Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz review – more than a gripping whodunnit
Two women arrive in New York on the same day, both determined to change their lives in a city famous for new beginnings. Weeks later, one is dead and the other is reeling from discovering her brutalised body – and becomes obsessed with solving the murder.
The debut novel of Melbourne writer Jacqueline Bublitz, Before You Knew My Name, is essentially a crime novel, but that label feels reductive here. The narrative is more complex than a whodunnit, traversing romance, philosophy, feminism, politics and inequality.
The story is told through the charmingly naive gaze of Alice Lee, an 18-year-old from Wisconsin who is struggling to forge a life for herself after her mother commits suicide. Embroiled in an ill-fated romance, she runs away to New York, with just a stolen camera and a few hundred dollars to make a fresh start. But as the reader is informed within the first pages of the novel, Alice has only weeks left to live.
Related: Jacqueline Bublitz on bringing the dead girl back to life: ‘I didn’t set out to write a crime novel’
Ruby, an Australian, also escaped to New York, after an affair with an engaged colleague. On a stormy day, she is running alongside the Hudson River when she finds the half-naked, bloody body; Alice’s spirit attaches itself to Ruby and tells us the rest of the story.
It’s an ambitious debut, which sets out to challenge the structure and conventions of the crime genre – and achieves that, with only minor compromises. While the opening chapters, which focus on Alice’s past, are engaging, the character verges on saccharine whimsy – until her death, when the narrative shifts: the uglier details of her life begin to seep through, showing cracks in her reliability.
Through this, Bublitz deftly highlights how society’s power imbalances shape the lives of women. Despite her optimism, tenacity and drive, Alice is powerless in the face of a stranger’s violence; Ruby too, from the manipulation and lies of the men in her life. The men aren’t stereotypes either: there are good men, complicated men, inconsistent men and bad men. Bublitz explores what drives their violence with attention to its complexity – ranging from the manipulation of Alice by her former teacher to the lies Ruby’s cheating lover tells, to the narcissism of the villain who ultimately connects them both.
The crime itself might read as standard for the genre – rape and murder by a stranger in a park – but this is a strategic choice from Bublitz. It’s the type of gendered violence that plays out in the press, and its aftermath in the novel is eerily true to life: a media cycle that’s characterised by ebbs and flows in attention. Ruby’s quest to solve Alice’s murder is a race against the clock of public interest, before the funding and enthusiasm for finding her murderer runs out.
Alongside this narrative, Ruby falls into a “death club”: a group of people who have each had a brush with death and who are obsessed with questions of human mortality and purpose. Through their discussions – vividly brought to life as though you’re a fly on the wall, listening in – Bublitz unpacks the vulnerability of human life and the fears that dog so many of us.
The characters at times feel a bit over-engineered: Alice is the victim of her father’s abandonment, her mother’s suicide, a teacher’s sexual predation, and eventually murder; her landlord/benefactor in New York is an eccentric old man who lives in an opulent apartment where he cares for numerous dogs and lavishes Alice with gifts and money with no ulterior motives. But the plot doesn’t feel unbelievable.
Instead, Bublitz invests us in the lives of these two women, which drives the narrative forward with all the suspense and tension we expect from crime fiction – but with complex characters and themes that linger for longer.
• Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz is out now through Allen & Unwin
