When judges of a competition for debut crime novels leafed through the pages of Cuts Through Bone they were impressed with the tale’s authenticity.
Unlikely star: the winner of the debut crime fiction competition turned out to be convicted murderer Alaric Hunt (left), pictured here in 2013, and his novel Cuts Through Bone
But when the Private Eye Writers of America panel decided to award their US$10,000 prize to its unknown author, Alaric Hunt, they did not realise they were reading the work of a convicted killer.
An interested publisher rang the Southern California number Hunt had submitted with his manuscript and got through to his cousin, Jade Reed, who had posted his novel to the competition’s organisers.
‘He’s not available. He’s in an institution,’ said Ms Reed.
‘Like a prison?’ asked Toni Kirkpatrick, an editor at Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
‘Yes.’
‘Will he be out soon?’ came the reply.
Ms Reed paused: ‘Well, he’s there indefinitely.’
Hunt, 44, has lived more than half his life behind bars. He last saw the outside world when he was 19.
In 1988 he was convicted of killing a 23-year-old student, Joyce Austin, in Clemson, South Carolina.
He is now in a maximum-security facility 180 miles away in the small town of Bishopville.
Ms Austin died of smoke inhalation from a fire started by Hunt’s older brother, Jason. The brothers planned to disctract the emergency services while they robbed a jewellery shop nearby. Jason wanted to go to music school in Southern California and needed the money to do so.
Six weeks later the police arrested Alaric and Jason for Joyce’s murder, and for robbery, conspiracy and several counts of arson. The spoils of their theft turned out to be women’s rings worth only US$200 in total.
The brothers were sentenced to life with no parole for at least 30 years.
Alaric Hunt, who after finishing at secondary school was found to have an IQ of 137, has immersed himself in literature while inside.
Every day he works in the prison library, where he has discovered authors such as Ernest Hemingway, the Greek and the Roman philosophers and the science fiction masters who wowed him as a boy and inspired him to write his own stories.
It was also in the prison library that he saw a competition advertised – the contest sponsored by Minotaur, an imprint of St Martin’s Press. The prize money caught his eye – a US$10,000 (£6,000) advance and a guaranteed publishing contract for the book – three years ago.
He wrote Cuts Through Bone in nine months in sessions between his prison duties – five to write the first draft in longhand and another four months for a rewrite.
The 320-page novel tells the story a military veteran wrongfully accused of his girlfriend’s murder.
Middle-aged detective Clayton Guthrie, teams up with Rachel Vasquez, the inquisitive teenage daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, to investigate the crime.
The book is set in New York, which Hunt has never visited. He said he pieced together knowledge of the city from watching episodes of the popular Manhattan-based detective drama, Law and Order, various novels set in New York, and a map of the city’s boroughs dating for 1916.
Unlike some other states, South Carolina has no law to prevent prisoners profiting from such work.
Hunt’s publishers, Minotaur, stress that Cuts Through Bone book is not based on the author’s own crime.
But Frances Austin, the mother of the Hunt brothers’ victim, told The New York Times she was incredulous to learn he had written the book. ‘He caused my daughter’s death, and now he’s writing a book about it,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe this.’
The book has received mixed reviews. ‘Sometimes, a crime novel grabs you on the first page with its plot. Sometimes, it’s the writing. Rarely is it the author’s background. But Alaric Hunt hits the trifecta in his debut,’ wrote the critic for the Richmond Times–Dispatch in Virginia.
But the Publishers Weekly reviewer was less impressed. ‘Overblown prose (‘dawn broke, like an egg yolk bleeding yellow into a dark pan’) doesn’t help an unremarkable plot.’
Reflecting on his crime, Hunt told The New York Times: ‘What haunts me is not seeing beyond what I wanted, and casually risking others. I killed Joyce Austin, and I killed my brother and myself. There’s a hole there that can’t ever fill up.’
He hopes to earn parole when he is eligible to, but that day is still five years away. ‘I’m afraid to choke on wistfulness,’ he said. ‘That has been the fate of many a prisoner. I pass them each day, still shuffling and muttering with their hands full of hope.’