Jay Carey is the author of The Crossley Baby and It’s a Crime among other notable novels. She writes the Detective Eureka Kilburn short-story series. Here she talks about her story “We Are Trapped at the Morgue” from the January/February 2017 issue.
I read mysteries because I love explanations. I am happy when order is restored. Now that the world I knew as a child seems to be in danger, this feeling is all the more precious to me.
What I am trying to do in my Eureka Kilburn mysteries is capture that sense of danger and also at least a fleeting sense of resolution. To heighten the danger, I have spun forward a few decades to the future.
This was a difficult choice for me. Although I admire some works of science fiction (especially Millennium by John Varley), I think most of it is silly. So I don’t like to emphasize the futuristic parts of the Eureka Kilburn stories.
That said, it really is fun to imagine what could happen. Eureka is a police detective in what is left of Sarasota, Florida, after sea levels have risen and most people have left the state. A good deal of the southern part of the state is underwater. Resources are minimal. What are people going to eat? How are they going to get around?
In “We Are Trapped at the Morgue,” bottle bombs are being found all over town. That struck me as an interesting way to make mischief with limited materials. To make one you need only some chemical cleaner, some tin foil, and a plastic soda bottle with a top. These things would be easy to find in the many abandoned houses.
The key is that when I am writing these stories I am subtracting from the world as we know it rather than adding to it. No flying cars for me! That means Eureka has to be shrewd in making do with very little in crisis situations – which might not be much fun to experience in real life, but is very satisfying to write about. You can make up all sorts of tricks.
I hope that this near-future world is frighteningly recognizable.
Trace Evidence 