Katharine Beutner is the author of the novel Killingly. She also has written the novel Alcestis. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Q: Killingly was inspired by a real case of a Mount Holyoke College student who disappeared in 1897--what initially intrigued you about it?
A: What intrigued me most was the strange circumstance of the family doctor still obsessing over Bertha's disappearance three years later--enough that he was giving interviews to NYC newspapers theorizing about her fate. I wanted to learn more about the real search for Bertha and the aftermath of her disappearance for her family and loved ones. As a Smith alum, I was also really curious about what women's colleges had been like almost exactly a century before I attended one.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between fiction and history as you wrote the book?
A: A great question! I wanted to build the story around some of the real events of the investigation and the real reactions of Bertha's fellow students to her disappearance, but I also wanted to be able to have a character present on campus after Bertha vanishes, which led me to create Agnes as her fictional best friend.
Creating Agnes marked a clear division between reality and the tale in the novel, too--what I wrote could never be the "real story" of what happened to Bertha, which made me feel more free to invent.
I felt reasonably comfortable writing about the real people in the book--Bertha, Florence, Hammond--without changing their names because none of them have direct descendants.
Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I began with archival research at Mount Holyoke itself, where they hold some materials about Bertha in Special Collections, and read a lot of contemporary primary sources--college novels of the time, journals, Edith Wharton, etc.
I visited the Mount Holyoke campus and Killingly, Connecticut (Bertha's hometown and the source of the book's title), including the Killingly Historical Society.
I also did plenty of online historical research. Bless the folks whose informational hyperfixations are helpful for historical fiction writers who need to look up century-old train schedules and such.
Q: The Crimereads review of the book says, “Beutner uses [Bertha Melish’s] disappearance as a wider set-piece to investigate the nature of those who stand apart from the crowd, and are punished for their independence.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think it's pretty accurate! It's certainly not the only theme I aim to explore in the book--I'm really interested in the way understandings of gender and sexuality have changed since the late 19th century, which will be even more relevant in the next book, and I'd maybe add that lens to this sentence as well.
I was most interested in how *women* and anyone socialized as female were punished for their independence at that time in American culture, and still are now, in different ways.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm writing the follow-up novel to Killingly, tentatively titled The Social Evil, which follows Higham (the private investigator) to Manhattan and into queer and working-class subcultures of the Lower East Side.
The novel is narrated by his partner in this new investigation, a lesbian ex-journalist who was unjustly convicted of vagrancy--basically butch Nellie Bly, down on her luck. The research for this one has been fascinating.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Killingly is now out in paperback, and my previous novel Alcestis was re-released by Soho last September in a gorgeous new edition, as well! I also edit a literary magazine that publishes eco-writing--The Dodge (https://www.thedodgemag.com).
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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