Cop Town’s Karin Slaughter on Writing, Feminism, and Why She’ll Never Get Picked Up By the Vice Squad

Thriller writer Karin Slaughter, best known for her beloved Will Trent and Grant County/Sara Linton series, recently took a break from Will and Sara to write Cop Town, a standalone thriller set in 1970s Atlanta. Cop Town is the story of both the hunt for a ruthless cop killer, and the first generation of women allowed onto the police force, as told through the eyes of restless rich girl Kate, new on the job, and Maggie, the put-upon daughter of a struggling cop family. I talked to Slaughter about the book, the way things have changed (or not) for women, and the writerly benefits of a vice-free life:

Why did you choose this particular time and place for Cop Town?
Atlanta’s the place I always write about because it’s my home town, but the time period is just fascinating to me. The civil rights battle was effectively over, but in Atlanta in the 1970s, we were in this huge transition. We went from a majority white population to a majority black population, we had our first African American mayor—one of two who were never indicted, I might add. The police force saw rapid change because of the federal government coming in and saying, “We’ll give you a lot of money if you make the police force look like the people they’re policing. So you have to have more women, you have to have more minorities.”

But this is a time period when we’re coming out of a very unpopular presidency, a very unpopular war, the economy was in the toilet. We were seeing layoffs, people were struggling for work, gas prices were sky high—it sounds like today, right? But if you talk about things that are happening today, sexism and racism and homophobia, you talk about them too much and you’re kind of whiny. But if you talk about them in the 1970s, then it gives people some perspective.

I’ve never read a cop story that was so effective at getting not just into the mindset but into the physicality of what it is to be a cop. How did you research that?
I talked to women police offers and I also did quite a bit of research, and I found a video of a woman police officer in the 1970s. She’s in the uniform and you can tell it’s a man’s uniform because she’s sorta petite, and the hem on the pants is too high and the shirt’s so big that she looks like she’s being swallowed by a balloon.

So she’s reminded every day that she’s doing a man’s job against people’s will?
Exactly. And I talked to these women police officers, and just the flashlight alone—you know, four double D batteries, made of galvanized steel—it was a weapon for them, and just that was heavy. Then you add in all the other stuff. Even women police officers today have scars from their belts because they constantly dig in, and they do have to wear an under-belt and an over-belt with clips because the equipment’s so heavy that otherwise it would pull their pants down.

Did you get a chance to actually try any of these things on?
I didn’t try them on—I felt them and lifted them. But today they’re much lighter than they were back then, and it was still heavy. And it makes sense that they’d have to stand with their legs apart, which is a dominant position and contrary to how most women are told to stand. For a lot of women I spoke with, the biggest hurdle was not apologizing for everything. Because women tend to apologize. They had to really overcome that. And the training was not very long, they only had a few weeks.

That was shocking to me. Like, you’re on a shooting range and then you’re on the streets.
Exactly. It’s much more intense now. But training for men actually wasn’t better. A lot of the men had come from Vietnam—most of the helicopter pilots and the motorcycle cops had come from ‘Nam, so they were used to weapons. They were used to having some chain of command and authority. So it wasn’t as big a deal for them because they had a lot of training through the army or military. But for the women, they were just fresh out of being in high school or homemakers or whatever. And for a lot of them it was just daunting to think about. And I talked to these ladies (who had become cops), and every single one of them said it was because someone told them not to.

Not just because they had read an article about motorcycle cops?
Yes, they read it and their mom said, “Oh you can’t do that, don’t be ridiculous.” Or their dad said, “I’ll never talk to you again.” Or, “Why would you take a job from a man?” I talked to one woman who wanted to be a typist for one of the commissioners. But she ended up in the wrong room—she was there where the police were taking applications. And this big guy said to her, “Little girl, you don’t belong here.” And she filled out the application and she was thinking, “Well, I’ll just come back tomorrow and do the other application.” But she got home and they called her and said, “We’d like for you to come in for an interview.” She was terrified that they’d arrest her for wasting police time, so she went in for the interview thinking, “They’ll never take me.” And during the interview they asked her stuff like, “Are you a virgin? Are you only becoming an officer to date other police officers? Are you a lesbian?” Invasive stuff. “How many sexual partners have you had?” And she went through all that and she got a call back and they said, “Show up for the police academy.” So she had to tell her husband that the secretarial job has turned into something else.

When you speak to cops today, do they see themselves still in this book? Have things changed so much? Or not enough?
They have changed a lot. But back then, if you complained about it, you were a bitch. Today if you complain about it, you’re a bitch. Even women I speak to today say, “If you can’t handle it, don’t do the job.” Because it really is tough. They have more respect now, they have more power because they can go to the equal opportunity employment office and file a complaint. But in the past, especially in the 80s, women who did that won the complaints or they won the court suit, but they never were promoted again, because suddenly they were too bossy or too opinionated or too aggressive.

Too all the things that would be appreciated in a male officer.
So, everything they’re saying about Jill Abramson.

I loved how the murderer was someone that we’re with from the beginning of the story, even if we don’t know who he is until the very end. How did you construct this thriller around that character, and in general, are you a really tight plotter?
I am and I’m not. I always know who did it. But while I love Hannibal and Dexter and stuff like that, for what I’m doing, I’m writing so close to the bone and I’m writing in a very realistic way, and rapists aren’t sexy. I didn’t want something where he’s like, “I wanna peel her skin off,” or something like that. But I thought it was important to explain why he’s so angry. And I think we see that anger reverberating even today. Look at what happened to (the women who started the #YesAllWomen campaign): they were shut down. They had to block their Twitter accounts, because they were so attacked. And I think that that’s really a huge issue. Feminism has been so co-opted, but the fact is, feminism benefits men as well. All we’re saying with feminism is that we want everybody to have the chance to do what they want to do. I don’t understand why that doesn’t compute.

What books first turned you on to the crime genre?
I read Nancy Drew and Encyclopedia Brown, Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, V.C. Andrews, which I’m not going to be ashamed of. I should be ashamed—I didn’t realize (Flowers in the Attic) was incest until I was in my 20s, I was like “Wait a minute.” Flannery O’Connor was a revelation for me.  When I read her I was very young and I didn’t understand what she was doing. I didn’t see the any of the Catholicism or any of the social stuff. I just saw, “Wow, here’s a woman writing about really gruesome, violent things and she’s being praised for it.” And her mind worked sort of like my mind worked when I thought of stories, and I love that. And of course I read her again and again as I got older and I studied her in college and saw that she was using violence as a fulcrum, to peel the scab off the human condition. To me that was really what was fascinating—not just writing a really interesting story, but writing something where if you read a little deeper you can get a deeper meaning.

Do you feel like you follow the Flannery O’Connor model of being a boring person who writes about exciting things?
Yeah, I do. I’ll cop to it. I mean, I’m really boring. I get up early, I go to bed early, I don’t smoke or drink, I mean, I’ll eat a cupcake. I’m just not a crazy, stay out all night sort of person. I love writing.

I feel like you wouldn’t have time to write.
Well, I mean, Great Gatsby is like how many pages?

It’s wonderful, but then he had better things to do than write.
And can you imagine if he hadn’t? So I like the excitement to be in my books. And I also think if you know too much about an author you have this preconception about them. I think it’s important for the reader to have the experience of the book. And honestly a lot of my characters don’t think the way I think, because that would be really boring. And they don’t talk they way I talk—even within a book they speak differently. One of the things with Kate and Maggie is that I wanted to make sure that their voices stayed true throughout the book. So when I finished writing the first draft, I went back to the beginning, and I went through their individual chapters and made sure there was no bleed-over. Working on that was probably the most difficult part of the book, making sure those voices were true.

I’m curious whether you think the character of Kate, who’s changing so quickly, could ever break bad in some way, if you made Cop Town into a series. I feel like she could.
I do, too. I mean, she’s such a liar. She lies about a lot of things.

And she’s very good at it.
She’s very quick. Maggie’s just appalled and just in awe at how great she is at doing it. And I could see her absolutely walking that line and maybe going on the wrong side. I’d love to write another book about them; I need to write another Will and Sara book first, but maybe. It’s hard because when I’m signing this book, people say, “Oh, is this a Will and Sarah?” and I’d say, “No, but please try it.” It’s different, but I think it has a lot of the same things that my readers like. You know, there’s a social message if that’s what you want, and there’s some nice sex and murders if that’s what you want. I think books should always exist on many different levels to appeal to many different readers. And if you just want to take it to the beach and read it and never think about it again that’s fine, and if you want to really savor it that’s fine too.

Before I let you go, what are you reading right now?
Well, this isn’t out yet, but I love Jane Smiley, and I just got her galley (Some Luck, forthcoming in October). And my favorite maybe in the last five months was Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent. It’s great, it’s so great. And another book that I really enjoyed was Bittersweet.

Who’s it by?
I’m not going to tell you, because you need to look it up and read it.

Karin Slaughter’s Cop Town is out today! I highly recommend looking it up and reading it.