Anatomy of a Bestseller, with Spoilers: Where the Crawdads Sing

I was in my local bookstore in Northwestern Germany when I saw Der Gesang der Flusskrebses, in other words, The Song of the Crayfish, otherwise known as Where the Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens' 2018 surprise bestseller.What a romantic cover, I thought: a girl in a canoe paddling off into the sunset, surrounded by blurbs like "unforgettable." Snatching a copy off the shelf, I sank into an armchair, only to hear another woman rhapsodize: "It is so wonderful!" she said. "You will love it!" I was set for a love story and predisposed to one in North Carolina, since my father's family hails from there. 

A beautiful, illiterate, exploited underdog with all the odds stacked against her learns to read, becomes a brilliant naturalist, and finds true love after single-handedly fending off a dangerous, vengeful boyfriend. The whole point turns out to be this: she gets away with his murder! That's the surprising twist at the end. 

Because you hate the guy--and since none would believe the "marsh girl's" testimony against that of the handsome football hero--you're glad she did him in. With careful planning, she lures him to his doom, because that's the only way to prevent him from stalking and destroying her. 

It's not enough. I kept reading through the murder trial wondering who could possibly have killed Chase. I was looking forward to methods and motives. How about the man who loves the marsh girl and wants to protect her? But he only finds out after her death that she actually murdered the guy. A quiet survivalist kills her predator, and everyone cheers.

Not to forget structure: my edition is 368 pages long. Smack-dab in the middle, about page 182 and continuing on for five-ish pages we get various crises: the heroine is gulled by the wicked footballer who pretends to love her. Her true love and she are, for reasons not interesting enough to enter, on the outs. A perepeteia: our heroine sees her footballer's parents, suspects she won't be introduced. By page 194, the reader knows she won't and by page 208 she knows how deeply he has betrayed her.  Suspense is sustained by switching timelines every chapter. By the end, you're just dying to know whether our young heroine will convicted for a crime we think she couldn't possibly have committed; all else is whodunit.

 Many a bestseller--and TV movie--has a twist in or near the middle. Go for it, writers of bestsellers.

Maybe the book's success arises from everyone's loneliness; during COVID, we all felt isolation, and the heroine's isolation was complete. A seven-year-old child trading mussels she digs up for food! Abandoned by her mother, her father, her siblings--until one brother finally comes back. It's an old American story: a loner in the wilderness carves out not just survival but prosperity. Then there's suspense: it's "killing me--I hope it will last!" Oscar Wilde said. I wanted to find out who killed Chase, and was mildly disappointed when the marsh girl turned out to be the culprit. Perhaps the point was that she lived by the ways of animals--eat or be eaten--so had no guilt and not much memory of the murder. She wasn't gleeful about it as far as the reader knows; once it was over, she was done with it and happy to move on. She saved a poem she'd written about luring the guy to his death and a necklace she'd given him, but one feels those things were there only so that her husband (and her readers) could finally discover who the murderer was. I wanted the murder to have a meaning, possibly because I just finished Crime and Punishment, in which murder is drenched with meaning after meaning. Comparisons unfair, of course--but it does seem as though murder should leave some footprint, however faint, in the murderer's brain--not remain forgotten.