West Heart Kill: A novel

literal partners in crime, David Black, Susan Raihofer, Paul Bogaards, and Jennifer Barth.

All we have, you and I, are these guilty memories of bloody crimes in which we are both complicit; for every writer is a murderer, and every reader a sleuth.

Did I hesitate before I wet my fingers to snuff out whatever Promethean flame fired Adam McAnnis?

W. H. Auden’s plot tip to Raymond Chandler (which he ignored): a club of assassins who, suspecting that one of their number is killing for sport instead of money, hire a private detective to find this killer among killers. Who better to interrogate the writer of murder, than the reader of same?

Agatha Christie savaged Hercule Poirot—inflicting him with a terminal illness and finally, cruelly, turning him into a murderer—in a fit of revenge that she kept buried in a drawer for three decades (The New York Times printed a Poirot obituary when the book was finally published).

What moves a man to murder a character named after his own dead son?

I pitied him for the miseries I inflicted upon him. Nor did I hate Claudia Mayer or John Garmond. If you credit this confession at all, then you may trust this: these were crimes of logic, not passion. Once I understood my plot, their deaths were a necessity. I could not do otherwise but kill them.

The son hates his father. The wife hates her husband. The suicide hates herself…

With the same mysterious force by which an ancient deity turned a woman into a pillar of salt. That is to say, a combination of magic and myth and belief.