At the Intersection of Fiction and Life: Creating Keye Street

Editor's Note: Amanda Kyle Williams is the author of The Stranger You Seek, The Stranger in the Room, and Don’t Talk to Strangers. Williams is currently at work on her next Keye Street thriller. Here, she stops by Biographile to talk about how life sometimes informs fiction.

It was a freezing Thanksgiving evening in North Georgia. I was driving back to Atlanta where I live after a family dinner with my brother, his son Kyle, his wife, Janice, and his daughter Anna, who had been adopted from China as an infant and had learned her English in the rural South. This gorgeous Asian child sounded like Elly May Clampett. I was so charmed by how undeniably Chinese and how deeply Southern my niece was, it nearly knocked me off my chair.

I was thinking on the way home that night about what it would be like to grow up looking different than the neighbor’s kids in the South. Would that even matter now? I grew up feeling a little outside the circle because of a learning disability. But I’d grown up white. How different might Anna’s South be from mine?

I pulled over on the shoulder on I-75 and found a pen and a piece of paper and jotted down a line that would appear a few years later in the first Keye Street thriller, The Stranger You Seek. “I have the distinction of looking like what they still call a damn foreigner in most parts of Georgia and sounding like a hick everywhere else in the world.”

As soon as I heard that voice in my head, the voice I would name Keye Street, the voice I’d been hoping for, waiting for, praying for, I knew it was strong enough and perhaps snarky enough to drive the book and the series I’d been dreaming about. The stars had aligned, it seemed. I’ve heard writers say it happens that way sometimes. But I wasn’t buying it. I had struggled and fought for every word I’d ever written till then. I had tried and failed to create characters that felt real. But that night, the clouds parted and my Chinese-American, Krispy Kreme-eating, recovering alcoholic, former FBI criminal investigative analyst with the southern accent dropped out of the sky and landed in my lap – damaged, funny, smart, obsessive, and fully formed. I began the first book in the series in earnest the very next day. Perhaps the happiest day of my life was hearing that Bantam Books liked Keye Street, too, and wanted to see her in print as badly as I did.

As I write this, the paperback edition of the second book in the series, Stranger in the Room, is about to be released, and I have all the quivering excitement I had at first seeing Keye Street come to life on the page. And the pride every author must feel at seeing his/her name on the cover.

I’d wanted to tell the story in Stranger in the Room for a long time, a story of addiction and love and the tricks they can both play on you. A story of family ties, of murder, of a stalker’s twisted obsessions, and the dark secrets at a North Georgia crematory.

I hope you enjoy Keye’s second adventure as much as I enjoyed writing it.

And, by the way, my niece Anna, to whom I’ve dedicated the series, is still not old enough to read the kind of crime fiction her aunt Amanda writes. And it appears she is not terribly impressed by the whole thing. She’ll be a teenager soon. She has more important matters to contemplate. Will she love this hard-charging, cocked-and-ready-to-fire kickass woman she inspired, the one who struggles with her own demons – addiction, self-esteem, inappropriate laughter, and a potty mouth? We won’t know the answer to that question until she is much older.