Chop-Chop the Killer Whore: How It Happened

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I did not sit down one day and decide to write a novel entitled,

Chop-Chop the Killer Whore.

There’s a story behind it. A true story. And the story begins on Sept. 29th, 1958.

On that day, in tiny Wyoming, Illinois, my Aunt Donna was murdered.

She worked in a shoe store and over the lunch hour was minding the shop all by herself

...when a man walked in.

My older sister has told me that my memory of what happened is askew. That I have my facts wrong and the events mixed. I have no doubt she is correct. At the time, I was only four, while she herself was almost nine.

Yet, there are things I will never forget. The memories remain like scar tissue, filmy and pale, but still there, fixed in place forever.

I remember my mother, God bless her, describing how my aunt died – in detail.

I remember that we children were not allowed at the closed-casket funeral and were instead babysat at a house nearby. I remember my sister warning me to say nothing to my cousins.

“They don’t know what happened. They haven’t been told.”

I remember my cousin Mike, my closest playmate then, whispering what he knew…

“My mommy went to meet Jesus.”

I could not yet read, but I knew that was our family on the front page of the newspaper. I could not quite catch the words, but I knew we were the topic of local TV and radio. I didn’t understand what policemen did, but I knew they were big. I knew they were scary. And I knew they had their eyes on us.

Forensic psychologists teach that violent crimes are most typically committed by someone close to the victim, a friend or family member. That’s what everyone thought then too.

But when they couldn’t catch the killer, people locked their doors. In Wyoming, in Toulon, in Kewanee.

Who could it be? Who among us is the monster?

In essence, the fellow was a stranger. A passerby in need of shoes. A random act. With my aunt, aged 25 with two small children, the very personal victim.

It took time, but they got him. He was arrested, tried, and found guilty. He lived the rest of his life in prison.

Of course, the trauma I felt then cannot compare with that of those closest to my aunt: her children, my uncle and my grandparents. I am not suggesting it does.

But while I cannot place a finger on the roots of my humor writing – Insecurity? A craving for attention? What? – the gothic vein that runs through my more serious fiction traces easily.

It leads from that shoe store in Wyoming, Illinois.

So… here we go… writers are supposed to write about something they know. Something that's real to them. My life has not been uneventful. I have lived overseas within another culture for close to half a century.

But what in my life has been more real than my aunt’s murder?

In the mid-1980s, I gave it a try. I was a high school teacher then on the island of Kyushu in southern Japan. It was summer and my wife and I scrambled about, chasing after our two little boys. At night I wrote.

I didn’t get far. Everything clunked – the setting, the crime and especially the characters. These were more than country folk gripped by sudden horror; they were my family. Yet, they came out cartoonish.

I gave up. Thinking…

I could never put this on paper. This needed far more talent than I possessed.

Time rolled by, a half dozen years. In America, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks grabbed top ratings. My mother, God bless her, sent us tapes of all episodes.

By then we lived in Tokyo. I sat on the sofa with my older son, now a film professor in California, and binge watched the videos.

My aunt was not Laura Palmer. There are no similarities. None. Except…

Except for the shock when Laura’s parents first learned of her death. And then the following shock when the news reached her school. Those moments struck chords that hummed all the way back to 1958.

I decided to try again.

This time, I got farther. Aided by that new tool, the Internet, I probed into the days of the crime itself. I reset the murder to Halloween. I enriched the setting. I inserted myself into the story. And…

I stopped. For I’d smacked into the same wall as before. These were not story characters. They were family members. I couldn’t be objective. Once more, I gave up.

Now a lot of time goes by. I become an established writer. I have a column in The Japan Times, with its tens of thousands of subscribers. I publish dozens of short stories and magazine articles. I teach literature at a major Tokyo area university and, like most of my colleagues, put out a textbook or so a year. My seminar for fourth year students focuses on creative writing.

In 2015, The Japan Times needs to trim pages. Newspapers are not selling well anymore and they ask to retire my column. In a way, I am relieved. It had been a tremendous run – 17 years. But topics had become harder and harder to find.

The column had been a major creative outlet and that first summer I grew restless. How to handle my extra time? I had to write something. But what?

Again, I turned to the murder of my aunt.

It hadn’t worked before and it certainly wouldn’t work now. Yet, I amazed myself with my memories. There I was, aged 60, and I could feel anew that savage crime in the heart of tranquility, a murder that yanked a small child into the realm of adults.

And that is how Chop-Chop the Killer Whore began.

For I realized I did not need to write about my aunt nor my family – at all. I only had to capture the shock.

I changed the crime – into something equally heinous. I changed the people and their genders. I changed the setting. I changed every element except one – the trauma. And the story launched itself.

The entire plot came to me during the twenty-minute hike to my local train station.

When I returned home, I began to write. I wrote each evening. And soon every off day. I couldn’t stop.

Along the way, I made myself some rules.

I would leave nothing out.

This was a swing from the hips. It would be as good as I could make it and I wouldn't stop till I was finished. I would give no concern to length. To hell with potential readers. This wasn’t for them. It was for what happened.

I would pay no attention to taboos. Fuck taboos.

We live in a world of Disney tunes, polite sentiments and happy endings. It is the world we hope for, not the world that is. It is cheap veneer plastered across desperate and often gruesome realities.

In the real world, men assault women in shoe stores. They motor off without remorse, wiping their knives on their car seat vinyl.

The legal system? Justice? I don’t know. But life in a prison cell can’t be very wholesome either.

Uh-uh. No taboos. I would write it well. And I would write it raw.

I would not forsake my comic heritage, no matter where the story led.

What can I say? It’s in my bones.

The final rule… I would be different.

I would not follow the endless line of self-published would-be thrillers that plug the Kindle-verse, with their cut-and-paste covers, tag-lines, and plot twists. I would go out of my way to be unique and I would start with my title:

Chop-Chop the Killer Whore.

Offended? That’s what this lady from England told me. She was offended at once.

Well, that was the idea. Sort of. I planned – not to offend – but to be original. As original and provocative as I could be, from the very title to the very end.

When I finally reached that end, around page 1800, I was stunned. I thought I would crack 3000 pages. I couldn’t believe I’d finished so soon.

What I did next was to write it again. From start to finish. Editing, rewriting, reorganizing. I rewrote an 1800-page book thirty times. It was a joy to do so.

Until around 2022 or so and I realized that, yeah, I was done.

I’d never considered readers, except for the editors I'd sought to pick through my prose. But once finished, I thought this:

Chop-Chop should step from my hard drive. Chop-Chop should see the light.

It is really two books, not one. Two full novels, one tucked inside the other.

The first is about the desperate pursuit of Chop-Chop, the killer, across time and distance, and the men and women eager to hunt her down.

The second, inner novel is about Chop-Chop herself, and how she grew from a spoiled child into the kind of person that sensible people would be wiser not to pursue.

I am proud of this woman. Of her mettle. Her scars. Even her licentiousness. Chop-Chop is…

Small and vulnerable. Slender and petite. Often tricked and more often tricky.

She is someone who stands up. And fights back.

My murdered aunt makes a cameo appearance, maybe around page 1200. Chop-Chop meets her in a shoe store – where else? They share a short conversation, from clerk to customer. That’s all.

But in this case, there’s a back story.

From 66 years in the past, I can hear my mother speak, God bless her. I can see her gesture as well. Her words to a four-year old boy, about why the casket had to be closed...

“He slit her throat. From ear to ear.”

Chop-Chop is made of steel stronger than any knife. Her unstated message in that shoe store at page 1200:

“He wouldn’t have done it, if I'd been here, Donna. If I had been here, he’d have never touched you.”

Chop-Chop the Killer Whore is available on Amazon.

Alternative Cover. One of many.

© Thomas Noah Wood

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