On the Shelf
‘The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives’
By Elizabeth Arnott
Berkley, 320 pages, $30
If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.
Serial killers grab hold of the public’s attention with their horrific misdeeds and never let go. We can’t help but wonder what could drive someone to commit such heinous acts and try to imagine living next door to Jeffrey Dahmer or a real-life Hannibal Lecter. Would we recognize a serial killer if we passed one on the street? What if we were married to one and did not realize it? Elizabeth Arnott presents us with three L.A. women who have lived through the last scenario in “The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives,” an empathetic and at times bracing mystery tale about unlikely crime solvers circa 1966.
“I loved the idea of taking three wives and putting them into a situation where they had to profile these killers,” says Arnott via Zoom from her pink-walled London writing studio on a cold and dreary winter day, calling the trio’s ability to figure out the killer before traditional law enforcement can “a little joke to myself. These women were scooping the FBI.”
And they were the last people cops or even their neighbors might consider capable of doing so.
The novel, Arnott’s first under her married name and subject to a bidding frenzy at the 2024 London Book Fair, reflects her long-standing fascination with murderers. She wrote her dissertation about serial killers decades ago, and as an author gravitates to storytelling about marginalized women. But she couldn’t really imagine what it would be like to be married to a serial killer until the central wife characters guided her through the book writing process.
By the time she had finished penning the propulsive tale, “I almost felt like I owed them an apology,” Arnott admits. “Because when I started writing this book, absolutely, in my deep subconsciousness, I judged these women. I thought, how on earth could they not have known what their husbands were doing?”
There’s Beverley, a pretty blond mom riddled with self-doubt; glamorous but financially strapped Margot, who frequents Hollywood parties in an Oleg Cassini dress; and demure Elsie, a newspaper editor’s personal assistant who longs to write and report stories of her own but is instead relegated to administrative tasks. When these women hear about unusual murders that summer, they don’t brush them off; instead, following instincts borne out of their own experiences, they investigate as best they can and eventually discover the killer. The story is engaging and ultimately affirming, replete with L.A. references and a reminder how constrained the lives of traditional wives could be six decades ago.
Beverly, Margot and Elsie were raised to be deferential to their husbands on matters big and small. “Their everyday life is being controlled by men,” Arnott says. “It’s very easy to say, how could they not have known? But these women are so manipulated, so controlled on a daily basis.”
And they accepted their husbands’ secrecy as something that came with the territory.
By the novel’s 1966 setting, Gloria Steinem had already gone undercover as a Playboy Bunny and the second-wave feminist movement was starting to gain traction in certain circles. But it would be another two years before a girdle-ditching protest outside the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City prompted the New York Post to coin an indelible (and false) headline about bra-burning women’s libbers that would define the feminist movement into the 1970s. In “The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives,” a pants-wearing female reporter who encourages Elsie serves as an avatar of the changing attitudes toward women and their role in society.
Setting “Secret Lives” in sunny L.A. at that time enabled Arnott, a wildlife and adventure travel journalist before she became an author, to dive into an iconic period of great change with links to old Hollywood. Beyond kohl-lined eyes and miniskirts, “you have this really sort of buzzy, thrumming cultural setting,” she says, citing the Civil Rights Movement, space exploration and the Vietnam War. “It’s also a time where women were facing a lot of prejudice; they were marginalized at home and at work. I wanted to put my marginalized women in this cultural setting and see what stories they could tell.”
To make sure she got the details right, she bought a slew of old women’s lifestyle magazines on EBay, watched old films, a lot of “Mad Men” episodes and music shows from the era — “just anything where I could to get a sense of the music and the clothes.”
Equally as important: researching women in the same boat as Beverley, Margot and Elsie. The novel is set a few years after the Boston Strangler terrorized that New England city, and the same summer as Richard Speck murdered eight nurses in Chicago, with the Zodiac Killer, the Manson family and countless others to follow. To understand how wives of her serial killers might have felt, Arnott watched documentaries about them and read books by daughters and family members of serial killers.
“I didn’t want to take anyone’s stories sort of wholesale and put them in this book, so there are glimmers of real inspiration in there,” she says. “But I wanted to be respectful about how much I chose to sort of take from those stories.”
Rather than have Beverley live in Pasadena or Mar Vista, Arnott created the might-be-anywhere suburban town of Berryview as her residence. “I wanted the reader to almost feel like this could happen to them,” Arnott says. “My intention was for it to be like Wisteria Lane with rotten foundations — a pretty white picket fenced suburb with blood running.”
By the very nature of its familiar domesticity, Arnott’s latest novel represents a marked shift from her first two books, both set in the 19th century and told from the perspective of young women with no parents in the picture. In “Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter,” a British-born daughter of a missing pearl boat captain seeks answers about her father’s disappearance in western Australia, while the titular character in “Maude Horton’s Glorious Revenge” attends public hangings in Victorian England while searching for answers about her sister Constance’s death on an Arctic expedition. Both required three to four months of research before she could begin writing the books, whereas in this case, she was able to write and research along the way, finishing her first draft in about six weeks, “which for me is crazy — so quick.”
It helps, she notes, that so many books and TV shows have focused on the dynamic period in American history.
The writer’s earlier novels were published under her maiden name, Lizzie Pook. The authorial name change for “Secret Lives” wasn’t initiated by her — Arnott calls it a publisher’s decision aimed at differentiating her latest, “more of a book club, commercial thriller” from her earlier historical fiction — but seems like a natural fit given that’s the name she put on her manuscript from the outset. “When I started writing this book, I did put Elizabeth Arnott at the top of the page because I felt that it gave me freedom to do something different,” she says. “And I think it sort of stuck.”
By the time her agent was ready to shop the book at the London Book Fair, Arnott was nine months pregnant with her first child. “She was emailing me back and forth, saying, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve got this many publishers interested, we’re going to set up calls with XYZ, XYZ,’” Arnott says of her agent’s communications then. “I ended up in hospital with high blood pressure.”
Lots of conversations with editors later, Berkley won a seven-way auction for U.S publishing rights under a two-book deal, with more than a dozen additional territories sold at the book fair. “It was wild,” Arnott says. “But I couldn’t allow myself to get too overwhelmed by it.”
Now she squeezes in writing her next novel when she isn’t chasing her daughter Joanie around the house. The author is under strict publishers’ orders not to divulge too much about the plot, but says it is similar in genre to “Secret Lives,” and is crime adjacent.
Beyond that: “I’ll always have women at the heart of my stories.”