“For twenty years I tried to outrun 1987,” Kate Crane writes in the preface to Whatever Happened to Eddy Crane? “But everywhere I went, everything I did, every conversation I had, it was in the room.” It refers to her father’s disappearance, an event that signaled the end of Kate Crane’s childhood and the beginning of a decades-long search for answers. Kate Crane was only twelve years old when her father failed to come home, and although there was evidence of a shooting in the office of his Curtis Bay trucking company, his body was never found, and investigators didn’t have enough evidence to make any arrests. For years, Kate tried to leave the past behind, but the mystery of what happened to her father haunted her.
In 2007, Crane decided to face the traumatic events that had shaped her life. She began to work with Baltimore’s Cold Case Unit in search of answers, and while she may not have found a tidy resolution, the resulting book delves into the unsolved mystery of her father’s likely murder, chronicles the impact of the tragedy on Crane’s own life, and serves as a testament to her love for the man who was taken from her far too soon.
We spoke with Kate Crane about her experiences and the decades-long process of transforming them into a book.
Baltimore Fishbowl: This is both a memoir and a journalistic exploration of your father’s disappearance, but at the core is the love you have for your father. Could you tell us a bit about him? How did the process of writing this book change your understanding of him?
Kate Crane: My dad, Eddy, was a big guy who loved rock ‘n’ roll, German food, Mercedes, photography, and his family, including the Rottweilers. Not necessarily in that order, and that’s the kind of thing I couldn’t find out in my work — did he love photography more than Mercedes? I’ll never know.
He co-owned a trucking business in Curtis Bay. E & M Machinery rebuilt heavy-duty truck parts. His role was to run the business and maintain good customer relationships. And he still came home with his hands dirty. We always had Lava soap — the WD-40 company makes it, supposedly with ground volcanic pumice.
Dad was confident, but he wasn’t a blowhard. His business situated him in a world of rough-and-tumble characters. Not all of them. Dad had work friends who, then and now, are solid family guys. And there was also a different, treacherous crew. In 2007, when I started the project, I was pure grieving daughter, with the fish-eye view of a daughter on a father. Through the work I did, Dad became more whole to me — a person, like all of us, who embodied flaws and contradictions.
BFB: Your father went missing in 1987, and you began the project of looking into his disappearance in 2007. Now in 2026, you have published your account of the experience. Could you talk about both the writing and publishing processes?
KC: In 2007, a friend connected me with a literary agent. This can be a soul-crushing obstacle. For me it wound up being one of the only quick-and-easy points on the timeline. The “oh, wow, this wasn’t so hard” of that moment cracks me up now. Sweet summer child!
We spent several years on a hundred-page book proposal. No one wanted the book. In 2012, I parted ways with that agent and was adrift. By 2015, I was working seven-day weeks in an abusive Silicon Valley startup, ambivalent about continuing the book. Then I rewrote an essay that the New York Times had bought and killed — twice! We ran it on the startup’s website.
At this point I did not want to do a book anymore! Only if I meet an agent who makes me feel excited, I joked. Unlikely. William LoTurco showed up in my life. I got excited. We redid the proposal. Several years later, we resubmitted. In 2018, John Glynn at Hanover Square Press, then a new HarperCollins imprint, bought the book. It took me another seven years to write the book itself.
I wrote in libraries. I wrote in cabins in the woods. I wrote on my phone in the car. I wrote in coffee shops. Throughout, I always had hectic jobs, and throughout, loved ones kept dying. I had more than one health crisis. A cross-country move, breakups, layoffs.
One pleasant surprise is learning that 24 back-to-back obstacles don’t preclude a sudden win. And showing up consistently makes things happen. If you write a paragraph every day, you are eventually going to wind up with 70,000 words.
BFB: In the book you describe that as a young person you became involved in Amnesty International and the punk scene. Do you think your experiences with social justice early on informed your decision to investigate what happened to your father?
KC: Absolutely. My time in DC punk in the 1990s gave me confidence in experimenting, in trying new things, in realizing that perfect is the enemy of not only the good but even just of achieving something. As for Amnesty, the realization that a letter-writing campaign might have the power to help someone vulnerable blew my mind.
The killing of my friend Brad Will, an anarchist and independent journalist, by plainclothes police in Oaxaca, Mexico, in October 2006 directly influenced my decision to take on this project. Brad died doing work that mattered to him. I grieved for months and asked myself: What am I doing with my life? Does it matter?
BFB: You talk about being an avid reader of mysteries, particularly those by Nero Wolfe. Do you think this interest had any influence on the research and writing you did for the book?
I do! Memoirist Erin Slaughter, author of The Dead Dad Diaries, remarked to me not long ago that when we read mysteries, solving the puzzle is the point.
Wolfe was an orchid-loving misogynist. We are different people! (Yes, he’s real to me.) And I saw, and still see, in this unconventional curmudgeon who did life his own way, ruthlessly, a model for conducting my life on my own terms.
Nero Wolfe always gives me a satisfactory conclusion. I knew my own book would be different — I’d have to contend with the impossibility of a tidy ending.
KC: You discuss the ways in which your demanding day job as a journalist slowed down the search for answers about your father. Are there any ways in which your background in journalism helped the process of writing the book?
My journalism skills were infinitely helpful. Deciding to wade into Dad’s disappearance was overwhelming. I grounded myself in the core journalism: What I can do here is seek people out and ask them questions.
I organized the book in terms of chronology, and in terms of what I did and did not uncover. Of how I was getting stuck, changing, finding a path forward. The interviews I did, and the process around them, form the latter part of the book’s skeleton.
BFB: In the epilogue, you state that, “This book is the goodbye kiss and the forever I love you. My job now is to keep living.” Now that the book is complete, do you feel you are able to move on?
KC: I’ve done everything I could for my dad, and everything I could to help myself find a little peace around the loss. In conducting interviews, doing road trips up and down the Jersey Turnpike, contending with my fears, and pushing myself to my limits to craft a beautiful book, I formulated an antidote to the silence that was poisoning me.
Now I am moving forward with the knowledge that I enjoy working on books. I’m in the early stages of a novel.
BFB: Baltimore is so vividly rendered throughout the pages of your book. How do you think your early years in Baltimore shaped you? On your return visits, what are some of the most significant changes you have noticed?
KC: I love Baltimore with all my heart. Once I was old enough to drive, I gravitated to movie theaters like the Senator, the Charles and the Orpheum Cinema. My love of film goes hand-in-hand with who I am as a writer.
I existed in Baltimore at the same time as Funk’s Democratic Coffee Spot. Striped awning on a row home, yellow City Paper box outside. Inside: colors and art everywhere. I drank so much coffee and ate so much chocolate cake, played chess and checkers. I equally loved Louie’s Bookstore Café, its own magic.
Funk’s, Louie’s, and the Orpheum are all gone. So is Greg’s Bagels. The Rev, Memory Lane. Lambda Rising, the gay bookstore in Mount Vernon. I used to read books and drink coffee in this nook in Charles Village that I think was called Cafe Moderne. Red Light Green Light was an incredible illegal vegan restaurant. If you knew the address and the light was green, you could feast.
It’s the same story in so many cities… The places that form our personal lore vanish. So we write about them.
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To order Kate’s book, visit any local bookstore, or go to bookshop.org.
