The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Before You Knew My Name: A Novel by Jacqueline Bublitz

Episode Date: September 26, 2022

Before You Knew My Name: A Novel by Jacqueline Bublitz Winner of Crime Debut and Readers’ Choice Awards—Sisters in Crime “A brave and timely novel.” —Clare Mackintosh, internationally bestselling author of Hostage This is not just another novel about a dead girl. Two women—one alive, one dead—are brought together in the dark underbelly of New York City to solve a tragic murder. When she arrived in New York on her eighteenth birthday carrying nothing but $600 cash and a stolen camera, Alice Lee was looking for a fresh start. Now, just one month later, she is the city’s latest Jane Doe. She may be dead but that doesn’t mean her story is over. Meanwhile, Ruby Jones is also trying to reinvent herself. After travelling halfway around the world, she’s lonelier than ever in the Big Apple. Until she stumbles upon a woman’s body by the Hudson River, and suddenly finds herself unbreakably tied to the unknown dead woman. Alice is sure Ruby is the key to solving the mystery of her short life and tragic death. Ruby just wants to forget what she saw…but she can’t seem to stop thinking about the young woman she found. If she keeps looking, can she give this unidentified Jane Doe the ending and closure she deserves? A “heartbreaking, beautiful, and hugely important novel” (Rosie Walsh, New York Times bestselling author), Before You Knew My Name doesn’t just wonder whodunnit—it also asks who was she? And what did she leave behind?

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep in keep your hands arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss i'm your host chris voss uh the chris voss show you may have seen me before we've been here for 13 years but unless you're new i'm your host uh at least for you know the time being as, until they fire me or something.

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I don't know. Anyway, guys, welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Thanks again for another installment of the Chris Voss Show podcast and expanding your brain or whatever it was they said in the intro I paid for from Fiverr. Go to YouTube.com, Forge says Chris Voss, hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com, Forge says Chris Voss, hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com, Forge says Chris Voss. Go to our big LinkedIn group over there, 138,000 people or something like that.

Join up on that thing in the LinkedIn newsletter and all the places we are across social media. Once again, we have an amazing author on the show. She's the author of the new book, Before You Knew My Name. It's a novel that comes out November 1st, 2022. Oh my gosh, we already got books coming out in November. It's getting to be the end of the year. In fact, I think the Halloween things are out. Jacqueline Bublitz is on the show with us today.

She's going to be talking about her amazing new book, telling us about it and some of the other work that she's done. She is a writer feminist arachnophobe who lives between melbourne australia and her hometown on the west coast of new new zealand's north island she wrote her award-winning debut novel before you knew my name after spending a summer in new york where she hung around morgues in the dark corners of city parks and the human psyche. We've all seen those dark corners. She did it far too often.

And welcome to the show, Jacqueline. How are you? Good morning from New Zealand. I am great. Thank you. Thank you. I had my coffee. I'm excited to be here.

Awesome, Sauce. It's wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your dot com's wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you for coming. Congratulations on the new book. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Yeah, I am nice and easy. It's Jacqueline, I don't know about the spelling, but JacquelineBubblets.com is my website in progress. And on socials, I'm actually RightRock, as in W-R-I-T-E-R-O-C-K, Right Rock.

There you go. And is this your first novel? It is my first novel, my debut. Awesome sauce. Yeah, I'm still getting my head around it, actually. And you're a number one international bestseller. So there you go. That's always nice.

That's probably the thing that's hardest to get my head around at the moment, but I'll take it. There you go. There you go. There you go. So what motivated you to write this book? We kind of heard a little bit about morgues and different things. Tell us more. Sure. Well, I was living – I'm a New Zealander, but I lived most of my 20s and 30s in Melbourne, Australia.

And back in 2014, there had been a murder on my street. Murder, you say? Yeah, murder. It's an endless source, unfortunately, of inspiration for many of us authors. And so, I should say, the novel deals with the connection that's formed between a young murder victim and the woman who finds her body. You know, the jogger, the dog walker, the fisherman who they usually get one line in the newspaper, you know, that the body was found by a jogger, and then we don't hear anything else about them. So back in Melbourne, 2014, there'd been a horrific murder, although, you know, murder is horrific. But this had been on my street.

A young woman was walking to work in the early hours of the morning. She worked at a bakery and she was chased into my local park. This very busy thoroughfare into the main central business district of Melbourne, chased into the park, murdered, and her body was found just a couple of hours later by a jogger running a track that I would, with best intentions, try to run as often as I could. And on that particular Sunday morning, I didn't go for a run, but I couldn't stop thinking about what if it had been me that had come across young Renee Lau's body.

I was used to, and I think a fair few listeners would, people watching would identify, I was used to seeing myself as a potential, as a Renee Lau, the young woman who was murdered. I walked that street all hours of the day and night. It was just before Uber was as popular as it's become. And so I was used to thinking about my safety and, you know, that it's someone walking too close behind me. But I had never thought about being the person who would, you know, what kind of trauma you'd go through if you were on the other side and you actually found the body. So that's where the genesis or that's the origin story of Before You before you knew my name uh but it was 2014 so it took quite a while um for it to become what it is now oh wow so you've been working on it for quite

some time then well yeah so i wasn't a um i wasn't a writer i mean i'm as in a professional writer it wasn't anything to do with my day job i worked in um online sales and marketing and uh so this was very much a um labor of love um something that i would pick up and put down there wasn't as i like to say there wasn't anybody waiting for this story there wasn't any kind of publisher or agent or deadline it was just me uh and this what would it be like um that wouldn't um wouldn't leave me alone? And I think also it was a way of my sort of like grieving for this young woman. I didn't know her, but there'd been a spate of similar murders in Melbourne after a relatively, I guess, peaceful period.

There'd been a few of those types of murders, and that was my way of working through, I say grief, but also anger and frustration about the prevalence of that kind of crime. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for

leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show. And be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. Yeah. I mean out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com now back to the show yeah i mean there's there's a horror to it and there's life that ends and and uh loved ones that

are affected and uh yeah it's a it's a horrible way to uh to pass away um so it's not just a whodunit uh this is kind of interesting from the byline. It asks, who was she and what did she leave behind? Tell us more about what that meaning is. Sure. So I think of myself as an accidental crime writer, a very lucky accidental crime writer, in that when I started What Became Before You Knew My Name, it was very much about exploring this relationship between the victim and the person who found her body. And the way I decided to tell that story was to have it told by Alice, who is our dead girl, not a spoiler. We know from the first page that she's dead. And so she actually narrates

from beyond the grave. We go backwards and forwards. So we start knowing that something terrible has happened to her. And then we go backwards, we go forwards in it. So it's a book that really centers the victim and not just Alice, but then the people around her that are impacted. And it very deliberately de-centers or takes I see as sort of some of the power of the perpetrator. At the same time, there is a mystery to solve. There are lots of red herrings in there about whodunit. So it's not, that's why we say it's not just a whodunit. It's a who was she as much as anything else.

That's really amazing. I mean, that's a great way to take it from that perspective. And I imagine before you knew My Name is the title. Now, does it interplay from her being most of the narrative, or does it flip between her and the person who found her body? Yeah, so Ruby Jones is the woman from Australia who found the body, and she's 36. She's twice the age of Alice, who's 18, when she dies. And they're really equal and opposites in a lot of ways.

The entire story is narrated by Alice. However, she picks up threads of Ruby's story. So there's a little bit of artistic license there in that she can sort of see backwards and forwards and has a different perspective on life and death from wherever she's telling her story from after her murder. So we learn as much about Ruby, this woman who comes to – they both come to New York City on the same day. They're both running away from something, and then they find each other.

They sound very kind of similar. They're both on a running away journey and trying to find each other. And then I imagine maybe sometimes finding oneself is finding through other people, I suppose. I don't know. I think that's pretty much what we are sort of striving to achieve when we create these characters and we throw them into these terrible situations and also want to say sorry to them.

I wanted to say sorry to both of those, both of my characters, many, many times throughout the process of writing the book. Now, I think it's set in the, I'm quoting here, dark underbelly of New York City. Well, I love New York, and I see it mostly as bright and shiny. And it was a beautiful summer of 2015, and I came, well, spring and summer. I managed to spend roughly six months in New York. I say researching, but I was mostly trying to get tickets to Hamilton and following Hillary Clinton around to like where she was launching

her campaign. So, but yes, it's set in New York. It does deal with, you know, obviously some of the less pleasant aspects of life in a big city and the anonymity, which initially works in these women's favour because they are running away. But then what happens when you sort of get chewed up and spat out and there's nobody looking for you? But no, I don't find New York dark,

and I didn't spend a lot of time in the so-called underbelly. Okay, there you go. So did you go? You went into morgues evidently? Well, I hung around. So the key there with my bio is hanging around or lurking is a word that we would use over here at least. Because I didn't have any credentials. So I couldn't show up and say, oh, excuse me.

Like I've got this idea for the story. I was wondering what it would be like if I could just come to. So I had met a very helpful law enforcement guy. I'd met him and he told me, I'll go down to like first half. Like, you'll be fine. I'm like, I don't really think he thought, you know, too much about that. So I just went in. So we went, you know, that whole Bellevue kind of like very evocative down there.

And then I went to the very austere um sort of lobby of the what's the office of the chief medical examiner and I just stood in the lobby for as long as I could without sort of raising suspicion and which turns out isn't that long because I think I did get asked to move along but I just watched people come in and going and um you know took in kind of the I can see it now and um so I haven't been able to get back because of, you know, because of COVID to, so I couldn't even come back and like fact check that I'd had these things. Right.

But it works well because my character Ruby who finds the body, she doesn't have any credentials. She doesn't have any, the part of the point of her story is you play this integral role in, you discover the body, you kind of, you play this integral role in you discover the body. You kind of begin this crime story, but then you're completely removed from it. You don't have any kind of – you're no longer a witness after you've described what you found and saw.

And so for Ruby, there's a scene in the book that's very meta or very method, I suppose, where she goes and stands in the lobby of the morgue and wants to go down but doesn't have any permission either. Wow. There you go. There you go. Morgues. That's one place I try and stay the hell out of.

Well, I wonder now if they were to – I know I'm working on my second book and another idea for a third, and I wonder now if someone would be able to arrange it for me, agent, publisher, somebody to talk. But would I want to? Has it been a lovely excuse that I've had no permission because I'm not actually sure how I'd cope with it. I did spend a lot of time talking with people who work in that environment,

so it's not completely, um, you know, in my head. That's awesome. I mean, it's, it's,

uh, I, you know, it's the research you have to do for the book to, so you understand, you know, what a Jane Doe or a John Doe goes through when they're murdered. And,

uh, you know, it's, uh, it's crazy. Um, what, what are some of the other things that people might,

uh, you can tease out on the book because of course with novels we can't give away the ending no and there's such a big spoiler in terms of you know letting people know straight up front that we know that Alice Lee is that she's dead and that she's been murdered

and so I do try to keep most of the rest of the book close to my heart although I love speaking to keep most of the rest of the book close to my heart, although I love speaking to people after they've read it, you know, just to talk about what can I say. So there's a group. So Ruby's quite traumatized by finding the body,

and she ends up stumbling across a group of people, a small group in New York called the Death Club. They know it's a bit of a silly name, but it stuck, as it did with the author. And Death Club is made up of a group of people who have all had some kind of proximity to death. Like one woman works in a morgue, another lost her daughter in an accident, and another himself had a near-death experience.

And they are an unlikely little group who meet at different cocktail bars around New York City or around Manhattan mostly, and they talk about death. It's really philosophical. The thing that sort of changed their lives is death. And so Death Club, Ruby is invited to join Death Club. And so we have a lot of, I guess, not your average crime book. I suppose it's quite a lot of, although what is an average crime book?

These days it's such a wonderfully broad medium. But they meet, they chat about death. Each meeting they get drunk and talk about death. Is it like Fight Club where you kill somebody and no one's allowed to talk about it? That's book two. That's book two. That would be a great title for a book if I'm not blowing your title already. Death Club.

Death Club. Yeah, well, they were a lot of fun. And I lost – They were a lot of fun. They were. They were a lot of fun. They were, they were. And then I lost, I lost my, this is, I'm laughing now because, but I lost my dad while I was putting the, like the finishing touches on the edit that would go in and eventually find

me an agent and publisher. And my beautiful dad, Johnny B and death club. I went back and turned some of those conversations into these really, well, for me at least, feels like the conversations that I wish that I was able to have after he passed away. And so they're not, it's not, I think, hopefully poignant rather than like maudlin or, you know, too serious. It's actually just kind of like what would I want to sort of sit down and talk about that

didn't make other people who weren't going through that uncomfortable and there we have death club and then they you know as often happens in a book they end up serving quite the purpose in terms of the pluses as well wow there you go it's interesting how you know we look we can learn so many great stories from life and lessons and and spin them into other things and you know sometimes the negative things uh turn out to be positive in some way or we can we can put them as positive as it were uh is there you mentioned arachnophobia in your uh bio is there any arachnophobia uh in your book? No. You're asked to write a bio. It's very... It's horrible.

It ruins vacations. I can't go camping. Living in Australia. I'm sure that people are well aware of the size of the spiders in Australia. Oh, that's right. A good 20-some years in a country where the spiders are as big know, like as big as my head.

Not really. That's an exaggeration. Maybe as big as my head. Not really. I've seen those spiders. They're like small animals. Some are like a small horse. Not even vaguely terrifying.

They're terrifying. And they're mostly harmless. But, yeah, so when you're in the position I was in around writing a bio and I'm like, well, what do I say? Like I just – I wrote – I don't mean to play down the fact that I wrote a book. But I'm like, I wrote this book. What do I know to be true about myself? Well, I only really sort of know a couple of things. And arachnophobe is like right up there in terms of what you need to know about me if you're going to spend time with me so i can't blame you i tease a lot of my friends in australia

about the the like everything there seems to be dangerous and everything poisonous and kill you way too large for its size i mean even the koalas i think have chlamydia so i mean they're they're not even cute. They're either wasted on their gum leaves or whatever. I've heard that they get stoned and fall out of trees and stuff. Fortunately, they're very cute. So they get away with all sorts of bad behavior. Don't get me started on the Vegemite in Australia either.

I tease my Australian friends a lot about that. I don't mind Vegemite, but it always gives me a laugh when people take, Americans in particular, take a big scoop. I'm like, oh no, no, okay. That's what I did when they sent me some. I took a big old slab and put on some bread. And then, yeah,

that was bad. So it's been wonderful. Anything you base the characters on in your book, from your life or a movie star? Some people think of a movie star when they make a book. The character of Alice, she came to me. It's one of those moments, and it's never happened again, and it probably never will. I'm very sad about that, but she came to me pretty much fully formed one afternoon.

I was in, I was on the upper West side in New York city in this little studio thinking like, who are you? And honestly, it was like, she came and sat down next to me and there's a, I don't talk about this often,

but there's a scene in the movie fame, you know, the old school night, 1982, with Irene Cara, and she's this, like, wonderfully confident young woman who's, you know, wanting to be a star, and then she gets put into a situation with a photographer who's taking some pictures of her and it's not above board. And I'd seen that when I was really little and it really traumatised me

because it was, you know, I understood. So for anyone who hasn't, I'm just assuming because I just watched it again the other day on an aeroplane, but anyone who hasn't seen Fame, she goes to get some headshots because she wants to be a star and the photographer's actually a pornographer and he, like, to like, you don't see much, which I'm grateful for, but convinces her to sort of take her top off. the most confident, aware, savvy person and still find yourself in a situation, especially when you're that young, where you're being exploited.

And so Alice came to me very much thanks to Irene Cara in that scene in Fame. And then she just sort of took off and told me what she wanted to say. Those are the best characters from one of the writers that we interviewed i mean this just comes to you fully developed and off you go um yeah i never saw the movie fame but now i have that song running through yeah i know i'm just doing sort of jazz heads it's really they had a um and on i was on a flight recently

and they had a whole new y playlist, and so I chose Fame. And I was like, oh, yeah, that was a really dark movie for me to be watching at five years old. Really dark, but it did give me my love of New York City. There you go. Along with Annie, which is slightly lighter. And then it did give me Alice Lee. So thank you, Fame. There you go.

That song is going to be stuck in my head all day long my gift to you it's one of those songs that we'll just catch did you ever get to see Hamilton when you were in New York I did I got to see Hamilton and I didn't understand all what was going on

and I left and went to Sardis the famous watering hole, as we would say here, the bar afterwards, and I cried. It's like I didn't understand. And I know I saw something brilliant, but I saw the original cast. Yeah, it was 2015. And so then I listened to the soundtrack and then, you know,

fully understood and will forever regret that I didn't do that first. So I had more of an idea. I mean, I know some American history, but obviously it's a very different take on me. But it was brilliant. I loved it, but I had really, you know, genuinely no idea for a while that what was going on. Some people get really angry when I admit that.

It was like, you saw the original cast. And I'm like, yeah, I did. Sorry. There you go. There you go. Well, I mean, sometimes you get it later. I mean, there's a lot of movies I have to watch like three or four times. I think The Godfather I've watched like 30 freaking times.

And every now and then I'm just like like three or four times. I think a Godfather I've watched like 30 freaking times. And I, every now and then I just like, Oh, there you go. Well, uh, congratulations on the new book. Uh, give us your.com one more time.

So people can, uh, find out more about you on the interwebs. Yeah. It's just Jacqueline Boblitz.com. We've got this. There you go. And thank you very much, Jacqueline for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for.com. There you go. And thank you very much, Jacqueline, for coming on.

We really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. There you go. And keep having fun out there in New Zealand, Australia, and stay away from those big spiders, of course. I will. Thank you. And everyone, order up the book wherever fine books are sold.

Remember, stay out of those alleyway bookstores. You might need a tetanus shot or you might get mugged if you go into there. So go to fine bookstores and order up before you knew my name a novel coming out November 1st 2022 so there's time to order up for your book club go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss go to

youtube.com for just Chris Voss all those places we are on the inner tubes in the sky that the kids are playing on social media thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time