CREATING EVE TWIST

Eve’s life is more retro than techno. This too she shares with the writer. She has the edgy humor of someone who can be surprised and amused by daily life, and she prefers real conversations over coffee or lunch. She never uses social media nor does she text, but she is not a technophobe or obsessive. Eve doesn’t use a smartphone, and the phone she has is often misplaced, but she can competently handle a computer when necessary. Beyond that, Eve reads paper copies of books, not e-books on Kindle, and likes to take time to slow down and think about things. The various characters who take their place in the books are thinly described, just broad strokes to bring them alive in Eve’s world. You won’t read details about how they look or wear their hair; they invite you to imagine their world and fill in the particulars. You will get to know them through their backstories, their relations with each other, and the cold case.

Eve, and this writer, were both trained as academics, but left the academy to live lives out in the open. Eve is not Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled, lonely tough guy who sticks up for the underdog. His world is the darker urban social life that followed the Great War. Eve’s Tucson world is a 21st-century urban place, not 1930s LA. But like Marlowe, Eve is more interested in what happened, rather than whodunit. The crime itself exposes something deeper, the slow, almost invisible, erosion of neighborhoods over time, ways of life fought for and partially erased, swallowed by the often-cruel forces of history. Eve straddles two worlds in Tucson, the one that was and the one that is now, and she playfully uses humor to keep her balance.