When I was a boy, my dad was stationed on a U.S. Army base in what was then West Germany. There was no library, just a cramped little bookmobile trailer, the kind with low ceilings and fold-out steps at the door. Inside this bookmobile, there were rows and rows of Agatha Christies — all in identical shiny white covers (you can still find them, on eBay or in old bookstores). I read them all.
These days, when it comes to mysteries, my devotions are pretty evenly divided into three sections: the British “Golden Age” writers exemplified by Christie; the American hard-boiled detectives of Hammett and Chandler; and metaphysicians like Borges, Chesterton, and Auster. West Heart Kill is a mash-up of all three strands. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a special case; he invented the most interesting detective in the history of the genre, but he also had some bad habits that infected generations of subsequent crime writers.)
The superficial reason is that it was fun! The hairstyles alone defy belief. Some of the most entertaining hours I spent “working” on the novel involved paging through mid-70s clothing catalogs; that led directly to an entire paragraph early in the book that is just a listing of the trademarked (and fabulously named) artificial fabrics worn by the characters: Acrilan®, Fortrel®, PERMA-PREST®, Sansabelt®, Ban-Lon®…
More substantively, the zeitgeist of the 1970s felt intensely familiar to me. We’d lost trust in institutions and in each other; the old solutions didn’t work; the new ones seemed inadequate; a creeping disillusionment had overtaken the best of us, while the worst seemed full of passionate intensity. As an era, the 1970s seems extraordinarily relevant to writers and readers today.
As I started the novel, I felt compelled to do a lot of research — I was a fan of the genre, obviously, but it wasn’t clear to me that I was qualified to actually write a mystery. The essays in West Heart Kill developed organically from the research: I found that stuff fascinating, and thought that readers might too. Why did Agatha Christie disappear? What’s up with that parable in The Maltese Falcon? What’s so special about the Locked Room, anyway? Soon the essays and the narrative became entwined in a very exciting way. One essay might foreshadow something that happens in the story 100 pages later; another essay might help explain something that happened 100 pages earlier.
I do have a few “outtakes” that never found a home in the novel. But as anyone knows who’s bought the “Expanded Special Super-Deluxe” edition of an album by their favourite band, there’s usually a reason that stuff doesn’t make it in originally.
The bedrock foundation of the book is the second-person (“you”) perspective, which I fell into almost immediately. It’s somewhat unusual for a mystery, and invited — or even dictated — experimentation in other ways. This “you” is essentially the imaginary reader of the book, and is the one consistent voice throughout the novel.
But on top of that, things get a little funky. The novel takes place over a long July 4th holiday weekend —Thursday to Sunday — and so I had the idea of writing each day from an additional different perspective: “he”... “I”... “we”... etc. Thus, each section is stamped with its own particular identity. And of course, the “you” voice explores why the perspective suddenly shifts, and how that plays into the intrigue of the plot…
As a practical matter, if you don’t isolate the setting in some way, then immediately after the first murder the scene — and the story — will be crawling with police! That’s no fun.
But also, micro-cultures are fascinating to examine and imagine. Prisons, schools, barracks, law firms, the Mafia, the Vatican, gang members, Park Avenue wives — they all have their own secret languages and rituals. For a writer, these are irresistible subjects (or are they targets?).
I’ll answer this as a reader rather than a writer. For me, the best mysteries are richly atmospheric, world-creating, filled with hints of past betrayals, featuring a detective who is weary and wounded but with the heart of a cracked romantic. Humphrey Bogart, basically.
Something small happens. A lady’s glove disappears. A parrot dies. A check is bounced. Wine is spilled. A niece fails to show up for dinner. And then — a murder! And usually another. Perhaps a third (but no more than three). The suspects distrust the detective — but they distrust the police more.
Reluctantly, they submit to interviews. They say terrible, nasty things about each other. In the end, both the detective and the killer must make a choice, the only choice any of us ever really have to make: whether to act from hate, or from love.
