MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
The basics of a whodunit are just that. You are trying to unravel the who, what, when and where of a dastardly crime. Well, Peter Swanson's new thriller, "Kill Your Darlings," turns all that on its head. You know who the killer is from the first pages. You spend the rest of the book trying to figure out why.
PETER SWANSON: It was not an easy book to write. I think about halfway through, I almost quit because I was getting jumbled up thinking about it. But I did keep going and kind of pull it together.
KELLY: Swanson told me how he pulled it together, starting with the who - the main characters, Thom and Wendy Graves, married, in their 50s, both writers living on the north shore of Massachusetts.
SWANSON: On the outside, they'd be in upper middle-class - look quite happy. But inside the house, their marriage is definitely falling apart. Thom is drunk most of the time and seemingly guilty. Wendy is concerned about Thom and what he might give away about their lives. And in fact, she's so concerned that, as we learn very early in the beginning of the novel, she's thinking it might be a good idea to kill him.
KELLY: Yeah. Read us the bit where Wendy makes up her mind, it's not just a good idea to kill him, but she might actually do it. And just to set the scene a little bit, they have just thrown a dinner party for colleagues, and Thom has, once again, had way too much to drink.
SWANSON: (Reading) She could see it in his blank eyes and the way his mouth was slightly ajar, lower lip hanging. She took a tiny sip of her wine. He had put his empty glass down and was mimicking playing the piano along with Ahmad Jamal. God, she despised him. She'd also known that he was never going to change, but she hadn't admitted to herself yet that she truly hated him. I should just kill him, she thought. What are you smiling about, Thom said? Just murder, she said back, your murder. He laughed and moved his hands along the imaginary keys.
KELLY: (Laughter) I hate to laugh, but it's so - I mean, there's no doubt she's about to do it, and she does. And I will say the where of this murder mystery is the famous "Exorcist" steps - famous from the movie "The Exorcist" - in Georgetown, in Washington, D.C. Describe them and describe what happens there.
SWANSON: Well, my first trip to Washington, D.C., unlike most people who want to see all the monuments, my - the first thing I wanted to see was "The Exorcist" steps. And, you know, those are the steps that Father Karras tumbles down to his death. So that was my first tourist stop in D.C., and I'd always remembered them. They are genuinely very long and quite steep and quite deadly. I think nowadays, they're being used as an exercise facility. People run up and down them.
KELLY: I run up and down them. I will inject. I live around the corner and...
SWANSON: Oh, you do.
KELLY: ...They - those steps have nearly killed me more than once, not 'cause anybody pushed me but because they are extraordinarily...
SWANSON: Right.
KELLY: ...Long and steep. Yes.
SWANSON: And, again, we're at the very beginning of the book, and we know that Wendy's thinking of how to kill her husband, and she's already kind of tried to kill him by pushing him down the stairs in their house, which isn't long enough. So she thinks, I'm going to need a longer set of steps.
KELLY: You can see all the pieces coming together. Then, though, the reason that we don't give up reading after the first chapter is you do something fascinating, which is tell the whole story, their whole marriage in reverse. So the book is moving backward in time from when Wendy pushes Thom down the steps - that's 2023 - all the way back to 1982.
SWANSON: Right.
KELLY: Why? Why tell it that way?
SWANSON: Well, I mean, the genesis of this book was really two ideas coming together. And one was the desire to write a book in reverse. I mean, I had thought about this as someone who loves crime novels, is that they often do go a little bit in reverse in the sense that we start with a corpse, and by the end of the book, we know what happened before that corpse arrived. And I thought, what if we could just really literalize that and have a story go entirely in reverse so that we slowly learn the events that led to the version of Thom and Wendy - that unhappy version of them in their 50s.
And then the other thing that really got me into the story was this idea of a young couple that plot to kill. In those stories that we're familiar with, it doesn't go well. But what if it did? What if this young couple got away with it and then lived happily ever after? What would they be like 30 years down the line? And those two ideas came together and created this book.
KELLY: Peter Swanson, you are a writer, obviously. We're talking to you about your book. You're writing here about characters who are both writers. Thom is an academic and has tenure at a university and keeps trying to write the great American novel. Wendy is a published poet. Did you relate to either of them as a fellow writer?
SWANSON: Yeah, I think - I mean, especially Wendy because I began my writing career as an aspiring poet. That was all - through my 20s, I was really solely writing poetry. Unlike Thom, where he has this vision of being a great novelist, you know, I think Wendy's kind of - she's blase about the whole thing. I mean, it doesn't mean as much to her ego as it does to Thom, who I think feels like he can salvage some of his life by becoming this great writer, and it's tied up in his ego.
KELLY: I was laughing because you show us many of Thom's awful first drafts, which he abandons...
SWANSON: (Laughter).
KELLY: ...After, like, three paragraphs (laughter). And then he goes back and reads them and feels even worse.
SWANSON: Yeah.
KELLY: And I thought...
SWANSON: He feels ashamed.
KELLY: ...Only another writer could have come up with that 'cause it's so true.
SWANSON: Yeah, I think he has one point where he's written a few paragraphs, and then he's just written awful, awful, awful, awful, awful underneath it. There's shame attached to him in writing, and I think I felt a little bit of that. You know, I used to not tell people I was a writer because it felt - I don't know - like, you're trying to - like, you have something to say to the world. It's a little embarrassing.
KELLY: It felt pretentious or something?
SWANSON: I don't know. I think a lot of writers don't feel this way and are happy to shout it to the world, but maybe there's two types of writers. So he lives with a lot of shame, some for good reason.
KELLY: So it struck me, Peter Swanson, the thing that has bound these two characters, Wendy and Thom, for decades is a shared secret that they need to keep. And the thing that ultimately breaks them, both as individuals and as a couple, is that they each have a huge secret or two that they do not share, that they're carrying all by themselves.
SWANSON: Right.
KELLY: What's the lesson there?
SWANSON: I mean, one lesson is, you know, don't live your life like Thom and Wendy. But when we meet them as young lovers, they're very much like a lot of us. Like, we'll never lie to one another. We're in this together. This is our lives, our shared lives. But as things progress - and it happens pretty fast - that they start to hide things from one another. You know, it does make you wonder if along the way they had remained completely open, if maybe they'd have existed longer. Everyone deals with guilt to a certain degree, and we all deal with it in slightly different ways. And I think that's one of the major themes of this book.
(SOUNDBITE OF MIKE OLDFIELD'S "TUBULAR BELLS")
KELLY: Peter Swanson telling us about his new book, "Kill Your Darlings." Peter Swanson, thank you.
SWANSON: Thank you so much for having me, Mary Louise.
(SOUNDBITE OF MIKE OLDFIELD'S "TUBULAR BELLS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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