Eight Perfect Murders (Malcolm Kershaw, #1)

by Peter Swanson

Books are time travel. True readers all know this. But books don’t just take you back to the time in which they were written; they can take you back to different versions of yourself.

Brandon had picked Lee Child’s last Jack Reacher novel, and Emily had written a quick blurb on Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place. My pick had been Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson. I hadn’t read it, of course, but I’d read enough reviews and summaries to feel as though I had; also, I was fond of the title.

The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie The Nine Tailors (1934) by Dorothy L. Sayers The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) by Nicholas Blake Tied Up in Tinsel (1972) by Ngaio Marsh The Shining (1977) by Stephen King Gorky Park (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992) by Peter Høeg A Simple Plan (1993) by Scott Smith The Ice Harvest (2000) by Scott Phillips Raven Black (2006) by Ann Cleeves

All poems—all works of art, really, seem like cries of help to me, but especially poetry. When they are good, and I do believe there are very few good poems, reading them is like having a long-dead stranger whisper in your ear, trying to be heard.

“Winter Nightfall” by Sir John Squire. I could probably recite it by heart, but I wanted to see the words. When I found a poem I loved, I would read it again and again. For one entire year I must have read Sylvia Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”

We never get the whole truth, not from anybody. When we first meet someone, before words are ever spoken, there are already lies and half-truths. The clothes we wear cover the truth of our bodies, but they also present who we want to be to the world. They are fabrications, figuratively and literally.

Besides Malice Aforethought, she’d listed Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, the first two Sue Grafton books, The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman, and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, even though she said she’d never finished it (“I just love the beginning so much”). Her other favorite book was Bleak House by Charles Dickens; I guess you could say that it has mystery elements, as well.

I’ve always been suspicious of literary writers, with their attempts at immortality. That is why I much prefer thriller writers, and poets. I like the writers who know they are fighting a losing battle.

I’ve always felt that being with people, as opposed to being alone, can make you feel loneliness more acutely.

I find that I am most drawn to books I first read when I was barely a teenager. Agatha Christie novels. Robert Parkers. Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch novels. I read When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block in one sitting and cried after finishing the last sentence.

But I also managed to write down some of my favorite poems from memory. “Winter Nightfall,” of course, by Sir John Squire, “Aubade” by Philip Larkin, “Crossing the Water” by Sylvia Plath, and at least half the stanzas from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray.