Elizabeth Gilchrist had long imagined writing a book about Santa Barbara.
“Since I was 14,” she tells me over the phone from her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I grew up in Santa Barbara…. The place has always spoken to me.”
For years, the idea stayed tucked away, like a note in the margins. It resurfaced in 2019 at a noir writers’ conference outside Montpellier in southern France…