Daniel Hecht
I have already written about a couple of personal mysteries -- including my first novel, Skull Session, and my most recent, The Body Below.
Skull Session was based on the time I was called by an old family friend to see if I could fix up her hilltop mansion in New York, which she had fled from. Now in California, she had heard it had been vandalized -- could I check on it? I did -- and was appalled at the extreme violence of the vandalism, much of which seemed to have required superhuman strength to accomplish. Also mysterious to me was the fact that she had fled leaving all her possessions -- priceless antiques, mink coats, jewelry, family photos -- there to be stolen or ruined. I puzzled about it for years before writing Skull Session, and my descriptions of the house are entirely true.
The Body Below, published August 29, 2023, is based on a terrifying event that happened to me while swimming. I used to swim long distances in Vermont's mountain lakes, and I was well out on a four-mile swim when I kicked something under the water. It was heavy, with the density and resilience of human flesh. Horrified, I peered underwater to see a large object spinning in slo-mo away from my kick and disappearing into the silty water -- something that had to be a human body, wrapped in a blue-white shroud. At the time, a woman had gone missing from a town 15 miles away, and the police believed she'd been murdered and dumped in a reservoir near her home. They had drained that reservoir, finding nothing, several days before I kicked my mysterious object. All I could think at the time was, "They drained the wrong reservoir!" The event stayed with me for years, until I finally wrote about it in "The Body Below"!
Skull Session was based on the time I was called by an old family friend to see if I could fix up her hilltop mansion in New York, which she had fled from. Now in California, she had heard it had been vandalized -- could I check on it? I did -- and was appalled at the extreme violence of the vandalism, much of which seemed to have required superhuman strength to accomplish. Also mysterious to me was the fact that she had fled leaving all her possessions -- priceless antiques, mink coats, jewelry, family photos -- there to be stolen or ruined. I puzzled about it for years before writing Skull Session, and my descriptions of the house are entirely true.
The Body Below, published August 29, 2023, is based on a terrifying event that happened to me while swimming. I used to swim long distances in Vermont's mountain lakes, and I was well out on a four-mile swim when I kicked something under the water. It was heavy, with the density and resilience of human flesh. Horrified, I peered underwater to see a large object spinning in slo-mo away from my kick and disappearing into the silty water -- something that had to be a human body, wrapped in a blue-white shroud. At the time, a woman had gone missing from a town 15 miles away, and the police believed she'd been murdered and dumped in a reservoir near her home. They had drained that reservoir, finding nothing, several days before I kicked my mysterious object. All I could think at the time was, "They drained the wrong reservoir!" The event stayed with me for years, until I finally wrote about it in "The Body Below"!
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