Honestly, I don’t have a personal mental image of Lois Duncan at all. Well, you don’t, really, with writers, do you? With some exceptions—I think most of us have seen Stephen King enough to remember what he looks like. And while it turns out our mental image of Shakespeare may not resemble Shakespeare at all, there’s still an image that says Shakespeare to people. But when I found an image of Lois Duncan playing the accordion, I knew that was an image I needed to share with all of you. You’re welcome.
Her life includes more layers than you would imagine, for someone probably best known for writing YA thrillers. She was born in Philadelphia, true, but the family later moved back to Sarasota, Florida. Because her parents were circus photographers. Which is a profession that existed. She would, as an adult, write a few books about the circus, and they’re probably more accurate to the actual circus experience than just about any other books written about it, albeit aimed at a specific audience. And even while her parents were off taking pictures of clowns and things, she was writing.
Duncan was writing so long ago that YA basically still wasn’t its own category yet. Certainly YA thrillers were few and far between. Yet much of her career was made on them. Even during my own adolescence, your choices were watered-down stuff along the lines of the new-at-the-time Nancy Drew Files, giving up and reading adult books, or reading a lot of Lois Duncan. I don’t mean horror, exactly—and if I did, Goosebumps didn’t start up until 1992—but thrillers. Crime novels, but suspenseful ones. She didn’t spawn many imitators in those days, I think because people wouldn’t realize for some time to come that there was a market for them.
Alas, that market would eventually bring about an adaptation of her I Know What You Did Last Summer that was so far from the book that she called her daughter and told her not to let the grandkids see it. I believe she was much happier with the adaptation of Hotel For Dogs. Successful at thrillers Duncan may have been, but limited by genre she was not. She wrote thrillers, poetry, romance, children’s comedy, and picture books. She’s the sort of writer you can picture getting a pretty intense surprise from if you’re a fan of some of her books and then discover some of the others.
The saddest of her books, however, was Who Killed My Daughter, from 1992. You see, it was nonfiction. Her daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette (from what I can tell no relation to the acting Arquettes), was found murdered in her car in 1989. The case remains unsolved. Duncan wanted to someday write a follow-up, explaining who had killed her daughter, how they were caught, and so forth. Alas, she herself died of unspecified causes five years ago before she was able to do so.
I’m contemplating putting together a book of some of these articles, including more detailed research on the more interesting people; help me afford a book of circus photography for background material by contributing to my Patreon or Ko-fi!
