A Tribute: A Guest Post by Caitlin Mullen

Released into the tumult of 2020, Please See US went on to win the 2021 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and now it’s our Monthly Mystery & Thriller Pick for March — Caitlin Mullen has been on quite an adventure. Read on to her essay below about how sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, and the details of the shocking real-world events that inspired her novel and the journey that led her to write it.

Having grown up on the Jersey Shore, I long felt that Atlantic City would make a great setting for a novel: the bright, busy boardwalk, the glittering casinos, the rich and varied history with cameos from the Rat Pack and Nucky Johnson. My dad and my grandmother both worked in casinos when I was a child and I would sometimes visit them at work, so for better or for worse I was no stranger to the chime of slot machines, the blackjack tables shrouded in cigarette smoke, and the cheers and groans from the crowds at the roulette wheel.  

But by the time I was in my twenties, the glamourous, thrilling version of Atlantic City I knew from my childhood was crumbling. Casinos—hulking, empty, and dark—were shutting down for good along the shoreline. The streets were desolate. Feral cats made their homes under the famous boardwalk. It was sad to see the city dimmed that way. But I also thought this version was its own story, worth capturing in all of its grit and desolation.  

Lily, one of the main characters of PLEASE SEE US, works at a casino spa not unlike the one where I had a summer job as a receptionist. Nearly every week a woman who worked as a psychic in town would come in and ask to give me a reading in exchange for access to the spa. I always said no, but I wondered what she might have told me if I said yes. Would it have been revelatory? Or would I have felt foolish for thinking she was privy to a glimpse of my future?  

It’s hard to know, but this dynamic is what inspired the relationship between Lily and Clara, a teenaged psychic who tends a shop on the boardwalk but is also dipping a toe into more dangerous exploits. Although they are an unlikely pairing, they soon come to rely on one another as a series of disappearances of women in town starts to feel increasingly dire.  

Clara and Lily form an alliance and try to understand what is happening to the women who go missing—a plot line that was influenced by the 2006 murders of four Atlantic City women whose bodies were abandoned behind a seedy motel. I was always haunted both by the murders themselves and the fact that they were never solved, that they seemed so quickly brushed aside and forgotten. This narrative inspired the novel too—not just the crime, but the ways society pushes vulnerable women to the margins, uses them up, blames them for what goes wrong in their lives, forgets about them.  

With that dynamic in mind, it felt crucial that the murdered women appeared on the page as real, whole human beings. That’s where the voices of the dead come in: Lily and Clara’s narratives are interspersed by the voices of the Jane Does who have been killed and hidden in the marsh on the edge of town, and we learn about their desires and disappointments, who and what they loved, how they understood the world. Though they are victims, more than that they deserve to be honored for their bravery, their endurance, and their strength. My hope is that Please See Us reads like a tribute to the real-world women like them, whose stories so often go unacknowledged and untold.