Washington-raised author Sarah Crouch thrived as a professional marathon runner until crippling postpartum insomnia sidelined her athletic dreams. To cope, she turned to her second love: writing. The result is “Middletide,” a mystery novel out on June 11 from Atria Books.
In this atmospheric debut, a small Pacific Northwest town is shocked by the suspicious death of Dr. Erin Landry, found hanging on a secluded bit of land inaccessible at high tide. All clues point to reclusive writer Elijah Leith: The body was found on his property and the death mirrors details outlined in his failed novel. After years in San Francisco, Elijah has recently returned home to fictional Point Orchards to mourn both his father and his career, hoping to reconnect with his first love, Nakita, an Indigenous artist who still lives on the nearby reservation.
In “Middletide,” Crouch revisits the forested landscape of her childhood, spent in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. The author, who grew up in a small town near Vancouver, Wash., has lived away for 13 years now, but “setting the book there was a no-brainer,” she said. “Those woods still feel like home today.” Crouch deftly captures the moody essence of Western Washington’s evergreen terrain and misty fog. “Middletide” is an intriguing whodunit complicated by a messy love triangle and themes of grief and desire.
Crouch recently discussed her debut with The Seattle Times over Zoom. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you come to novel writing?
I didn’t seriously consider writing a novel until I was about 25 years old, five years into my professional distance running career. I was so burned out and my coach said, “Take some time to do something else.” You always hear that statistic that, of the people who start writing a novel, only 2% or 3% ever finish it, and I wondered, do I have this sort of stamina? So I did it. And that [manuscript] was not any good and will never be published, but I was hooked by the novel-writing process. Over the next decade, I wrote nine manuscripts and “Middletide” is the one that finally broke through. Writing and running are both professions that often require years of hard work with little to no reward. The vast majority of us face so much rejection before we finally [succeed], and I’m no exception.
Elijah and Nakita’s will-they-won’t-they love story is an elemental plot line that becomes intrinsically connected with the murder case. Why did you weave them together?
The great thing about crime fiction is that it provides a timeline: a dead body at the beginning, and a killer caught at the end. But in this particular [novel], the love story is the soul. If you returned to your hometown 17 years later and saw the person that you first loved, especially if that flame hadn’t quite gone out, what would you say? What would you do? That [first love] can be very reckless and intense, and it’s perhaps not the most mature love. It certainly isn’t with Elijah and Nakita.
Grief is a central theme of “Middletide,” with most of the characters dealing with a version of it. What drew you to the topic?
I was grieving. I wrote the book when my professional running career had just come to an end. When I had my kids, I dealt with severe postpartum insomnia: bouts of 60 to 90 hours in a row without sleep. That level of insomnia is not something you can train through at a professional level. It felt like distance running walked away from me. So writing a character like Elijah who was mourning the loss of his dream, the loss of a career, that was very much the place that I was in. Ironically, as the book goes on, he finds purpose in restoring this land, this ramshackle cabin that his father left behind, and I found purpose in writing this book that breathed life back into me again.
Grief is a many-faced monster. It’s not something we all respond to in the same way. The three main characters of “Middletide,” Elijah, Nakita and Erin, all face grief, and they all handle it differently. I was interested in exploring the numerous pathways that grief can take in our minds.
The story starts in the 1970s and ends in the 1990s. Why did you choose that period?
Pure nostalgia! I think there’s a deep hunger right now for that pre-smartphone simplicity. As a reader, I love when books are set before the time of iPhones. There is that old adage that writers write what they know: The 1990s is the era in which I grew up. I don’t know that I’ll ever write a novel set after 2005 — that might be my limit. Especially after COVID, I think we crave that escapism right now; we long for a time when technology was not so excessive.
Tensions between Indigenous and settler populations provide an undercurrent to the story, but at the same time, don’t drive it. Tell me about this narrative choice.
Life in the Pacific Northwest for many people means interaction with tribes. There are so many, and their cultures are so rich, and the U.S. has treated them so poorly. I was interested in exploring this in my writing but very hesitant to take an existing reservation and shape it in any way to fit a fictional [work]. The whole setting of the story, both the U.S. citizen town and the reservation, are fictitious. The closest geographical tribe to this area would probably be the Nooksack. I was diligent in doing research to make sure that things were accurate, and insistent with my publisher on getting a very good Indigenous sensitivity reader. But I didn’t want to leave that element out of a Northwest-based story because it was an important part of my life growing up.
Your characters are complex but murky. We think we know them but then we doubt ourselves, which feels true to life. What was your approach to character development?
I think there’s a temptation when a [romance] is involved to write a really likable, nice, swoony guy. Elijah is not that guy. He’s a coward. He betrays those he loves. He’s self-centered. I told my editor, “People are going to hate this guy.” And I knew that was a cost I was willing to pay to write someone who is real. A lot of us have darkness and mistakes in our past and most of us, privately, are very flawed. But I’d rather deal with [readers] being polarized by him than finding him forgettable!