This was the start of my enduring fascination with the Bomb and America’s dark atomic history, particularly as it intersected with the Nevada Test Site about 65 miles outside Las Vegas.
Years later, I wrote an noir murder mystery novella centered around Operation Buster-Jangle, the November 1st, 1951 explosion of what at the time was the largest nuclear weapon ever created. Here’s what I envisioned: in the aftermath of the blast, a charred skeleton is found, chained at ground zero in a fiery, irradiated murder. I loved the premise of the novella, but it felt too much like a Raymond Chandler pastiche (or maybe Kiss Me, Deadly with the A-bomb backdrop) and never quite worked.
Even more years later, I had a full-circle moment while developing a story influenced by my teenage years in 90’s Vegas. What if instead of approaching my old atomic murder mystery as a hardboiled period piece, I entered into the story through an entirely different point of view character?
Enter Mikey, a disaffected teen living out of a scummy motel, who comes across the Atomic Rose Murder decades after it was abandoned and attempts to solve the cold case.
KMWR: In your interview on The Dark Minds podcast where your novel Bondage is discussed, you describe the terror behind the “alien impulse” of evil deeds and the "black box" of the human mind. What scares you most is never truly knowing the mind of another. I'd love to know about how being a writer may be alleviating that fear, or at least attempting to understand the mind of another. Can you talk more about that? I also found that while “Boy Detective” has the same elements of disturbing deeds (the murder mystery of The Atomic Rose), this story was a bit “lighter” than the themes and plot points in Bondage. I would argue that there is some sort of innocence and humor that permeates and lightens up “Boy Detective.”
SJJ: I think you’re right that one of the central impulses behind reading and writing fiction is trying to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Which is maybe an obvious statement for me to make, but one of the things I personally love about reading fiction is the mind-expanding perspective it gives me beyond the narrow blinders of my own subjectivity.
Yet as you point out, both my novel Bondage and “Boy Detective” explore the central conundrum at play here—we can never truly know what’s going on in someone else’s head. While fiction can help us imagine what the world looks like through another’s point of view, who really knows what’s going on in that skull across from you? Despite our most educated guess-work, there’s no seeing beyond that event horizon.
So rather than alleviating the fear, in my writing I like to lean into the stuff that scares me the most. Like the idea that behind someone’s eyes I’m looking into, hidden inside the black box of that mind, lies something unfathomable, horrifying. In Bondage, that takes the form of a former TV sitcom dad who kidnaps and imprisons women inside his Las Vegas mansion. In “Boy Detective,” it’s the Atomic Rose murderer, a shadowy figure who left a woman to die at ground zero of an impending atomic explosion.
