This story was so disturbing and tragic and poignant in so many ways that it haunted me and still does. I read these articles a year before my retirement, when I was still teaching an MFA fiction class. I ran off photocopies of the articles and distributed them to the class. I often used what my classes called my “story prompts” — a device that has led to a number of publications for my students. Their assignment was to select a point of view and write a fictional version of the kidnapping/identity confusion from that perspective. As always, I received finely written and nuanced stories, but all from the perspective of one or other of the parents or from the point of view of the man who believed he was the missing child.
As so many writers have noted, there are ideas that will not let you go. They become obsessions. They show up in dreams. What haunted me were the black holes in the account, the permanent absences: the abducted child; the kidnapper/killer; the absence of closure (the never knowing what happened).
By this time I had actually written three novels about psychopaths, the first of these (Oyster) prompted by the cult messiah David Koresh and the horrific conflagration at Waco, Texas. I was trying to understand what made so many people willing to submit all to a darkly charismatic figure. I read voraciously in the scholarly literature on psychopathology. I realized it was impossible to portray a psychopath from inside because there is no inside. It is like reporting on an earthquake or a tsunami. All the fiction writer can do is chronicle the devastation on all sides and seek to pay tribute to the survival strategies and the stricken inner lives of those left behind. I confess, to my own regret and dismay, that as a fiction writer I have become morbidly obsessed with psychopaths, both violent (cult messiahs, terrorists) and nonviolent (Bernie Madoff, a fictional clone of whom is a major character in The Claimant). The kidnapper/killer (?) in this short story is the closest I have been able to come in an attempt to get inside the mind of such a person; though of course that is sleight of hand. The reader is never really inside the mind of the killer but is inside the mind of the man who needs not only to construct an alternative narrative of his own life but to construct his supposed kidnapper and killer.
To me, the greatest mystery is how anyone manages to survive catastrophic loss and trauma, and I am fascinated by the narrative strategies used.
Richard Lange is the author of the short story collections Dead Boys and Sweet Nothing and the novels This Wicked World and Angel Baby, which won the 2013 Hammett Prize. His stories have appeared in The Sun, The Southern Review, and The Best American Mystery Stories and as part of the Atlantic’s Fiction for Kindle series. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently working on a novel.
• A number of years ago I started a novel that never got off the ground. One of the characters from that book, a security guard living in a skid-row hotel, stuck with me, and one day I started writing about him again. That story eventually became “Apocrypha.” So, in the end, something positive came out of that earlier failure. There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
“Apocrypha” is a story about an invisible man engaged in a life-and-death struggle in a place most of us pass through — car doors locked, windows rolled up — as quickly as possible on our way to somewhere else. It’s these men and these places that fascinate me and that I keep returning to in my work. In this milieu, people live so close to the edge that the smallest misstep can be ruinous or even fatal. Just thinking about it scares me, and what scares me inspires me. I’m glad that I got to save the lost soul in “Apocrypha.” I only wish that I could save them all.
Dennis Lehane grew up in Boston. Since his first novel, A Drink Before the War, won the Shamus Award, he has published eleven more novels, which have been translated into more than thirty languages and become international bestsellers: Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone, Baby, Gone; Prayers for Rain; Mystic River; Shutter Island; The Given Day; Moonlight Mile; Live by Night; The Drop; and his most recent book, World Gone By. Lehane was a staff writer on the acclaimed HBO series The Wire and a writer-producer on HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.
Three of his novels — Mystic River; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Shutter Island — have been adapted into award-winning films. In 2014 his first screenplay, The Drop, based on his short story “Animal Rescue,” was produced as a feature film starring Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini in his final role.
Lehane and his wife, Angie, currently live in Los Angeles with their two children, a fact that never ceases to surprise him.
• As I remember it — and a writer’s memory is about the last person’s you should trust — Michael Connelly and I were approached by Steve Berry about a unique collection of stories he envisioned. We’d take our series protagonists and have them work together, which would mirror Michael and me working together. Michael said he couldn’t imagine Patrick Kenzie in L.A., so he thought it best and more believable if Harry Bosch were led to Boston on official business. So Michael took pole position and started the story with Harry arriving on the East Coast. At some point he and Bosch reached the place where Bosch’s path crossed with Patrick’s, and that’s where I jumped in. From there, I can’t explain how we decided when and where we’d toss the potato back into the other’s hand, but making prose is a lot more like making music than laypeople suspect, and a lot of riffing between successful collaborators happens organically. The whole experience, in retrospect, was a lot more fun than it had any right to be. Maybe the story reflects that. I hope it does, anyway.
Theresa E. Lehr is a scuba diver and educator and has published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and in Texas Magazine of the Houston Chronicle.
• Years ago, while six months pregnant and traveling Down Under with my children and husband by camper van, we stopped at a roadside park next to a rushing stream. Within moments a motorcyclist, dressed completely in black leather, pulled up next to us. Once the rider removed her helmet, I realized she was a young woman. Her independent spirit fascinated me, and she was the inspiration for my main character.
I have been a scuba diver for thirty years. Near-drownings, bad air, faulty equipment, and poor decision-making have given me a mighty respect for the power of the sea. However, nothing can keep me from exploring the wonders of the ocean whenever possible. After watching a show about the pearling industry in Western Australia, I knew I had to write this story.