TRUE CRIME ‘HOW I QUEEN: CREATE FEAR’
AUTHOR RUTH MCIVER’S LATEST NOVEL WAS INSPIRED BY HER OWN DARK PAST
Most true-crime novelists aren’t afraid to spill a bit of blood on the pages of their book, but that’s not true of Ruth Mciver.
The author, from Perth, prefers to create a more suspenseful and anxietyinducing style of writing. In her hotly anticipated book,
I Shot the Devil, that’s exactly what readers can expect.
“I am not really into incredible violence in my
books, I prefer to create suggestive violence and to create fear in other ways,” Ruth, 41, tells New Idea. “You can create a lot of suspense with someone stalking you online, for example, that is really fearful. I will splash out with a bit of violence, but one thing that I am conscious of – especially if it’s based on a real case – is to be incredibly careful with that.”
Ruth’s new novel follows the story of journalist Erin Sloane, who is tasked with investigating a thrill-kill murder. As she unravels details about the case, it propels her closer and closer to a terrifying truth from her past. And closer and closer to danger as well.
Ruth drew on her own experiences to create the novel, which has been described as “electrifying”. She says she has dreamt of being an author ever since she was a child.
“Since I was 8, there wasn’t anything else that I wanted to be,” she recalls. “I knew that I would be an author.”
But I Shot the Devil is her most personal work yet, having originally started as a memoir. In researching, she realised that her own story hit a little too close to home, so instead opted for a fiction story, recalling memories of her own brushes with crime through the pages of the novel.
At the age of 10, Ruth and her family were living in the United States. On one particular family holiday, they visited a friend of her stepfather’s, who Ruth says committed a crime that she got away with. The woman and her lover had allegedly put a hit out on her husband, who was killed. Ruth says she got away with murder – and everyone knew.
“It was common knowledge and even her children knew she was involved,” she says. “It was an incredibly strange experience staying there with them because I knew that this woman had done something terrible, and the adults around me were my moral compass.
“I remember feeling like the atmosphere was strange and electric. It’s really stayed with me,” she says.
Later, in her 20s, Ruth lived in the same house that Perth serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, nicknamed ‘The Night Caller’, murdered one of his victims. From September 1958 to August 1963, Cooke terrorised the city of Perth by committing at least 22 violent crimes, eight of
which resulted in deaths.
“About 10 years after living in the house, I found out that the victim lived in that house and she slept in my room,” Ruth recalls. “He came through the window to kill her. It was haunted as hell. It was
‘I PREFER TO CREATE FEAR OUTSIDE OF INCREDIBLE VIOLENCE’
a bit like The Amityville Horror. We got robbed the first night we moved in. One of my housemates had a nervous breakdown. People in relationships broke up and the house fell apart.”
What’s more, Ruth says she was also nearly abducted outside a nightclub.
“It was a very frightening incident. I saw this person who just looked at me with so much hate and like pictures of someone when their pupils are all black, like that,” she says. “It just made me aware of my vulnerability and just the fact that you can think things happen to other people, but they can happen to you.”
Ruth, who has a PHD in true-crime-inspired fiction, believes her own experiences sent her on an unexpected trajectory into the world of true-crime writing.
“I always read true crime and collected Murder and Mind magazines. When I started reading crime fiction, I was enjoying it so much more than literary fiction.”
Ruth says she is inspired by other authors in the genre, like Megan Abbott and Karin Slaughter. “I think she’s the queen,” says Ruth.
The author adds that while COVID-19 lockdowns have impacted her ability to share the book with the world, she can’t wait for her audience to have a read of her thriller.