The Lost was published by Leisure Books in 2001. Ray Pye is the center of a small New Jersey town’s social scene: good-looking (though shorter than he pretends), charismatic, generous with drugs and alcohol, and a murderer. Three years before the novel begins, Ray shot two women who were camping in the local woods — a motiveless crime committed, as far as anyone can tell, because he could. The local detective, Charlie Schilling, knows Ray did it but cannot prove it. The novel follows both men through the three years of waiting: Ray, increasingly unhinged as his control over his circle of friends erodes, and Schilling, doggedly assembling evidence that the legal system keeps finding insufficient.
Ketchum’s portrait of Ray Pye is his most complex character study — a sociopath rendered not as a monster but as a recognizable American type: the small-town big fish, the guy who always has the best drugs, the man whose charm conceals not depth but emptiness. Ray is not intelligent in any conventional sense, but he has an instinct for manipulation that allows him to maintain his position even as the people around him begin to suspect what he is.
The novel is based loosely on the real case of Charles Schmid, the “Pied Piper of Tucson,” who murdered three teenage girls in the 1960s while maintaining his social standing in the community. Ketchum moves the setting to New Jersey and expands the psychological portrait, but the essential dynamic is the same: a community that does not want to see what is in front of it.
Collecting The Lost
First edition (Leisure Books, New York, 2001): Mass market paperback.
Market values:
- First edition paperback, fine: $15–$40
- Cemetery Dance hardcover (later): $30–$80