How do you plan a murder? Do you rely on chance or fate to create a crime of opportunity? Do you meticulously plot the steps, the way a chef might devise a recipe? Or do you study how other killers have done it?
In my debut novel, West Heart Kill, I adopted the latter approach. It’s a metafictional crime novel set at an elite hunting club in the 1970s, that is both a traditional detective story and an investigation of the genre itself. The narrative is stuffed with allusions to other mysteries and essential tropes like the Locked Room and the Dying Message; essays embedded in the text explore how authors have chosen to murder their unfortunate victims and disguise their own identities; and, most importantly, the Reader is addressed directly as a participant in the story.
I very much believe in celebrating source material in the way that Jonathan Lethem once described as “The Ecstasy of Influence.” As a partial bibliography of West Heart Kill, the list that follows helps explain how the book was written; it’s also a mental biography of the author during its composition.
The Mousetrap (Agatha Christie)
I picked up a blue “acting edition” of The Mouse-Trap as a study aide for writing a crucial part of West Heart Kill. This stupendously successful production — “The world’s longest-running play!” boasts a sign in the lobby — is an oft-mocked but never-bettered piece of mystery theater that showcases Christie’s genius simplicity: the plot hinges on an early lie, brazenly uttered, from which everything else flows. The Real Inspector Hound (Tom Stoppard) is the great playwright’s satire of The Mousetrap; certain experimental innovations in this play gave me the courage to jump off the diving board myself. Bonus plug: check out the should’ve-been-better-but-still-not-bad comedy See How They Run, which explores a murder committed backstage at The Mousetrap, starring Sam Rockwell as Inspector Stoppard (see what they did there?).
“Theme of the Traitor and Hero” (Jorge Luis Borges)
The plot of this famous short story is fantastically dramatic — Irish revolutionaries trying to uncover the traitor in their midst as the movement’s leader is assassinated — but it’s the style of the opening paragraphs that helped me with the peculiar voice of West Heart Kill. Borges as narrator-creator begins the story as if it’s still inchoate and only half-formed in his mind. “I have imagined this story plot which I shall perhaps write someday… there are zones of the story not yet revealed to me,” he says. Even the setting is undecided: “The action takes place in an oppressed and tenacious country: Poland, Ireland, the Venetian Republic…” All of which produces the extraordinary illusion that the reader is seeing the words as they spill from the pen of Borges, or, even better, that the reader has a privileged seat at the moment of creation.
The New York Trilogy (Paul Auster)
The books that showed the American mystery novel could be metaphysical. What riddle, exactly, are Auster’s hard-boiled detectives trying to solve? Does it matter? Auster is hunting bigger game. From the trilogy’s second book, Ghosts, I also nicked the conceit of an older detective and his apprentice for West Heart Kill. (For years, I lived just down the street from Auster in Brooklyn. I once saw him clutching a thick parcel, on his way to the post office, and inevitably thought, wondered, speculated: What is this one about?)
The Father Brown Stories (G.K. Chesterton)
Borges’ favorite mystery writer, and for good reason. Chesterton delights in paradoxes and psychologically appealing (though sometimes physically implausible) solutions. One story turns on the simple but socially layered fact that in Edwardian England, a gentleman’s dinner jacket and a waiter’s tunic were virtually identical. In another story, a series of bizarre incidents are revealed to be a string of clues pulling our protagonist across London. Chesterton’s sleuth, an unassuming Catholic priest named Father Brown, is an inspired creation: who understands our secret murderous lusts better than a priest-confessor?
Speedboat (Renata Adler) and The White Album (Joan Didion)
These two classics are obviously not mysteries. But I read and re-read these books the way you might obsessively listen to a favorite vinyl LP spinning on the record player: they set the right mood music as I tried to capture the anxious, dread-filled zeitgeist of the 1970s in West Heart Kill. Also, frankly, for a middle-aged guy writing in the early 2020s, these books functioned as a literary “Phone a Friend” lifeline to help me channel the desires and disappointments of a certain rarefied strata of women who lived and died half a century ago.
The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett)
The OG. It’s extraordinarily difficult to create a private detective character who deviates from the Hammett blueprint — and, honestly, why would you want to? The archetype is more or less perfect, like your favorite but threadbare suit, fraying at the seams, which you’ve worn night after night on long lonely stakeouts outside the apartment of the millionaire’s wife’s lover…
King Lear and The Tempest (Shakespeare)
This is going to sound ridiculous, but as a first-time author, I found myself unexpectedly squeamish about inventing characters, infusing them with as much life and vitality as I could, and then cruelly manipulating their fates for my own sinister ends (i.e., the plot). Don’t laugh! It felt somehow immoral. So as I struggled with this, I found a strange kind of melancholy comfort in Gloucester’s lines from Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport.” Also, in Prospero’s iconic speech from The Tempest: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on / And our little life is rounded with a sleep.” (It’s the same speech that Humphrey Bogart famously misquotes as detective Sam Spade, cradling the film’s eponymous falcon: “The stuff that dreams are made of.”) My heart was hardened; I bent back to my task of afflicting my poor characters with their various miseries. As I did so, however, I also felt an uncanny, prickling sensation at the back of my neck — what if someone was writing me?
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino)
If you must steal, steal from the best.
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