A Few Bookish Questions With Chris Harding Thornton

Author of "Little Underworld" and "Pickard County Atlas"

Oct 29, 2024

Hello readers,

It’s been a while since I’ve published an author interview, but Chris Harding Thornton’s Little Underworld was so fun and interesting that I felt compelled to ask her a few bookish questions.

Check out my review of the book, published last Friday, and find her novels anywhere books are sold.

Little Underworld is set in 1930s Omaha. It’s a gritty, corrupt place where nobody is innocent—from barmen to politicians and everyone between. Omaha, though, isn’t exactly broadly known for its sordid history. How did you come across it? Was it something you knew from growing up in Nebraska or did you have to dig?

It was a combination of both. When I was growing up right outside Omaha, I lived with my maternal grandparents for about seven years and my great-grandparents, my grandma's parents, lived next door, and they were all born and raised in Omaha. Little hints and allusions about the city were dropped, which always made me curious. And then in high school, I dated someone whose father had been, if not a gangster, at least gangster-adjacent, so I heard whispers about that sort of thing.

Later, I got into genealogy, and Little Underworld really sprang from two of my great-grandpa's uncles. They (sort of) became Jim and Ward. My uncle Jim was a private investigator, and Ward was loosely based on my uncle Jess, whose father-in-law had a bar during Prohibition.

In reading newspaper articles about these uncles and other members of the family, I was consistently stunned by the seediness. Omaha was pretty dang terrifying. I mean, that's what newspapers tend to report, of course—the terrifying, grisly stuff. But what really struck me was the totally brazen corruption of county and city officials. I mean, I guess they were sketchy way before and well after the period in the book.

And then, as I was getting ready to write the novel, I reread a book by a poli-sci professor (River City Empire: Tom Dennison's Omaha, by Dr. Orville D. Menard) that kind of provides a history of the city. Menard's book was a poli-sci thesis and wasn't meant to be a history book, but it's been taken as one. Something I'd read about Uncle Jim led me to spot a statement in the book that I knew wasn't true, and that took me down a rabbit hole of fact-checking. There are true things in River City Empire, for sure, but there's a lot that isn't supported by reliable evidence. A major primary source is the papers of a mayor who wound up embroiled in corruption scandals, and his closest ally had a habit of making things up.

So that had my brain spinning while I was writing the novel—that the actual history of Omaha seems to have been a lot more sordid than the traditionally accepted sordid narrative.

One of the things I especially love in the book is the sense of place you created. Why is it that a strong sense of place seems to play a particularly important role in crime novels? The atmosphere—how real it feels—can really make or break that kind of story.

Well, first off, thank you for that. I usually decide what to write by thinking, “Where would I like to go, inside my head, for the next few years?” So place is really central to me.

That's a great point, too, about crime novels. I suspect one reason why setting is so important is just how setting works in any piece of fiction (or how it can)—it immerses readers into the world of the story, and it characterizes the people dealing with the realities of that world.

More specifically, though, I think a lot of crime novels are about how sticky and complex navigating the world can be from an ethical perspective. And the realities characters have to navigate are really specific to both their individualities and the physical places they're in.

How do you think writing a historical crime novel different than one set in the modern day? There were a few times I thought, “It’s handy that the perps don’t have to deal with GPS tracking or DNA testing.”

It really was handy. I wonder if I'm daunted by the idea of writing a novel set in the current era.

You know, though, I think a lot of crime fiction set in the here and now departs from reality—it's kind of created an alternate universe. Take homicides. The reality is that most homicide cases still go unsolved in the US (when they're even deemed homicides), but that doesn't always make for a compelling storyline. I also think a lot of cases that are “cleared” are only cleared because that's the job—someone needs to get a file off a desk, so here comes Occam's Razor: “Person A, the victim's spouse, has motive, means, and no alibi, so Person A did it.” (I often wonder how many spouses are wrongfully convicted solely because we have this ongoing assumption about spouses.)

And DNA evidence is compelling to a jury, but it's really not commonly used in homicide prosecutions. If an assailant has even left any DNA, there's the expense of processing it, which municipalities often aren't willing to pony up for, and if the assailant is unknown, ID-ing them relies on the DNA being in CODIS. And all of this—even whether or not crime scene investigators are available—really depends on geography and resources and class and all kinds of factors.

So, I guess that I think the landscape of crime and criminal convictions in 2024 isn't as different from 1930 as Dateline and CSI would have us believe, and even though writing fiction means you can make things up, I'm not super into writing alternate-reality stuff. I mean, you're always creating a kind of alternate reality in a novel (the world isn't made of words or of a narrative coming from one character's perspective; it's made of physical matter and, I'm pretty sure, abides by chaos theory). But I tend to write in the realities I'm more familiar with for some reason. There's that pressure in writing about crime in the current age to CSI it up, but I worry a little about how that affects the legal system.

There are plenty of crime novels in which the characters are one-dimensionally sarcastic, with no soft edges whatsoever. Little Underworld definitely has some of that, but offers much more depth. I’m curious about how you balanced classic noir wit/sarcasm with the earnestness and even tenderness we see in Jim, Ward, and Frank. Was that a tough line to toe?

You know, it really wasn't. My only opinion on humanity is that people are lovely and people are garbage. We are all complete turds capable of great acts of beauty. I suspect that view just winds its way into what I write.

Who are some noir authors you’ve taken inspiration from?

Dashiell Hammett is probably the biggest one for me. Red Harvest definitely informed Little Underworld. I love Gary Phillips' work—I think One-Shot Harry is his best book yet. Patricia Highsmith is way up there. Honestly, a lot of the people who blurbed the book write great noir or noir-leaning work that impacts my writing: Erin Flanagan, Stephen Mack Jones, Chris Offutt, Steve Weddle, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Laura McHugh, and Gabino Iglesias. My friend John Woods has a great book called Lady Chevy that no doubt inspired me while I was writing. Another friend, Jason Allison, is one to watch for. He's let me read a work-in-progress that's great.

You are a proud Nebraskan. Besides Willa Cather (because she’s the greatest), are there any other Nebraskan authors/books you like to recommend?

Well, I can't really be proud about being Nebraskan—being born here was just luck. But there are a ton of great Nebraska writers. There are so many, I'm going to leave a bunch out and feel really bad about it, but where to start...

At the top of my list would be Wright Morris, whose book The Home Place is my personal favorite (it's no one else's favorite Morris book, but it stuns me). I think it captures the region's existentialism perfectly.

Bill Kloefkorn's memoirs, any of Ted Kooser's poetry, John Neihardt's The River and I. Ted Wheeler's Kings of Broken Things offers another view of Omaha a little before the period I wrote about, and everyone I know is reading his latest, The War Begins in Paris. Carson Vaughn's journalism is fantastic, and his book Zoo Nebraska is incredible. Pretty much anything Roxane Gay writes is worth reading. Sean Doolittle, Rebecca Rotert, Loren Eiseley, Timothy Schaffert, Joe Starita, Roger Welsch—there are so many more writers in Nebraska. I say just read all of them.

Thanks so much for reading! Who else would you like to see me interview? Drop your ideas in the comments below.

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