West Heart Kill

by Dann McDorman

The writer of murder, like all writers, must be a miser, conceding revelations bit by bit; for every novel is a puzzle, and every reader a sleuth.

If this novel has a thesis statement, the way we’re taught to do in grammar school, this sentence is probably it. But in West Heart Kill, I take this sentiment quite literally — and (some would argue!) to an extreme.

This case was a nasty one, parents hiring him to locate and extract their daughter from a cult in California.

This was the first piece of my detective’s backstory that I wrote; as I got to know McAnnis better, I slowly filled in the blanks. “The Cult Job” reflects the research I was doing into the 1970s, trying to immerse myself in what was a very violent, unsettling time. This story also reflects some personal experience. I lived in the Bay Area for several years, and it’s where I worked briefly as a newspaper reporter. My last published article was a long investigative piece about a cult in Berkeley. A mother called me with a strange, disturbing story: her husband was in a cult, and they were trying to take away her daughter… (as readers will discover, this story stays with McAnnis in much the same way that it stayed with me).

If the wind is right, they almost—almost—play Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy.’ But of course they never play it perfectly.”

Claudia’s wind chimes are a great example of the happy serendipity that research and necessity can bring to a novel. Claudia and McAnnis are on the porch, talking. For pacing, I needed a break in dialogue — something for them to do. But what? I don’t know — maybe they look up and see wind chimes. Great. But I didn’t know anything about wind chimes. Some determined googling led me to the website of a company selling wind chimes that purportedly play famous riffs from classical music: Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, etc. Terrific. Except when I listened to the sample of an “Ode to Joy” wind chime, I realized that it didn’t really work. The notes were all there, but the odds were a million to one that they would ever play in the right order and in the right rhythm. I thought of people all over the world buying these chimes and waiting, waiting, for the wind to be absolutely perfect so that they could, finally, hear the “Ode to Joy.” But of course that would never ever happen. And I found this unspeakably sad. The notion haunted me so much that it resurfaces twice more later in the novel.

“Every year, without knowing it, we pass the date of our death,” declares Jonathan Gold, eyes flitting around the table.

When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned to read a poem by W.S. Merwin titled “For the Anniversary of My Death.” It begins: “Every year without knowing it I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me / And the silence will set out.” What an unsettling idea! That we have a “death day” just as much as we have a “birth day.” The notion stuck with me, and I turned to it when I needed some ominously foreshadowing dinner conversation on McAnnis’ first night at the club.

Does he comprehend the danger?

The Word Problems that end Thursday are of course, in some mystical way, linked to the word problems that Ralph was working on during the earlier dinner. They were inspired by one of my favorite John Updike short stories, entitled simply “Problems,” which uses the format to address those peculiarly Updike-ian obsessions: infidelity, suburbia, selfishness. My twist on what Updike did is that each word problem reflects a character in the novel.

The 1935–1940 plaque has been removed, recently, and each of the other plaques painstakingly moved into the place of its predecessor.

The idea for what became West Heart Kill was born when, on a whim, I wrote the dust jacket copy for a book that did not yet exist. The only specific clue I had then was that the unnamed detective would discover, in the lodge on a wall full of plaques marking club presidents, that one of them was missing. Why? I had no idea! In some sense, I wrote the book just to answer that question for myself. It doesn’t hurt sometimes, I think, to let the tail wag the dog in terms of writing.

“I’m wrestling with the angels,” I said.

Unfortunately, I have a lot of trouble sleeping — I have been one acquainted with the night, as Robert Frost puts it. The Jacob story in Genesis has always struck me as a metaphor of insomnia. It’s an apt affliction for fictional detectives, who tend to get more weary and disoriented as the plots progress. McAnnis, of course, is also scarred by his experience at war, which is as distressingly common now as it was then.

Apex predators in a city of carrion.

In this section, I tried to capture just how strange and unsettling it feels the first time a child visits a parent’s workplace. It’s a bit like seeing a friend acting on stage, in costume — they both are and are not the person you thought you knew. My father was in the U.S. Army for 20+ years; this passage reflects my awe and confusion as a child at seeing him dressed in combat fatigues, sleeves rolled up, boots on his desk, smoking cigarettes and trading vulgar jokes with other sergeants at the armory.

Touch your toes Touch your nose Never go in one of those Hold your collar Do not swallow Until you see a dog

Let’s face it: kids are creepy. They have their own secret rituals and traditions, and even their own language — scholars say some schoolyard nursery rhymes have been passed down for centuries. I have two kids of my own; when they were very young, it felt at times that they were in touch with some hidden strata of the world which was invisible to me and other adults. (It’s probably why horror films focused on children strike such a nerve.) This uncanniness surfaces a few times in the novel, including in the character of Ralph.

7) What emotion would be most likely to drive you to kill? (Select only one.) LOVE HATE

I’ve occasionally used this as an ice-breaker question at book events — “By a show of hands, what emotion…yadda yadda.” Interestingly, there seem to be a lot more HATERS than LOVERS out there. Myself, I fall in the LOVE camp; I’m most likely to kill to protect someone I LOVE than to eliminate someone I HATE.

And you’re imagining this rat, smeared with John Garmond’s blood, dragging its belly across the stores in the pantry, while reflecting on this new gambit by the author, shifting to the “we” of the first-person plural, a form you’ve seldom encountered in murder mysteries, and for good reason, since the “we” effectively obscures the “who”—which, you realize, might be the reason to tack in this direction now, when the “who” moves to the heart of the story, a ploy allowing the murderer’s individual identity to be concealed in the “we” like a leaf hidden in a forest, or a body on a battlefield.

Fans of G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown sleuth may spot a reference here to his revelatory short story “The Sign of the Broken Sword.” As for the shifting perspectives, this was a format I’d resolved to do very early on: I wanted each day to be told from a different point of view, as a way to stamp each section with its own identity. (The exception being the “you” second-person perspective of the imaginary reader, which remains present throughout the novel for reasons that will, I hope, become clear by the end.)

And so it was that, on one auspicious day in the autumn of 1928, Christie stepped on board the fabled Orient Express…

All of these essays (my wife called them “interstitials”) reflect back on the story in some way, helping to elucidate plot or character. This particular essay, as its placement suggests, echoes Claudia Mayer’s predicament, just as the Dashiell Hammett essay hints at McAnnis, or maybe even — if I’m being honest — at myself. Agatha Christie’s disappearance is the great mystery of what was an otherwise precise and orderly life. She was quite clearly embarrassed by it, or perhaps mystified by it. This secret deep well of passion makes her, I think, a more interesting and sympathetic figure. I’m also moved by the fact that the book that became Christie’s greatest success was born in the wake of such personal misery.

You recognize this type of scene from past mysteries: the Great Detective Pondering the Case.

Formula is a key part of the fun of mysteries — we’re all familiar with these stock scenes and characters. Greedy nephews. Clueless policemen. Foolishly romantic young lovers. When does the detective overhear the heated argument in the garden? What letter’s return address causes all color to leave the mother’s face? How does a fading, sepia-tinged photograph of a rowing team reveal the vital clue to a murder, decades later? I think that one reason that readers and writers of mysteries can forge such tight relationships is because they share this common vocabulary.

For a few hours, he’ll stay behind the steering wheel, watching the yellow rectangles in her building go out, one by one, the first and only time he’s been on a stakeout for himself.

This passage was inspired by one of the saddest parts of a very sad play — King Lear. At the end, the old king is doomed to die but doesn’t know it. And he speaks wistfully to his daughter Cordelia about their imagined future together, a future they will be denied by fate and the cruelty of men. Lear says to her: “Come, let’s away to prison. / We two alone will sing like birds in the cage. / When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live, / And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh…” Lear is, finally, a better person than he was at the start of the play. But it’s too late. And this sad little imagined future will never come to pass.

Ralph felt that this map, his secret map, was in fact the true map of West Heart.

This entire scene was not in my original manuscript. At some point during rewrites, my editor at Knopf, Jennifer Barth (who’s absolutely amazing), proposed that we needed one more scene near the end, before some of the novel’s really crazy stuff starts to go down. I immediately thought of Ralph, who is one of my favorite characters in the book. His role is limited but important; I decided to give him a new map and one more crack at solving the word problems from Thursday night. (The “NO LIMIT” answer to problem #3 was inspired by Bob Dylan’s song “Love Minus Zero / No Limit.” At a concert once, Dylan said “The name of this song is a fraction… I made the title before I made the song.”)