Eight Perfect Murders (Malcolm Kershaw, #1)

by Peter Swanson

I read the first paragraph, its words hauntingly familiar. 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.

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.

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.

I was not innocent, even though sometimes I allowed myself the luxury of thinking that I was. And if Gwen Mulvey discovered the truth, then I would have to accept it.

Being an avid mystery reader as an adolescent does not prepare you for real life. I truly imagined that my adult existence would be far more booklike than it turned out to be. I thought, for example, that there would be several moments in which I got into a cab to follow someone. I thought I’d attend far more readings of someone’s will, and that I’d need to know how to pick a lock, and that any time I went on vacation (especially to old creaky inns or rented lake houses) something mysterious would happen. I thought train rides would inevitably involve a murder, that sinister occurrences would plague wedding weekends, and that old friends would constantly be getting in touch to ask for help, to tell me that their lives were in danger. I even thought quicksand would be an issue. I was prepared for all this in the same way that I wasn’t prepared for the soul-crushing minutiae of life. The bills. The food preparation. The slow dawning realization that adults live in uninteresting bubbles of their own making. Life is neither mysterious nor adventurous. Of course, I came to these conclusions before I became a murderer. Not that my criminal career satisfied the fantasy life I had as a kid. In my fantasies I was never the murderer. I was the good guy, the detective (amateur, usually), who solved the crime. I was never the villain.

I have never been good at making friends. Sometimes I blame it on the fact that I am an only child, and that neither of my parents, excepting my father when he was drunk, was particularly sociable. But I think it goes deeper than that, to an inability to make genuine connections with people. The longer I interact with someone, the more distant I begin to feel from them. I can feel an enormous amount of affection for an elderly German tourist who visits my store for ten minutes and buys a used copy of a Simon Brett novel, but whenever I begin to truly get to know people, it’s as though they start to dim, as though they are behind a glass partition that gets thicker and thicker. The more I learn about them, the harder they are to see and hear in any meaningful way. There are exceptions. Claire, for one. My best friend in junior high, Lawrence Thibaud, who moved to somewhere in Brazil at the end of eighth grade. And characters in books, of course. And poets. The more I learn about them, the more I like them.

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.

“Spry,” I said. “Right, spry. That’s what I am. And if you decide to suddenly lunge at me, I’ll put a fucking bullet right through your face.” He smiled. “Okay,” I said.

IT’S A FUNNY THING grieving for someone you’ve murdered. In the beginning my sadness was coupled with an enormous guilt.

If you are still alive when you read this, close your eyes. I am under their lids, growing black.

There will be some satisfaction that I’ll die by drowning, that in a sense I’ll be fulfilling one of the murders from my list. MacDonald’s The Drowner. Maybe they’ll wonder if it wasn’t a suicide, after all. Or maybe my body will never be found. It’s nice to think I’ll leave a mystery in my wake.