Inspired by a series of mysterious unresolved murders, Randall Peffer, Instructor in English, wrote “Listen to the Dead,” a novel which follows a young Latina detective working as part of a small police force searching for a Cape Cod killer. In “Listen to the Dead,” Yemanja Colon, a feisty detective and the only female and non-Caucasian on her police force, is initially frustrated by her murder case. She then realizes that she must “listen to the dead” in order to find out what really happened to the murdered girl. Peffer found inspiration for his novel from the New Bedford Serial Killings of 1988, a string of murders and disappearances of eleven women in the Cape Cod area. The case attracted Peffer because all the victims of the killings were either involved with drugs or prostitution. “I feel that if those people had not been desperate people, the police might have done a better job in finding the killer,” Peffer said. Peffer hopes “Listen to the Dead” will revive the investigation of and interest in the New Bedford Killings, as it offers an alternate theory to those proposed by the police and district attorney. According to Peffer, because the victims were financially unstable, the police assumed all the suspects would be in the same socioeconomic class. The police never considered the possibility of a privileged killer. “You can’t tell if Colon’s channeling what happened in [the victim’s] life or just channeling events in her own life that she has repressed. But Colon connects with the dead girl because Colon feels like a victim also and she wants justice, for herself as well as this other woman,” said Peffer. “The [southern] coast of Massachusetts… is an odd mix of very privileged summer people and a lot of working class people, and sometimes they mix, but not always in a healthy way.” Since he lived around the southern coast of Massachusetts at the time of the New Bedford Killings, Peffer recalled hearing about the crimes on the news. Peffer remembered driving along Interstate-195 and seeing a state police team and trained police dogs. “People were afraid. There was a kind of widespread panic all over Cape Cod,” said Peffer. “It was really scary because they never found the killer,” added Peffer. However, Peffer had forgotten about the killings until his friend, the lighthouse keeper for Bird Island Light, mentioned a similarly eerie murder on Bird Island. Peffer learned that a lighthouse keeper on Bird Island had murdered his wife in 1820, and they had never discovered the bones on the island. It then occurred to him to link this idea with the New Bedford Killings. Peffer first wrote a draft of “Listen to the Dead” four years ago, but soon switched his attention to a sequel to one of his Cape Island mystery series, Bangkok Blues. Because of his publisher’s advice, he returned to work on “Listen to the Dead” and spent last fall rewriting drafts. To research the New Bedford Murders, Peffer read Carlton’s Smith Killing Season: The Unsolved Case of New England’s Deadliest Killer. Peffer attributes his ability to write books so quickly to his childhood, his previous experience in journalism and travel writing and his “hyperactivity.” He said that as a child, he delivered newspapers in the morning “in some pretty sketchy places.” Every day, for eight years, he kept himself entertained and less frightened by making up stories and using different stops along his route as markers for key plot points. As an adult, Peffer wrote travel guidebooks and articles for several newspapers. “Most of the stories I wrote [as a journalist] were narratives, so I’ve had a lot of practice telling a story,” Peffer said. Peffer sees a novel as a play, and typically begins the writing process by mapping out his story in a “five-act” outline, with plot twists at the ends of certain acts. At any given time, Peffer is usually writing two or more books. “Sometimes I’m in the process of rewriting a civil war thriller and starting a mystery novel… they’re always staggered,”said Peffer. He said that the rewrite process is more “left brain and analytical” while the first draft process is “right brain and imaginative”. Peffer said everyone from his students to his editor has given him worthy advice and ideas in the past. He shares his recent work with a “writers’ group” in the English department consisting of Nina Scott and Susan Greenberg, Instructors in English and Co-Advisors to The Phillipian and Lewis Robinson, Writer in Residence.
