Meet Author Cayce Osborne

A Wisconsin mystery writer talks about her debut novel

Hello, friends!

I’m pleased to introduce you to Cayce Osborne, author of I Know What You Did. Cayce and I are in the same small online writing group, and I have a deep appreciation for her writing. (I have serious writer envy over her evocative descriptions!) Her debut novel, I Know What You Did, was on my birthday gift wish list, and when my daughters bought it for me, I read it in two days.

When a bestselling novel fictionalizes the death of her childhood best friend—and accuses her of the murder—Petal Woznewski must figure out who wrote it and why.—from the book jacket description

Welcome, Cayce!

You've mentioned elsewhere that part of the inspiration for I Know What You Did came from an Anthony Horowitz book, which used a novel-within-a-novel concept. What attracted you to that concept, and how did you know that it was right for your novel?

I love the trick Horowitz used in the beginning of Magpie Murders, where you start reading the front matter and launch into the book, only to later realize you’ve been reading the book within the book. I’ve always loved to play with structure and form in my writing, and after reading Magpie Murders I knew I wanted to try writing a novel that centered around a fictional book, and to use that book to drive my main character’s fear and anxiety.

Are you like your main character, Petal, in any way?

We are the same age, and grew up in the same place, but that’s about it. I first came up with her as an exercise in creating a character very different from myself. My previous characters had felt too familiar, and had many of my same instincts. Petal was something new. She’s had trauma in her past. She’s a curmudgeon, she’s a loner, she pushes people away. She has no family or friends, just a part-time boyfriend she tries not to get emotionally attached to. I’m lucky that none of those things are true for me. Petal gets to say the inappropriate things out loud that I would keep to myself. But we do both share a deep and abiding appreciation for Keanu Reeves.

Do you ever base your characters on real people?

Not really. I take past experiences I’ve had with certain people, and use them to flesh out character interactions. But no one I write is real, or based wholly on someone I know—not yet, anyway.

What kind of research did you do for this novel?

This one didn’t require a lot of research. At the beginning of the novel, Petal lives in New York City, a place I have visited but never lived. So I did a bit of geographical research for that. After leaving New York she returns to her hometown of Madison, WI, which is also my hometown and where I still live. I had to do a bit of remembering about how Madison has changed in the last 30 years, since some of the flashback scenes take place in Petal’s high school years.

Other than reading, what are your hobbies?

When I started writing fiction seriously, that was my main hobby. I wrote short stories, entered contests, and eventually tried a novel. It was about seven years of experimentation and finding my way before I Know What You Did was published. As writing became more of a second career, I started looking for another creative outlet. I found pottery. I took a wheel throwing class, and have been dabbling at home ever since. I’m learning a new skill while working with my hands, and spending time away from screens, which I need. I also like to travel, cook, and put together the occasional Lego set.

You work in science communication and public engagement at a university. What does this work involve?

I started working for UW-Madison Chemistry Professor Bassam Z. Shakhashiri at the Wisconsin Initiative for Science Literacy back in 2009, shortly after I interviewed him for a local magazine. My early duties were mainly writing, editing, and maintaining his website. All these years later, I now do a little bit of everything. We aim to make science less intimidating for the public. It’s also important to train new scientists to be able to communicate their work to a wider audience—the politicians who make decisions that will affect the world, for instance—so we work with graduate students to help them learn ways to effectively communicate.

Some people find it strange that we thriller writers spend so much time thinking and writing about such dark, often morbid, subjects like murder. What attracted you to this genre in particular?

It’s that page-turning quality that all good mysteries have—the drive, as a reader, to find out what happened, or whodunnit, or why the characters act the way they do. Before I really called myself a mystery writer, I realized all my favorite books, and the books I was trying to write, had an element of mystery. And eventually I realized that’s what I was, a mystery writer.

Out of curiosity, do you have any loose connections to unsolved mysteries or crimes?

I feel fortunate to say that no, I don’t.

Also out of curiosity, do you know of any true crime or ghost-story-type legends from your hometown? (Or the weirdest or most notorious crime?)

I’ve been thinking about one particular crime that occurred in my hometown of Madison for a long time. It’s rather famous. In 1970, four men bombed a building on the UW-Madison campus because part of it was home to an Army research center. They were protesting the war in Vietnam. The building was supposed to be empty, but a graduate student was working late that night and was killed. The bombing also injured three others who were nearby. The bombers fled, and two of them were later caught in Canada, another in California. The fourth, who was 22 years old at the time, fled to Canada and has never been found. This is the part that fascinated me. What happened to him? How has he been able to stay hidden all these years? The new book I’ve just begun to write takes a bit of inspiration from this, but I’m fictionalizing and changing the details of the real crime.

You can learn more about the Sterling Hall Bombing on Wikipedia.

You can learn more about Cayce on her website.

Thank you for joining me, Cayce.

I’d never heard about the Sterling Hall Bombing before. My education on the 1970s is woefully inadequate! Aside from Watergate and Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ (the top song the year my parents married), the seventies feel like a blank space for me.

Over to you, Dear Reader. Comments? Questions?

And help educate me … If you remember the 1970s (or even if your knowledge comes from other sources), what’s something interesting/weird/dramatic that you remember or know about that time period?