noir thing – these people are always terribly lonely.
The nitty gritty of intelligence gathering
I wanted to do something low key, to be psychologically realistic. I wanted to ask, ‘How does an organization like the CIA actually work, when it’s just your job?’ When you’re a normal person with normal capacities, doing a job that’s often boring, confusing, useless…a job you may be good at, or not good at. It’s similar to the way The Wire blows up the police procedural – the cops spend a lot of time complaining about paper work, getting authorization to do things, losing arguments with their bosses; things that are very true of working in a large, hierarchical organization. Which is why Vera spends a lot of time making transcriptions and eating sandwiches.
On Vera’s support for the CIA’s mission to ‘preserve democracy’ in South America
I spent a lot of time sweating over this issue. With the benefit of hindsight, the CIA did tremendous harm in South America. As far as we know, it wasn’t getting up to much in Argentina in 1966, the setting for the first book. But a decade later, in Chile, the CIA played a part in tens of thousands of deaths. And in no way did it oppose the Junta in Argentina at that time, which killed 30,000 people.
On the other hand, I wanted to write a mid-century spy novel, with a person who represented the CIA. And I wanted Vera to have a solid reason why she would choose this path, which alienates you from everyone you know. So how to approach that? Especially as a fairly left-wing person myself, knowing the damage that occurred and the scars that are still felt all over South America. What does Vera believe about what she’s doing?
For a start, she doesn’t have the benefit of hindsight. And the Cuban Missile Crisis is important; she reacts to that moment of genuine terror by seeing her work as a reasonable and patriotic thing to do. She sees an immensely powerful enemy, which itself is playing dirty. During the Cold War, I think many people justified behind-the-scenes activity as the alternative to having an actual war. So I pictured her as a JFK-voting, pro-civil rights American moderate of the 1960s; not a left-wing position, but a very common one.
In the second book, she’s started to see things differently. She’s recoiled a bit from the way the US is playing fast and loose with proxy countries. But it hasn’t made her any more ideological – it’s just soured her on the whole enterprise.
A gay spy
It made sense for Vera to be gay. She’s used to having to keep some things very secret. And it’s part of what makes her decide that going into covert ops is a reasonable move. She doesn’t have a lot of pathways to security. She’s estranged from her mom, her father is dead. She’s a single woman from an affluent suburb, but she’s not going to marry her way out of insecurity. As a teacher or social worker, she’s never going to earn her way out of a boarding house. Then someone comes along and says, ‘We’ll pay you an incredible amount of money to go on trips and do surveillance’. And she thinks – yeah.
The culture of the CIA in the Sixties was not as conservative as you might think, although officially being gay was not allowed – you’d get fired. But the FBI were the real squares. Compared to them the CIA was relatively free-wheeling, and involved in all kinds of strange things, like funding book awards.
What’s next?
Who is Vera Kelly? was optioned for TV by Freeform. Obviously way more stuff gets optioned than made, but who knows? It’ll be great if it happens.
I’ve begun writing the third Vera Kelly – there’s nothing like a quarantine to get you started. It’s mostly set in California, which is part of my Chandler preoccupation. But I’m planning to stop with Vera after the third one. I don’t want to repeat myself.
