The Shining Girls

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to everyone who helped make this book what it is.

I had a crack team of researchers digging up information, out-ofprint books, videos, photographs and personal histories on everything from illegal abortion groups to real-life radium dancing girls, the evolution of forensics, ’30s restaurant reviews and the history of ’80s toys. My dedicated researcher Zara Trafford, as well as Adam Maxwell and Christopher Holtorf of research and game design company SkywardStar, all found me strange and amazing things, elaborated on by Liam Kruger and Louisa Betteridge, and also Matthew Brown, who was always on call by dint of being married to me. Thank you.

In Chicago, Katherine and Kendaa Fitzpatrick were the best possible hosts, although it was a little weird taking Katherine’s two-year-old daughter along on a murder scene playdate to Montrose Beach. Kate’s husband Dr Geoff Lowrey provided medical advice and fact-checking, as did ENT surgeon Simon Gane. Any gruesome errors are mine.

Twitter friend Alan Nazerian (@gammacounter) drove me round, accompanied me to Wrigley Field and introduced me to helpful people, including Ava George Stewart, who gave me invaluable insight into criminal law over the best Chinese food in the city at Lao Hunan, and Claudia Mendelson, who walked me through Architecture 101 over coffee at Intelligentsia. Claudia put me on to Ward Miller who talked about the city’s most amazing buildings over dinner at Buona Terra. (Chicago is a foodie kind of town.)

Ghost tour guide, historian and YA fiction novelist Adam Selzer took me to the creepiest places in the city, including the back corridors of the Congress Hotel, and filled me in on intriguing Chicago history and the ’20s and ’30s in particular, much of which I couldn’t fit into the book, and treated me to that Chicago institution: Al’s Beef.

Longtime Chicago PD detective Commander Joe O’Sullivan (@joethecop, now retired) ran me through the inner workings of police procedure at the Niles police station, where he took me through some startling boxes of old evidence with haunting photographs. (Also: bacon and bourbon cocktails at divey bars.)

Jim deRogatis gave me the inside scoop on working at the Chicago Sun-Times, the paper’s librarians, ink in the air, the editors and cranks and stories from the frontlines. I have taken liberties. He also provided in-depth intel on the ’90s music scene, and sent me a copy of his brilliant, hilarious book, Milk It: Collected Musings on the Alternative Music Explosion of the 90s

I’m grateful to sports reporter Keith Jackson and The Tribune’s Jimmy Greenfield who talked about the ins and outs of sports journalism with me, as well as philosophies of baseball.

Ed Swanson, a volunteer at the Chicago History Museum, offered to read the novel for me, fact-checking the history, Americana and El (or L as it was previously known) routes with an eagle-eye. Any mistakes are mine and some minor ones, like the actual release date of The Maxx or the presence of any African-American workers at the Chicago Bridge And Iron Company in Seneca, are intentional nudges in service to the story.

The newspaper article on the murder of Jeanette Klara owes much to a real piece of journalism about a real-life radium dancer, ‘In New York She Is Dancing To Her Death’ by Paul Harrison, published in the July 25 1935 edition of the Milwaukee Journal. Thanks to the Milwaukee Sentinel Journal for permission to quote some of the great lines from the original.

Pablo Defendini, Margaret Armstrong and TJ Tallie were very helpful with excellent Puerto Rican swear words while Tomek Suwalksi and Ania Rokita translated and double-checked the Polish dialogue, also obscenity-laden.

Mutant-protein-wrangling scientist Dr Kerry Gordon at the University of Cape Town advised me on Mysha Pathan’s research.

Nell Taylor at the Read/Write Library gave me a deep history of Chicago zines, while Daniel X O’Neil talked me through the ’90s punk and alt theatre scenes as well as Club Dreamerz and sent me off with original flyers. Thanks also to Harper Reed and Adrian Holovaty for hanging out at the Green Mill listening to ’30s-inspired gypsy jazz band Swing Gitan.

Helen Westcott loaned me all her criminology textbooks and serial killer reading matter, and Dale Halvorsen kept me supplied with great true crime podcasts he found. My studio mates Adam Hill, Emma Cook, Jordan Metcalf, Jade Klara and Daniel Ting Chong kept me grounded with funny YouTube videos and daily merciless teasing. And thanks to all at animation company Sea Monster, for letting me hide out there to work when our building was being renovated.

Thanks to my friends and family and strangers on Twitter who leaped to help with useful suggestions or translations or medical advice or Chicago recommendations, and anyone I have neglected to mention.

I’m not going to list the full bibliography of my research, but some of the most useful and entertaining reference works included: Chicago Confidential by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, an amazing, sexy, fun guide to the seedier places and people of the city published in 1950; the wonderfully accessible Chicago: A Biography by Dominic A Pacyga; Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters In American Nightlife 1885–1940 by Chad Heap; Girl Show: Into The Canvas World of Bump and Grind by AW Stencell; Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition by Griffin Fariello; the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union’s Herstory resources on Jane at The University of Illinois Chicago’s website, including transcriptions of personal histories; Doomsday Men by PD Smith, about the history of the atom bomb (and extracts Peter emailed me from his new book, City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age); Perfect Victims by Bill James; Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert K Ressler and Tom Schachtman; Gang Leader for A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh; Jack Clark’s Nobody’s Angel; The Wagon And Other Stories From The City by Martin Preib; Wilson Miner’s talk on how cars shaped the world in a tectonic way at Webstock 2012; Chicago Neighbourhoods and Suburbs by Ann Durkin Keating; as well as The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold; I Have Life: Alison’s Journey as told to Marianne Thamm; and Antony Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree, which all gave me devastating insight into what real victims of violence and their families endure. Studs Terkel’s oral histories were invaluable for conveying real people’s stories in their own voices.

First readers Sarah Lotz, Helen Moffett, Anne Perry, Jared Shurin, Alan Nazerian, Laurent Philibert-Caillat, Ed Swanson, Oliver Munson and time-travel plot advisor genius Sam Wilson all made great suggestions on making the novel better and more interesting.

The book wouldn’t have made it into the world without super-agent Oli Munson. Thanks also to everyone at Blake Friedmann and their international co-agents. I’m especially grateful to the editors and publishers who believed in it right off the bat, especially John Schoenfelder, Josh Kendall, Julia Wisdom, Kate Elton, Shona Martyn, Anna Valdinger, Frederik de Jager, Fourie Botha, Michael Pietsch, Miriam Parker and Wes Miller.

I wouldn’t have been able to write it without the love and support of my husband, Matthew, who played single dad for weeks at a time to our daughter, while I was away on research trips or in lockdown behind my desk writing and editing and is always first among first readers. Thank you. I love you.