The importance of empathy when writing thrillers

 

It’s the 4^th of July today, and of course apart from America’s Independence Day and Election Day in the United Kingdom – it’s also the release day for Peter Swanson’s latest thriller, A TALENT FOR MURDER.

We reviewed it last month, noting that “…….Told in a beguiling style, alternating between third person as well as first person point of views, we get a literary thriller that will make you shiver next time you think about reading a collection of short stories of John Cheever…….Though a warning – this novel is beguiling because under the cheerfully evocative and engaging narrative, lurks a much darker truth about concealed psychopaths and how banal evil can be……”

Read the Full Review HERE

Following our reading of A TALENT FOR MURDER, Peter kindly supplied our readers with a little context on the writing of this engaging [but very dark] narrative >

I write a lot of bad people. I write some good ones, too, and quite a few that fall somewhere in between. What I try to remember with all of these made-up humans is that they have something in common; they are the center of their own story. And they all think they’re the good guy, more or less.

My job, as I see it, is to write these characters as though they are morally equal. That doesn’t mean I don’t somewhat judge them, myself, but I need to let their actions speak louder than my words. Nothing is worse than a writer telling their reader straight out who the good people are and who are the bad. Most readers can figure this out for themselves.

Also, there is not much worse than a one-note villain. That’s why I think empathy is so important to a writer. Whenever I create the antagonist of the story, I remind myself that this particular character was a child once upon a time. That they were more than likely treated poorly by someone along the way. Just as in real life, this is not an excuse for truly heinous actions, but it does help us to understand why they happen. It helps us to feel as though this bad person has complexity.

And that makes for a better book. Once upon a time I wrote a novel called The Kind Worth Killing. There was a murderer in it named Lily Kintner, and somewhere along the way she became the protagonist of the story, and now she’s the protagonist of my latest book, A Talent for Murder. And, yes, she still kills people. But she has her reasons. I suppose all killers do. Anyway, as a writer I just put her on the page and let her do her thing. It’s not for me to judge if she’s a good person or a bad person. That’s up to the reader. 

The importance of empathy when writing thrillers

(c) 2024 Peter Swanson

Shots Magazine would like to pass our thanks to Tara McEvoy and Angus Cargill of Publishers Faber and Faber [London] for their help in getting this essay from Peter Swanson for Shots Readers.

More information about the work of Peter Swanson >

https://commons.trincoll.edu/reporter/features/a-master-of-suspense/

https://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2019/07/the-rules-for-eight-perfect-murders.html

https://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-hotel-that-inspired-kind-worth.html

https://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2020/03/peter-swansons-6th-novel-launched-in.html

https://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2019/03/a-friend-you-havent-met-yet-by-peter.html

https://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-talented-mr-swanson.html

https://wwwshotsmagcouk.blogspot.com/2017/01/inspiration-behind-her-every-fear-for.html

http://www.shotsmag.co.uk/feature_view.aspx?FEATURE_ID=245

And https://www.peter-swanson.com

 

Books to Look Forward to From Faber and Faber

 January 2021

Once You Go This Far is by Kristen Lepionka. After the death of her cop father, PI Roxane Weary did everything she could to lose herself in her work - but she's getting tired of the hangovers, of fighting with her ex-girlfriend, and of avoiding her mother. When she's asked to investigate a suspicious death, she delves into the case with her usual stubborn determination. Pulling her far from home, and into an insular and controlling evangelical community, the case might just be bigger than Roxane can handle alone. But is it too late, or too dangerous, to call on the people she needs?

March 2021

After a whirlwind, fairytale romance, Abigail Baskin marries freshly-minted Silicon Valley millionaire Bruce Lamb. For their honeymoon, he whisks her away to an exclusive retreat at a friend's resort off the Maine coast on Heart Pond Island. But once there, Abigail's perfect new life threatens to crash down around her as she recognises one of their fellow guests as the good looking, charismatic stranger who weeks earlier had seduced her at her own Bachelorette party... Every Vow You Break is by Peter Swanson.

April 2021

My Life as a Villianess (Essays) is by Laura Lippman. I knew something new about venality - my own. I realized I had become the bad guy in someone else's story. And I deserved it. Laura Lippman's first job in journalism was a rookie reporter in Waco, Texas. Two decades later she left her first husband, quit the newspaper business, and became a full time novelist. I had been creating villains on the page for about seven years when I finally became one. Her fiction has always centered on complicated women, paying unique attention to the intricacies of their flaws, their vulnerability, and their empowerment. Now, finally, Lippman has turned her gimlet eye on a new subject: herself. My daughter was ten days old the first time I was asked if I were her grandmother. In this, her first collection of essays, Lippman gives us a brilliant, candid portrait of an unapologetically flawed life. Childhood, friendships, influences, becoming a mother in later life - Lippman's inspiring life stories are at once specific and universal.

May 2021

Love and Theft is by Stan Parish. When Alex Cassidy and Diane Alison meet by chance at a party in Princeton, New Jersey, there are instant sparks. Both are single parents living in wealthy suburbia, independent, highly competent and seemingly settled in their lives. She runs a successful catering business. He's part of a crew that robs banks, casinos and jewellery stores around the world. Neither realises initially that their lives have overlapped before, or that their shared history and burgeoning relationship will come to threaten everything they love. As Alex prepares for one final, daunting job, he discovers that he's not the only one with secrets - and that both of them are playing for the highest stakes imaginable.

June 2021

The Occupation had a hangover, but still the Occupation went to work. Tokyo, July 1949, President Shimoyama, Head of the National Railways of Japan, goes missing just a day after serving notice of 30,000 job losses. In the midst of the US Occupation, against the backdrop of widespread social, political and economic reforms - as tensions and confusion reign - American Detective Harry Sweeney leads the missing person's investigation for General MacArthur's GHQ. Some men go mad, some men go missing . Fifteen years later and Tokyo is booming. As the city prepares for the 1964 Olympics and the global spotlight, Hideki Murota, a former policeman during the Occupation period, and now a private investigator, is given a case which forces him to go back to confront a time, a place and a crime he's been hiding from for the past fifteen years. Some men do both . Over twenty years later, in the autumn and winter of 1988, as the Emperor Showa is dying, Donald Reichenbach, an aging American, eking out a living teaching and translating, sits drinking by the Shinobazu Pond in Ueno, knowing the final reckoning of the greatest mystery of the Showa Era is down to him. Tokyo Redux is by David Peace.

What do you Write by Sara Gran

People ask me what I write. I have to say something, so I tell people I write detective fiction. This means very little. Detective fiction is most fiction; it covers everything from Genesis (who killed Abel?) to CRIME & PUNISHMENT (go Detective Porfiry!) to that fat paperback you picked up at the airport. But it still means something: genre is a joyous and beautiful set of rules, boundaries, formulas, and tropes. Everyone knows a murder mystery will be solved. Everyone knows the prime suspect didn't do it. A private eye with a bottle of whiskey in his hand is an image that has become a symbol: it tells a story to people. We know this man and we know his history: tough, bitter, hard-drinking, solves cases, easy prey for a certain type of woman. In this way, genre can be seen as a kind of language, and we can think of the tropes of genre as words. If you put a whiskey-drinking PI on a page with a woman in a tight red dress, you know what you're reading, and it's something like noir.

The joy in writing genre fiction is in the privilege of using this language. Once we see a scary little girl in a white dress and long hair, we all pretty much know where this story is going, and it ain't toward a happy ending. Imagine if every time you wanted to use the word "chair" you had to, instead, explain what a chair was and what it did. Genre gives us a series of building blocks to build a story without having to start from scratch every time.

If we use these building blocks exactly as they've been used before, we might end up with something smart and cool and fun, but we probably won't make anyone think twice if we give them exactly what they expect. Sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes we need a fucking break. Sometimes we need to enter a story and know it's going to play by the rules and take us exactly where we expect -- maybe because the rest of life never seems to play by the rules, and we can never know what to expect at all.  

But the other joy in writing genre fiction is taking those boundaries and formulas and tropes and fucking them all up. Language is so wonderful when we use it as expected. Maybe it's even more wonderful when we use it in unexpected ways. For example, put together the word "chair" with something you haven't seen before. Maybe "apple." Now you've got something to think about. What's an apple chair? Or is it a chair apple? Or is it a chair with an apple on top? Hey now, what if it's an apple with a tiny chair on top? And a mouse lives there? See, here we are, already thinking and creating and making something new.

The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran (published by Faber & Faber)

Driven off the desert road and left for dead, Claire DeWitt knows that it is someone from her past trying to kill her, she just doesn't know who. Making a break for it from the cops who arrive on the scene, she sets off in search of the truth, or whatever version of it she can find. But perhaps the biggest mystery of all lies deeper than that, somewhere out there on the ever rolling highway of life. Set between modern day Las Vegas and LA, The Infinite Blacktop sees Claire at her lowest point yet, wounded and disorientated, but just about hanging on. Too smart for her own good, too damaged to play by the rules, too crazy for most - have you got what it takes to follow the self-appointed 'best detective in the world'?

More information about the author and her books can be found on her website.

Stav Sherez’s The Intrusions

I was delighted to receive an invitation to iconic British Publisher Faber and Faber’s Spring Literary Party.

I find the range of publications from Faber to be eclectic, with a focus on good writing, including poetry, music, film criticism and the unusual. I am fortunate to have known Publicist Sophia Portas and Publisher Angus Cargill, for some time; and they kindly keep me up to date on my reading, as Faber’s Crime Thriller List must never be underestimated.

A few years ago, I was sent a remarkable novel entitled A Dark Redemption by Music Journalist Stav Sherez. I was hypnotised by this very dark tale, which I reviewed excitedly here

We were delighted to see that his third in this police procedural series is even more remarkable, as Shots Magazine reviewer Les Hurst reported -

Carrigan and Miller are detectives in the Metropolitan Police, nominally part of a team, but each suffering their own demons and frequently having to work independently. In Carrigans’s case he is carrying the extra weight from an earlier case, described in the previous ELEVEN DAYS, in which he used some extra-judicial investigations in order to discover the truth; for which an unattractive superior is hounding him now using the cover of an internal complaint. This persecution looks as if it will raise its head again very soon, and in a much worse way.

What are the “intrusions” of the title? In one immediate sense it is the girl who bursts into the police station saying that her friend has been kidnapped. Miller begins to investigate the grotty clubs and back alleys of London where the girls went in search of a good time. When a dead body is discovered, drained of blood, but on a floor absent of blood - Carrigan becomes involved. When the two detectives realise that the missing girl and the murder victim are one and the same they realise they have a case of horrifying complexity, and previous victims.

Read More Here

So it was most generous of Faber and Faber to send me an invitation to their Spring Literary Party, held in The Crypt at Clerkenwell. Though not a Crime / Thriller Event per se; it was good to meet up with Stav Sherez and the wonderful NJ Cooper aka Daphne Wright [who is perhaps better known as Natasha Cooper, from her days as Chair for The Crime Writers Association before the Millennium].

The event was very well attended, and robustly organised, with an array of canapes and a well-stocked bar. The party allowed the guests to mingle with the Faber & Faber Editorial and Promotional Teams during the evening; and there were readings and talks, all hoisted in The Crypt on the Green, Clerkenwell, East London.

We have recorded some of the highlights for our readers below

We were welcomed to the event, which included Sebastian Barry reading a short passage from his Costa Book Awarded ‘DAYS WITHOUT END’, which is a wonderful novel, and which the BBC dramatized. Barry received this news last week, and is the only novelist to have won this prestigious literary award twice.

Then Stav Sherez took to the stage to introduce his latest work, the prescient and unsettling dark thriller ‘THE INTRUSIONS’

Kate Hamer spoke about her follow up to the bestseller The Girl in the Red Coat, and read a passage from her follow-up ‘The Doll Funeral’

After several other readings, Hanif Kureishi closed the proceedings with an extract from ‘The Nothing’.

So after more mingling, it was time to thank the Faber Team, and emerge back into the London Night, with a book bag, and memories of a most enjoyable literary gathering from one of Great Britain’s most iconic publishing houses.

Incidentally Stav Sherez kindly supplied Shots an intriguing essay about the linkage of Music and Serial Killers, and can be accessed here

Follow Stav on Twitter @stavsherez and remember Shots Bookstore have discounted copies of THE INTRUSIONS available here 

And if you haven’t discovered the dark imagination of this former music journalist’s Carrigan and Miller London based Police Procedural series, why not head to the beginning, A Dark Redemption [out in PB] as is the second installment Eleven Days – and then buckle-up for The Intrusions.

Stav Sherez & The Intrusions

Shots thoroughly enjoyed The Intrusions from London based journalist and thriller writer Stav Sherez – Click Here to read the Shots Review

We were delighted when Stav provided a thought provoking essay, for our readers.

What is it about serial killers and cheesy pop music? While researching my latest novel, The Intrusions, I went through a lot of true crime and serial killer biographies. Most of what I read was pretty horrific, leaving a really bad taste in the mouth – but one thing kept popping up that couldn’t fail but to intrigue me: the music serial killers listened to while stalking or killing their victims. The best and worst of human actions seemed encapsulated by these two poles. I'm sure the music says something about the killer's state of mind or psychology but you'd need someone far more qualified than me to tell you what. Instead – and without meaning to stumble too far down the path of bad taste – here's some of the strange and unlikely music that serial killers listened to.

1. Richard Ramirez

Ramirez conducted one of the most bizarre, baroque, and truly depraved killing sprees in American history. The sheer repetitiveness and obsessive compulsion manifest in these crimes says a lot about serial killer pathology. The "Night Stalker" cruised the LA streets in the mid-1980s searching out victims at a terrifying rate. Several sources state that he would crank up AC/DC on his car stereo as he did so. At the home of one of his victims, he inadvertently left behind an AC/DC cap.

2. Fred West

One of the most degenerate serial killer couples in history, the Wests turned their house on Cromwell Street into a De Sade-ian experiment in depravity. Gordon Burn's Happy Like Murderers documents the terrifying descent into dark sex, murder and incest with chilling, hypnotic prose. It's probably the best true crime book I've ever read – but the most incongruous detail to emerge from its pages was how Fred would often whistle Susan Vaughn's "I Want to Be Bobby's Girl" as he was committing his atrocities.

3. Charles Manson

Manson isn't, strictly speaking, a serial killer but more along the lines of crazed cult leader sending his disciples out to do his killing for him. But he's perhaps the most famous example of not listening to pop music properly. In his Mojave desert hideaway, high on acid, Manson reportedly listened to the Beatles "Helter Skelter" for 24 hours straight. During this epic session, Manson worked out what Paul McCartney was trying to tell him: Jesus was coming and the Beatles had seen it; but Jesus first wanted Manson to make his 'song' – America would descend into race war and it was Manson's job to initiate it.

4. Dennis Nilsen

The Muswell Hill Murderer's spree of slaying and necrophilia was put to an end when the remains of several bodies were discovered clogging the drains of his house. Nlsen picked up vulnerable gay men, spiked them with drugs then strangled them and kept their bodies under his floorboards. He would often take them out and place them on an armchair and chat with them. What music did he listen to while he did this? Doom Metal? Thrash? No, apparently, it was the soothing sounds of Clannad.

5. Dean Corll

One of the most savage and sadistic serial killers ever recorded, Corll hunted young boys in 1970s Houston with the help of two accomplices (one of whom would later end up shooting him). Jack Olsen's superb The Man with the Candy details this bizarre and ritualistic killer who would strap young men to a tortureboard as the Stylistics' "Betcha by Golly Wow" played in the background.

 © 2017 Stav Sherez

The Intrusions is out on 2nd February, 2017 and can be ordered from the Shots Bookstore HERE

The Talented Mr Swanson

I recall when British Publisher Faber and Faber picked up author Peter Swanson’s debut novel ‘The Girl With a Clock for a Heart’, a couple of years ago. I was startled by this noir-ish crime thriller debut, as it appealed to my inner Tom Ripley. I wrote at the time –

It will be of little surprise to hear that Hollywood has snapped up a movie option, as the narrative is written in a Spartan and terse style, that resembles a detailed screenplay, but one that the readers has to provide the camera directions, and as for lighting? There is no need, as it is noir in the literal sense. An astonishing debut from a writer that even at this early stage, is one worth marking for the future

Read More Here

I enjoyed Swanson’s writing and was delighted when Faber and Faber organised an interview with him; as I had a few questions that haunted me. The interview is archived here

Peter’s second work The Kind Worth Killing, was even more elegant and dark, and as many of us had predicted, Swanson was no ‘flash in the pan’ as he was recognised by The Crime Writers Association and Ian Fleming Publications; finding The Kind Worth Killing For - on the 2015 Steel Dagger Shortlist; as well as on the inaugural Dead Good Books Reader Awards [2015].

So what have we instore for Peter’s third novel?

Kate Priddy was always a bit neurotic, but after an ex-boyfriend kidnapped her and nearly ended her life, her bouts of anxiety began exploding into full-blown panic attacks. When Corbin Dell, a cousin in Boston, suggests the two temporarily swap apartments, Kate agrees, hoping that time away in a new place will help her overcome the past traumas of her life.

But at Corbin's grand apartment on Beacon Hill, Kate makes a shocking discovery: his next-door neighbor, a young woman named Audrey, has been murdered. When the police question her about Corbin, a shaken Kate has few answers, but many questions of her own--and her curiosity intensifies when she meets Alan, a handsome tenant who lives across the courtyard. Alan saw Corbin surreptitiously come and go from Audrey's place, yet Corbin's denied knowing her. Then, Kate runs into a man claiming to be the dead woman's old boyfriend, who insists Corbin did the deed.

Corbin proclaims his innocence and calms Kate's nerves . . . until she comes across disturbing objects hidden in the apartment. Could Corbin really be a killer? And what about Alan? Kate finds herself drawn to this appealing man who seems so sincere, but she isn't sure. Jet-lagged and emotionally fragile, her imagination full of dark images, Kate can barely trust herself, let alone a stranger she's just met. Yet the danger Kate imagines isn't nearly as twisted as what is about to happen. When her every fear becomes very real.

Shots have copies of HER EVERY FEAR with a generous discount from our bookstore here

Peter was in London last week and thanks to Faber & Faber’s Sophie Portis and Angus Cargill, I found myself invited to the launch, which was hosted in a Pub in West London. It was good to meet up with fellow literary commentators Nick Clee and John Williams, as well as catch up with Peter Swanson, a tremendous writer, who is often described, as a contemporary /updated version of Patricia Highsmith or James M Cain.

It wasn’t long before Angus Cargill of Faber & Faber [London] welcomed us to the gathering, as well as Peter saying a few words -

So if you are not familiar with the work of Peter Swanson, then click here for more information, and don’t forget, Shots Magazine’s bookstore has copies of HER EVERY FEAR with a very generous discount for our readers, so click here for your copy.