Despite coming from the heart of the UK, Country music, especially of the 1960s and early 1970s, has long been a love of mine, and when it came to writing a story of obsession and revenge, the world of Country—one of whose foundational texts is “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”—seemed a natural fit.
As well as focusing on the revenge aspect, I also knew that I wanted the story to be about how men construct images of women—literally in terms of crafting a stage image and persona, or figuratively in terms of how they may build up an image of who they think a woman might be, without actually bothering to involve her in the process. Country often deals in first-person perspectives of heartbreaks, but those first-person perspectives also allow for a certain amount of bias, obfuscation and unreliability (does Jolene even know that the narrator of her song exists, or is it all just a manifestation of the narrator’s fears and insecurities?), and so I wanted to tell my story from the POV of someone whose feelings and actions we can understand and empathize with—right up until we can’t.
As well as there being an inherent idea of authenticity to Country music—the idea that the artist has “lived” their songs—there is also a concomitant idea of artificiality, the desire to create a “show” persona, part of which involves a costume, so I wanted to make my protagonist someone involved in that process. Years ago, while working as part of a film shoot in the South of the US, I’d visited the Country Music Hall Of Fame in Nashville and seen the exhibits there, many of which contained examples of heavily rhinestoned stage costumes, and the likes of Gram Parsons’ marijuana-leaf-embroidered “Nudie” suit, so that felt like a natural fit. I loved the idea of somehow making embroidery dangerous.
The story spans three decades and two different countries, jumping in time to catch the characters a little older and a little more changed,, a structure which hopefully gives the reader a sense of the scale of the protagonist’s dedication to revenge, as well as giving the idea of the arc of a career—from small beginnings to heights of fame and back out the other side. It’s full of the big feelings you find in Country music—heartbreak, longing, regret—paired with some of the drivers of crime fiction—resentment, jealousy, desire—to hopefully create something that feels true to both genres.
Trace Evidence 