
Peter Swanson is the New York Times bestselling author of The Kind Worth Killing, winner of the New England Society Book Award and finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year; and Eight Perfect Murders, a New York Times bestseller, among others. His books have been translated into 30 languages, and his stories, poetry, and features have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Atlantic Monthly, Measure, The Guardian, The Strand Magazine, and Yankee Magazine. He lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts, where he is at work on his next novel.
Be sure to check out his newest novel, A Talent For Murder!
TSM: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing?
PS: My newest novel is my eleventh thriller. Seems like a lot, but I kind of started late in life as a published author. I was in my mid-forties when I first published a crime novel, but it has been a lifelong love of mine. I’ve been reading crime and mystery ever since I was a kid, and to this day, it’s my favorite genre by far. Even though I’ve dabbled in different types of things, my dream was to write crime novels, so I was lucky enough to get published. 2014 was my first book, and now I’m at book 11, so it’s unbelievable.
TSM: In your opinion, what is the key to writing a good mystery novel?
PS: If I’m a genre writer, one of the things that you’re promising in a thriller novel is thrills. It’s going to have some suspense, so plot is important. But you could have the greatest plot in the world, and if the characters are dull as ditch water, you know it’s not working. But you gotta start somewhere. I start by thinking of ideas, something that would make a good story. Usually a story device that you can surprise the readers with in starting one way and shifting to something else. Think about all those things, and then you want to build characters out of that and make them as interesting as possible. But in mystery and thriller, I think plot is very, very important.
TSM: Do you know the endings of your novels before you begin them, or does that change as the story goes on?
PS: I have a premise, something to start it off with. I don’t outline, but I usually have a sense of where I want the end to go. It’s driven by thinking about the antagonist in the story, the villain. I think it’s important to know what they’re up to, and who’s doing what, because they’re really driving the story. And so I often have an end in mind, but not written down. Then I just figure out my way to get to that end. It does occasionally change, but I don’t go into it totally blind, and I also don’t outline.
TSM: What’s been a case in which an ending of one of your novels has totally changed from what you originally planned? On the other hand, what is the ending that was most similar to your initial plan?
PS: One that changed was The Kind Worth Killing. When I started that book, it was about two characters that meet on a plane, have a conversation about murder, and how it goes on from there. Initially, the male character was going to be the most important character of the book. As I went along, I realized that the female character, Lily Kintner, kind of wrestled the book away from Ted in a sense and became the main character of that story. The book itself became kind of different; it moved along as a series of cat-and-mouse games. I really had no idea where I was going with that book until the very end, so that was an example of something that changed.
I think Eight Perfect Murders was the book that came closest to arriving fully formed when I thought of the idea of the book. It’s about this blogger who writes this list of the best murders in fiction. Someone else uses that list to murder real people. As soon as I thought of that idea, I knew a lot about it. I knew who the main character was, I knew who the main villain was, I knew why the main villain was doing it, I knew the end. It just kind of came to me all really fast, and it never really changed. Obviously, little details along the way changed, but the book itself came fully-formed.
TSM: Where do you get your ideas from in the first place? Is it through reading other books, through reading other people’s works? Is it through listening to other writers? Just living your daily life? I’m just wondering because Stephen King has a metaphor where he says his ideas come from a fantasy land; you don’t really work to get your ideas, they just come to you, so I was wondering where your ideas come from.
PS: Well, I think, as usual, Stephen King is pretty eloquent about the writing process. He’s usually right. For me, my ideas come out of daydreams. I’m not someone who reads a newspaper article and says, “I’m gonna officialize that.” It just doesn’t happen that way. It’s usually just idle daydreams where something starts threading together. Like thinking to myself, “What are my favorite murders in books?” Then it becomes, “What if someone made a list of that?” And then “What if someone used that list?” Then suddenly you’re off and running. The vast majority of these daydreams lead to nothing. What tells me I need to write a book is if I keep thinking about it, if it’s an idea I can’t shake. I think this is something Stephen King said, and I one hundred percent agree, which is “If I forget an idea, it probably wasn’t good enough.” So I don’t write stuff down; it’s easier if I keep thinking about it in order to start a novel. That’s my process.
TSM: You have also said that the inspiration behind your novel Nine Lives came from Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. To you, what about Christie’s work makes it so special?
PS: For her, it’s so much about the plot. She was so clever at coming up with all these incredible ends to mystery novels. She almost kind of came up with them all. I think she really thought outside of the box in terms of her plotting. I don’t think she thinks outside of the box with her characters, which is fine. I think her characters are these set tropes. No one has been better at constructing these things than she was. Early on, I fell in love with And Then There Were None, this sort of brilliant idea that ten strangers are brought to an island and told in advance that they will be bumped off one by one, and then they are bumped off one by one. There are so many layers to it, like “Who’s the killer? What do they have in common? Why were they brought here?” It’s chilling.
I do think that my daydreams start from books because it’s not coming from my real life. It’s a good thing that I’m not drawing on scary things that happen in my life. Because scary things don’t happen in my life, for the most part–except for book tours. With Nine Lives, I was thinking, “How could I do this book and not put these people on an island, a ski resort, or all these other things?” I came up with this idea of, “What if all these people are selected to be killed, and their only way of knowing is a letter in the mail?” In a way, they were on a metaphorical island. That book came from thinking about doing something in a different way than it had already been done. Because in some ways, as a mystery writer, it’s all kind of been done, so you have to come up with a new spin on it.
TSM: Another thing that Christie does so well is pacing. How do you balance the pace of a mystery plot line with other aspects of the story, such as character development?
PS: I mean, it’s a tricky thing because pace is so important. In crime thrillers, this is really the case when you choose to reveal information that’s going to lead to the big moment. It can go one of two ways: you can be too slow or too fast. I think people these days often go too fast. Sometimes there’s a big, giant twist that comes at the end of every chapter. By chapter six, you’re kind of exhausted and like, “This is too much.” The way I do it is by reading a lot and thinking about the books that I read. When I read a book that has a really good pace, I think, “How is that done? When do we learn what? How long do we spend on this?” And then if I read a book where the pacing is not working for me, I think, “What’s going wrong with this?” I just try to absorb it and get it right, but it’s a tricky thing.
TSM: Publisher’s Weekly called A Talent For Murder a “masterpiece in misdirection.” What does praise like that mean to you? How do you handle praise? How do you handle criticism?
PS: Well I go back to the definitive voice on this, which is Rudyard Kipling in his poem “If,” which is advice he wrote to his son. The key is to not get too excited by good praise and to not get too disappointed by bad reviews. I think you have to treat them both the same. If you really believe the good critics, then you are stuck having to believe the bad reviews as well. Enjoy it or move on, because you don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. Just work on your next book. That’s my advice. Or don’t read any of it, that’s another thing you can do.
TSM: What are you reading now? Any books/TV shows/movies you would recommend?
PS: I really enjoyed Dennis Lehane’s new book. He writes differently than I do, more gritty and realistic thrillers. He wrote this new book called Small Mercies. It’s essentially a detective novel set during a busing crisis in Boston in the seventies. It’s about a mother searching for her missing daughter, and she becomes a detective figure. I thought it was a pretty riveting book.
In terms of TV stuff, I thought Ripley was really great, the Patricia Highsmith adaptation. You’re either gonna love it or hate it because it meanders. Since we talked about pace, I’m someone who doesn’t mind meandering and a slow burn. This is one of them, so it all depends on how invested you are in the characters, so I enjoyed that.
TSM: What is one piece of knowledge that you wish you knew at the beginning of your career that you know now?
PS: I think for that beginning writer, you need to finish whatever it is you’re working on. I think that gets in the way of a lot of people. So read a lot, write a lot. And the stuff that you do write, get to the end of it. Don’t keep polishing it, finish it. That might not be the book that gets published. It might be your fourth book, like mine. It could be your tenth. It could be your first. But nothing will get published if you don’t eventually write the end.
For more interviews from The Strand Magazine, please visit: https://www.mysterycenter.com/category/interviews/
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