Stephen McWilliams 
Dublin, Ireland

In Peter Swanson’s fifth novel, Before She Knew Him, Hen and Lloyd move in next door to Mira and Matthew in West Dartford, Massachusetts. Hen soon suspects her new neighbor of murder, but has trouble convincing people because her own history of mental illness makes her an unreliable witness in the eyes of the law. Hen, while unwell, has wrongly accused people before. In the course of all this, Swanson describes her illness and its treatment with considerable attention to detail. As he puts it, “Her current cocktail of meds, which included a mood stabilizer, an antidepressant, and something that apparently boosted the antidepressant’s effects, had kept Hen’s bipolar disorder from rearing its ugly head going on two years, but she did feel that it had also removed all of her creative impulses.”¹

Recounting Hen’s psychiatric history, Swanson tells us that “in her freshman year at Camden College, she’d had her first manic episode, cycling rapidly through bouts of wild self-confidence and crushing insecurity.”² Hen could not sleep at night and, as her mania worsened, she developed persecutory delusions about her fellow student Daphne, whom she believed to be a psychopath bent on killing her roommate, Sarah. Hen reported her concerns to her academic adviser and then to the local police, believing Daphne might kill her, but to no avail. Finally, “Hen, at three in the morning, her skin electric with anxiety, her mind a buzz saw of terrible thoughts, went outside Winthrop Hall in only an oversized T-shirt and threw a paving stone through Daphne’s window.”³ Hen injured herself, was treated in the ER, and was then admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Swanson goes on to evoke Hen’s subsequent depressive episode. “After a year back at home—six months spent in a hole so deep and so black she thought she’d never feel joy again,” life seemed to be normalizing.⁴ “Then one day in November she woke up late and confused, her body aching, and drained of any desire to ever create a piece of art.”⁵ Still in bed when Lloyd came home from work, Hen was tearful and experiencing strong suicidal ideation that ultimately resulted in her readmission to hospital where she was offered a change of medication and a course of ECT. She recovered well, noting that, “One of the benefits of the electroconvulsive therapy was that her memory of the whole episode was hazy at best, and some of it was completely gone.”⁶ In Swanson’s skillful hands, it soon becomes evident that Hen is, in fact, the sanest character in the story—something not infrequently true in real life. Sadly, the stigma of mental illness is such that Hen cannot relinquish her reputation as an unreliable witness. She is easy to gaslight.

Before She Knew Him is unique among Swanson’s dozen or so thrillers in that the plot relies heavily on what is called an “Axis I” (or mainstream DSM-5) mental illness. His other books rely on psychopathy (a severe personality disorder rather than a mental illness) or non-psychopaths committing murder and then trying to rationalize their guilty consciences. Swanson’s novels share other things in common. All are set in New England. The characters read a lot of American literary fiction, the titles often namedropped into the prose. Some are published or aspiring poets. Everyone seems to drink heavily. Many of the characters have well cared for cats with names; at one point, librarian-turned-vigilante-killer Lily Kintner—a recurring character—kills one cat to save another as a sort of warm-up for homicidal events involving people. Swanson even titled one of his novels Nine Lives.

The concept of the homicidal non-psychopath grappling with guilt is not a new one in fiction. In some ways, these murderers are more interesting than their psychopathic counterparts. Why else would murder mystery writers—from Agatha Christie to Georges Simenon to Jo Nesbø—have relied on them for over a century? Indeed, it is the basic premise of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, first published in 1866, in which the destitute student Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov murders the pawnbroker Alena Ivanovna in cold blood (partly to rob her apartment and partly by way of a quasi-social experiment) and her sister Lizaveta (an inadvertent witness to the first murder).⁷ Raskolnikov plays a game of cat and mouse with the local police, the prosecutor Porphyrius Petrovitch, and—for the most part—his own conscience. Dostoevsky, the son of a Moscow doctor, was in a good position to write such a groundbreaking work of fiction; he was sentenced to death in 1848 for his role in a radical socialist group known as the Petraveshky Circle but his sentence was commuted to four years in the Omsk labor camp and another four of compulsory military service. Perhaps he met a few psychopaths along the way.

Donna Tartt echoes Doetoevsky’s magnum opus in her own. In The Secret History, narrator Richard Papen grapples with his conscience over his complicity in the murder of Bunny, a fellow Greek scholar at Hampden College, Vermont. Perhaps Richard should have stuck with his original plan to study medicine. We know from the outset that Bunny will die; the motive, choreography, and consequences are gradually revealed. At one point, Richard attends Bunny’s wake and refers to it as “one of the worst nights of my life,” describing a house “filling with people and the hours passed in a dreadful streaky blur of relatives, neighbors, crying children, covered dishes, blocked driveways, ringing telephones, bright lights, strange faces, awkward conversations.”⁸ For Richard, the aftermath of the murder is torture, just as it is for Raskolnikov. Indeed, Richard refers to Crime and Punishment as he surmises, “It was I killed the old pawnbroker woman and her sister Lizaveta with an axe and robbed them.”⁹

The aftermath of murder is equally torturous for Thom Graves in Swanson’s most recent novel Kill Your Darlings. Thom is an English professor at New Essex State University, and Wendy, his other half, is a published poet. Born hours apart fifty-five years earlier, they are now the well-heeled, well-educated parents of a grown-up son and hold regular dinner parties for equally well-heeled, well-educated guests. Though likeable, Thom has a wandering eye and drinks far too much alcohol as he struggles to mask his dark secret. Wendy, a more gifted psychopath, has grown to hate her adulterous, alcoholic husband and decides she wants to murder him, eventually settling on an “accident” in which she pushes Thom down the Georgetown steps made famous by the film The Exorcist.

Kill Your Darlings is structured in an unusual manner: it starts at the end and finishes at the beginning. Wendy’s homicidal intent is evident from page one, set in 2023, such is her hatred for and boredom of her husband. But as the story gradually rewinds, eventually ending with Thom and Wendy’s first stolen kiss at fourteen on a school trip to Georgetown (on the very same steps), we see them fall ever deeper in love. Their story is tragic only if viewed through time’s arrow. Reverse time, as Swanson does, and the tale is a much happier one. Swanson borrowed this concept from Martin Amis, which he acknowledges in a passage set in 1993. Thom and Wendy meet at a book promotion event for Amis’ Time’s Arrow, published two years earlier and shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize. We are told, “The event was sold out, but they had let in twenty or so ticketless people to stand in the back of the church hall.”¹⁰ Amis’ interview by the president of the Paulding Book Festival was slow to gather momentum, although, “Toward the end of the hourlong interview the discussion had gotten a little livelier, maybe because Amis had steadily drunk his way through a bottle of red wine, and maybe because they had moved on from the topic of the novel being discussed, Time’s Arrow, and were now talking about pinball machines.”¹¹

In Time’s Arrow, the protagonist, Tod T. Friendly, lives his life backwards. But while Thom and Wendy’s story is simply told backwards, Friendly’s lifelong experience is in complete reverse second by second. For example, when eating, “First I stack the clean plates in the dishwasher,” he says, “…then you select a soiled dish, collect some scraps from the garbage, and settle down for a short wait. Various items get gulped up into my mouth, and after a skilful massage with tongue and teeth I transfer them to the plate for additional sculpture with knife and fork and spoon.”¹² Then “you face the laborious business of cooling, of reassembly, of storage, before the return of these foodstuffs to the Superette, where, admittedly, I am promptly and generously reimbursed for my pains.”¹³

Friendly’s story starts with his death, then his retirement, and then his later career as a physician, which makes him despondent because the patients he first meets are recovering well and his intervention serves only to make them ill. But as Friendly gets ever younger, he moves to Europe in time for World War II, where it transpires he is a Nazi doctor based in Auschwitz engaged in the horrific business of torturing Jews. But from his time-reversed perspective, he brings dead prisoners to life in the gas chambers and then dispatches them by train to their eventual liberation. In Amis’ eyes, reversing time reverses morality. Swanson explores the same theme with respect to love in Kill Your Darlings. In the end, from mental illness to conscience to time’s arrow itself, Peter Swanson’s murder mysteries are really rather special.

References

1. Swanson, P. Before She Knew Him. London: Faber & Faber (2019), 13.
2. Swanson, Before, 28.
3. Swanson, Before, 30.
4. Swanson, Before, 31.
5. Swanson, Before, 32.
6. Swanson, Before, 33.
7. Dostoevsky, F. Crime and Punishment. London: Penguin Popular Classics (1866, 1997).
8. Tartt, D. The Secret History. London: Penguin Random House (1993), 446.
9. Tartt, Secret History, 447.
10. Swanson, P. Kill Your Darlings. London: Faber & Faber (2025), 180.
11. Swanson, Kill Your Darlings, 180.
12. Amis, M. Time’s Arrow. London: Vintage (1991, 2019), 9.
13. Amis, Time’s Arrow, 10.