Growing up in suburban Detroit, Deborah Goodrich Royce was around 12 years old when she learned about the specter that hung over her family: when her mother was the same age, her childhood best friend was violently murdered in Pittsburgh in 1948. The case was never solved. This, compounded by another family revelation, catalyzed her fascination with secrets, trauma, and the power they wield many years and generations later. Even now, living in Riverside, Connecticut, her life and career in entertainment paint a picture shaded with a penchant for the unknown. These themes, and the crime itself, provided her the inspiration for her third novel, Reef Road.
Royce categorizes her novels as “identity thrillers,” mysteries that probe at the turmoil that shapes us. In Reef Road, two disparate characters, a middle-aged, hermetic writer and a dissatisfied housewife, both harboring familial secrets, succumb to their worst instincts while under Covid-19 lockdown in Palm Beach, Florida. While Royce believes her own family bears little resemblance to these two wounded female protagonists, the real-life murder indelibly altered her and her mother’s perception of the world. The novel’s first-person narrator, dubbed “The Writer,” describes this in the book as the Black Swan effect, based on the writings of statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
Taleb’s area of study is randomness, probability, and uncertainty. He uses the example of a black swan to illustrate the fact that improbable events and realities pop up to surprise us just when we think we have it all figured out. The example goes as follows: Hundreds of years ago, Europeans were familiar with swans, and they knew what swans looked like. Swans were white…And then those Europeans traveled out into the big, wide world, eventually landing on the continent of Australia. Where they found black swans. And, just like that, the impossible—a black swan—was not impossible at all. It was merely something that a particular group of people happened not to have seen before. But—and this is a big but—the book concentrates on the extreme impact of rare and unpredictable outlier events. Because there is always an impact.
After majoring in languages with a dance minor at Lake Erie College in Ohio, Royce moved to New York to pursue a dance career. She quickly turned to acting in the ’80s and moved to Los Angeles, landing roles in the soap opera All My Children and various film and TV projects. In a canny twist of fate, she played Ted Bundy’s wife in a television miniseries in 1986, while the killer was awaiting execution. True crime as a genre wasn’t as pervasive as it is today, but Royce believes society has always harbored a collective compulsive taste for media anchored in others’ pain.
“When I was a kid in the ’70s, Ted Bundy was in the zeitgeist. In the ’80s, there was great hubbub around the files of Jack the Ripper,” she says. “Doing this miniseries that I did with Mark Harmon, and playing the woman who married [Bundy], required a delve into the psyche of women who fall in love with or become obsessed with criminals. I think people have always had a kind of negative attraction to terrible things that happened to other people. You want to figure it out. You want to figure out what you can do to avoid having that thing happen to you.”
When acting lost its luster while raising her two children with her first husband, they moved to Paris in 1992, where she worked as a film reader. The next year, she became a story editor at Miramax Films in New York, working under a producer with many secrets of his own. But it would take a shattering divorce, a new marriage, and a relocation to Connecticut for her to meet the friend who officially set her on the novelist’s path: Gene Wilder. Willy Wonka himself frequented a local movie theater Royce and her second husband had restored, and he stated rather than asked her, “You’re a writer, aren’t you?” And what else are you supposed to do when Gene Wilder insists you write, than write?
Royce penned Reef Road while under pandemic lockdown herself in Florida—Reef Road is a real street, and the beach in the prologue is a real beach. The narrative oscillates between chapters of The Writer’s internal musings and the housewife Linda’s close third-person point of view. Both women appear at first to lean into familiar tropes of women in true crime narratives: victims and observers. The Writer has embraced isolation after a volatile childhood with a mother who, like Royce’s mother, lost a childhood friend to murder; Linda, whose chapters are titled “The Wife,” has fallen out of love with her domineering husband but stays for her young children. How these women eventually engage with each other articulates Royce’s interest in the inheritance of secrets and psychiatric burdens.
“I've become very interested in this concept of epigenetics and ‘What do we carry of trauma that’s not our own?’ And how do we shake it off? Life has proven to me that everybody has secrets,” she says, “and family systems are so fascinating at secret-keeping. Ted Bundy has a daughter out there in the world. The genetic burden of that conferred trauma has to be enormous.”
Kirkus Reviews awarded Reef Road the Kirkus Star and named it one of our 100 Best Books of 2023: “Royce is a wicked good writer. This is meta with a vengeance, a story about telling a story, and fascinating for students of that stuff. Another clever trick is that characters that we have a bias to trust, like Linda, may not be so trustworthy…the gears of this clever plot mesh like those of a Swiss watch.” Royce, as both a reader and a writer, loves a good plot twist. Her nonlinear narrative style lends itself well to obfuscating the depth of both women’s darkness, as well as how far and wide the consequences of our choices can manifest.
Royce also hosts the Rhode Island-based Ocean House Author Series and writes a quarterly column for “Hey Rhody” magazine. Reef Road, which she reiterates is “very meta, very self-referential,” has been received positively since its January release. While it might have made a compelling nonfiction book, Royce believes the novel form, taking notes from her acting and editing past, was the best way to convey the full scope of the crime’s reverberating grief.
“In fiction, because the possibilities are infinite, the job of the writer is to curtail [the story], to put a box around it. In a parallel way, COVID was a very useful time period in which to set it, because it confined the characters. I wanted to explore,” she says, “a very noir storyline, in which people are dark and situations are hopeless and the woman is up to something no good. And the soap opera genre is famous for cliffhangers, which I think is very useful for the pacing of a thriller. So there was the box. And the box was crazy-making for both of these women, who each went very far over the edge.”
The book has also connected her to others impacted by the aftershocks of that crime, now 75 years old. In May, a journalist investigating the crime for a Pittsburgh magazine contacted Royce. His mother, as it turns out, had dated the brother of the murdered girl, who was previously considered a suspect. His article is set to come out by the end of the year.
Amelia Williams is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.
