Poured Over: Peter Swanson on Nine Lives

“My book starts in my brain with me telling myself a story. And I choose not to write it down, as I’m thinking about it. Sometimes for months, sometimes even maybe for a couple of years. My feeling is that if I stop thinking about it, or stop daydreaming about the story, then it’s died a natural death in my brain and shouldn’t make it to the page.” Nine strangers, one determined detective and plenty of devious ways to die; Peter Swanson’s latest whodunnit, Nine Lives, is a creepy, entertaining ride, and he joins us on the show to talk about Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell and his other literary influences, Maine, trading poetry for crime fiction, and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.

Featured Books:

Nine Lives by Peter Swanson

Eight Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays), here, and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: Peter Swanson, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over, we are huge fans. Eight Perfect Murders was one of our first monthly picks for mystery and suspense. And we’re going to go back to that one in a second. But Nine Lives is just out and, having reread Eight Perfect Murders and just read Nine Lives, I have to ask you a question about your internet browsing history, because you are very clever when it comes to killing characters. How did these books start for you?

Peter Swanson: Well, first of all, about my internet history. Yes, I think this is probably the case with most mystery writers that there’s a lot of how much carbon monoxide does it really take for someone to die? Is a good one. I’m assuming I’m flagged somewhere. And I’m assuming also maybe they’re smart enough to know. I mean, I think we’re all flagged somewhere. Right? Obviously, they — and when I say they, I mean the big internet cloud — know everything about us. Because, these days, they even know if you’re talking about buying a cardigan sweater with your wife. Suddenly, cardigan sweaters are making strange appearances in your social media. It’s very creepy. So, my searches might be creepy, but I think their searches on me are probably just as creepy.

B&N: So, Nine Lives is set partially in Maine and in a few other places. And we are going spoiler free in this conversation so, listeners, have no fear. But it starts with the death of a man in Maine. Yeah. And then we meet this cast of nine. Yes, there’s a letter that everyone has received with nothing more than a list of names. So, how did Nine Lives start for you?

PS: It’s the kind of book that I’ve wanted to write for a very long time. So, I think if you scratched the surface of a lot of mystery writers and mystery readers, you’ll go back to their childhood and find out that they definitely either read Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and that led them to read Agatha Christie, and that was the case with me and a lot of people I talked to — other writers and other readers. And the book that really grabbed me as a young, precocious adult book reader was And Then There Were None. The Agatha Christie book where 10 complete strangers are lured to an island, and then murdered off one by one. And she actually talked about spoilers, she gives it away and her title, not her original title, by the way. That book was just sort of a fascination for me when I was young. I just love that type of storyline. And the thing about that type of storyline is you got to get a bunch of strangers into a place and all those places nowadays are kind of cliches like putting them on an island, snowbound hotel, train that’s broken down — they’re all kind of these creaky Agatha Christie cliches. So, I was always wondering how to do it. How do you isolate people? When I came up with the idea that maybe they don’t need to be isolated, maybe they just need to be identified. So, in this case, nine people who don’t know one another all received the same letter, and the letter is a list of their names, including theirs, and then one by one, they begin to get killed. I love these kinds of stories because they actually contain a couple different layers of suspense and who done a trade, for lack of a better word, because you want to find out who’s doing it, and what their motive is. But you’re also wondering, what do these strangers have in common? I think that’s one of the mysteries in this book. And then there’s another mystery, which I think is really fun, which is who’s going to get killed off next, or who gets killed off first? I think we all, maybe you do this as well, when you watch a movie where you know a lot of people are going to get killed, we started identifying early victims. Like, oh, there’s that dumb girl who’s flirting with all the guys. And we’re all like, she’s dead within 20 minutes. So, I like to play around with that idea as well.

B&N: It was really fun trying to figure out how everyone knew each other. And I’m certainly staying far, far away from what I discovered, but piecing it together is certainly fun for the reader. But when you’re starting something like this, I’m going to guess you know whodunnit? Yeah?

PS: Yeah, I didn’t know some things. But I always know what the criminal’s up to.

B&N: Okay. So, when you’re starting a book like this, do you have the complete cast? I mean, is there space for you to still be surprised?

PS: Oh, yeah, because I plot very little. I had to do a little more plotting in this book, just because I needed nine people. But you know, one point it was 10. And then I reduced it. You know, I did a couple changes with characters because there is a connection between them, there was some parameters by which I was confined in creating these characters. But that said, I just had fun kind of coming up with the type of people that I don’t often put in my thrillers. They’re not detective types. They’re not criminal types. Some of them are, in fact, but a lot of them are just sort of ordinary kinds of people trying to get through their days. And those characters were kind of the most fun for me to write because I’m not used to writing them.

B&N: Did any of the characters change radically while you were writing? Or did they all stay steady enough taking the killer out of the equation? Especially when you’re writing characters that you’re not used to writing?

PS: So, the very first character we’re introduced to is Allison, and she’s lived in New York City, and she’s fallen into a relationship with an older man. She’s essentially a kept mistress. And he pays for apartment, and she doesn’t really do much. There were reasons I came up with her as a character early on. And I didn’t give her a lot of thought. And I think as the story went on, she kept surprising me because I kept wondering like, how did she get to this place in her life? And how does she feel about it? And what kind of life would she rather be living because she’s not particularly happy with her life as it is. She’s not miserable, per se. I mean, I didn’t want her to be a tragic figure because of her situation. So, she was kind of surprising to me. And I did decide early on that one of the characters, one of these random characters was going to be kind of a budding psychopath, a really psychopathic personality, although he hadn’t really done anything about it yet, but he’s certainly on the edge. He kind of stayed the same for me, that was kind of his primary, who he was.

B&N: And yeah, he was deeply creepy. The thing about this killer is the killer is very, very clever. And we don’t really want to give away how people died. By pairing up names with deaths. But you had some smart stuff in here, do you have a favorite?

PS: Well, there’s a contraption, which is such an old-fashioned idea that there’s basically a contraption that causes a death, so the person doesn’t have to be there. And it’s a locked room death. As someone who has spent my whole life reading mystery novels, there’s sub-genres, within sub-genres within sub-genres in the crime genre field, and one of those that comes and goes in popularity is the locked-room mystery. I mean, there were authors who just specialized in it. So that was fun to do that, because it was a little out there and I wouldn’t normally put it in another book. But I figured in this one, we might have a deathly contraption. So, we do.

B&N: Did you start with the characters? Or did you start with their deaths?

PS: I started with the characters. First, I started with the idea. I was like, okay, this is interesting. How would these people react if they got this letter? Would they try and find the other members on this list? Would they try and solve themselves? Would they freak out? They’re all staring death in the face in a way. So, I started with the idea. And then I went to character and quickly realized that I couldn’t do character until I knew who was doing this and why. So, once I got that, I came up with the characters. And then I tried to think like the killer, which is always fun to see. Is there an order you’d want to bump off these people? A smart order to do it? Get the hard ones out of the way first. And these are all sorts of considerations. Because eventually, as soon as the police and the FBI, and they quickly become aware of the situation, you know, they’re going to put protective details around these people, and the killer is going to have to get around them. So, I tried to think like the killer in this case, which is kind of what I do that always in my books. If you’re ever stuck in a mystery, this is my advice to mystery novel writers. Sometimes you get stuck in a story in that soggy middle, or what have you, always think about what your killer is doing. Don’t think about your hero or your protagonist, because your killer is the one who’s driving the narrative, always, even if they’re hidden. So, if you’re not kind of solid with them, sometimes the story itself loses some stability. So, I always try and do this anyway.

B&N: Is Sam coming back? Sam’s the local detective in Maine. Would you revisit him and put him in a situation or has his story played out exactly as it needed to?

PS: I might bring back Sam. I’m always looking for continuation detectives. I don’t write a series, I write standalones. But I have had occasional detectives who cross over from stories. And I was sort of fond of Sam’s backstory. He’s not a detective in charge of this case, he’s a detective who stumbles on this case and becomes interested in it. He’s a local detective. So, when the case will swiftly become FBI, because of course, it’s happening in multiple states, but he has connections to it. And what makes him really fun is that he has a love of Golden Age crime novels that he picked up from his grandmother. And that’s kind of informed his life and one of the reasons he became a detective and one of the reasons that he moves to Maine, because he’s someone who’s originally from Louisiana, and even before then, originally from Caribbean islands, and England as well. So, he has this sort of interesting background, but he has this love of books. So, he recognizes that there’s a bookish quality to these murders. And he begins to think of it in those terms, which kind of allowed me to have a kind of meta take on the book that I felt I could get away with because of this character. So, I did enjoy him. And you know, if I if I ever put him in another mystery, I think I’d have to put them in kind of another literary type mystery where he could think about it in those terms.

B&N: There’s also a very fun moment with him where he has to go speak to someone who is not in Maine and he grabs a copy of And Then There Were None but he goes to buy a new one because I don’t really want to take my copy. I want to read this again, but I don’t really want to take my copy off the shelf. I’m gonna go buy a new one, which I thought I might not be the only person who’s ever done that. It’s like let’s go get another copy. Alright, so New England is as much a character as your FBI agent. Sam, and the nine lives of the title. Certainly, you could have set this book wherever you wanted. But Maine, Maine is a very good creepy backdrop for many, many things. I say this as someone who went to college in Maine to and has spent quite a lot of time there. How did you settle on Maine?

PS: Several of my books have connections with Maine. The first reason is because personally, I have a connection with Maine. I grew up in Massachusetts, and we were the family that took our two-week vacation every year getting a cottage in Maine. And it just became one of my favorite places. I love the rocky coast rockiness and beaches. It is a fairly dramatic coastline. And I’ve just continued to go back. So, I like to set things there. And I think it works really well as a backdrop to murder mysteries. I mean, I think any place works well. But there’s a few things. I mean, one, it’s moody, you can have storms, you have dark winters, you have interesting summers where places get filled up with tourists, but you also have classically sort of reticent people, I think the same way that like English murder mysteries do. In the sense that people don’t wear their emotions on their sleeves, necessarily, and maybe have secrets that they like to hide or don’t want to talk to people. And I think that’s always helpful in a way for murder mystery.

B&N: When you’re building a story like this, and you’ve got your people, and you’ve got the board, what’s the editing process like for you? I mean, how much are you having to shift and move and cut and rebuild to get the story you want?

PS: So now I’m going to admit how little actual plotting and outlining I do and how much of it, I actually am just sort of flying by the seat of my pants. I don’t want to say I’m making it up as I go along. Because which is funny about that. I did recently read a review, not of mine, but of another book where someone said this sounds like this author just made it up as they went along and I thought well, yeah, of course they did. And how else do you think these things get made? Of course, I’m making it up as I go along. In this case, I definitely got that the going back and the cutting was much more intense, because of the timeline, because I had sort of, essentially, you start with nine different characters and nine different places all getting the same letter at the same time. And then I’m sort of bouncing back and forth between them. And I really had to keep track of the timeline. And so, I actually created like a calendar, what happens on what day and even with a calendar, like my own calendar, and my real life, I got it all wrong. And the editors had to come along and tell me that like this could have been happening on this day, because this was happening on this day. So, thank God for copy editors at my publishing house, because they do catch a lot of that stuff. And I’m not great at it, I just get bored and bogged down with those little details, I want to get on to the next sort of big thing. So, there are authors who are very good at this. And I have author friends who have the like sticky notes on the wall above them that tell them when things are happening. And then they can move those around. I don’t do any of that

B&N: Doesn’t sound like you need it though. It just sounds like you dive in and go.

PS: I have a strange little system of plotting my books, which is because I get a lot of ideas because I’m primarily a daydreamer and I’ve been that since I was a kid, like I often just space out. And when I’m spacing out, I’m telling myself a story. And this is how my book starts. So, they my book start in my brain with me telling myself a story. And I choose not to write it down as I’m thinking about it. Sometimes for months, sometimes even maybe for like a couple of years. My feeling is that if I stop thinking about it, or stop daydreaming about the story, then it’s died a natural death in my brain and shouldn’t make it to the page. So, what will happen and what has happened for the past eight books, fortunately, is that some story kind of emerges victorious in my head, and I start thinking about it and adding to it and actually then starting to create the characters and maybe giving them names. And at some point, there’s enough in there that I just think I’m going to start writing now. Yeah, so there’s a lot of sort of thought that’s already gone into that without any kind of outlining. So that’s my process, which makes it sound like I have a good memory and I don’t think I do, but I guess I have a good memory for whatever story I’m sort of currently working on in my head. And then once I’ve written that, it’s gone. It’s poof out of my head. So that’s my process, which made a book like Nine Lives actually kind of hard. I think it threw me out of my comfort zone for a little while just because it was like a lot of juggling. Usually, I juggle three balls. This was juggling nine balls, so I had to work a little harder on my calendars and things like that.

B&N: Okay, so here you are saying you’ve daydreamed some of these stories, which I think is a really lovely way to describe the creative process. You’ve grown up reading murder mysteries and thrillers and this is what you’ve immersed yourself in. What is it about murder mysteries that we just keep coming back to?

PS: I actually think about this a lot. And I think my short answer is actually, I’m not 100% sure. Although I think there are some good guesses out there. One of them is that a murder mystery novel throws the world into chaos. I mean, if you just want to pick like a classic story, there’s an English country village, and the schoolteacher is brutally murdered. You’re in Eden, right, and then something’s come along and destroyed the con of this town, and then an inspector or detective figure, or it could be a little old lady, a little nosy old lady, it doesn’t matter. And they’re essentially almost like a religious figure. They come along, and they take the chaos, and they restore order to the universe. So, there’s something nice about that — comforting. When I think about that, I also think about those few mystery novels that don’t end like that. I mean, we have hard boiled tales that came out of America that created film noir that kind of, and with that, the world is not restored, that we are actually living in a world of sin. And we just need to negotiate our way through it. And I find those comforting as well. So, my new theory is that it’s nice to sit at home, in the comfort of your own home and read about bad things happening to other people, and know that you’re not part of it at that particular moment. So that’s the third thing, the less intellectual version, which is it’s not happening to me. And I also think darkness is fascinating. I mean, everyone has slight dark sides or dark thoughts. So, to read about people who go past those lines that we would never pass is interesting.

B&N: Agatha Christie obviously plays a big role in both Eight Perfect Murders and Nine Lives because of her influence on you, but also her influence on the story as well. There’s a little Patricia Highsmith in your work. There are a couple of references if I remember correctly. There’s James M. Cain and John MacDonald. But John MacDonald shows up in both books, right?

PS: Yeah, John MacDonald, John D. MacDonald. And I suspect a number of listeners won’t know of him. But he was a hugely popular thriller writer in mid-century America. And he had a series called Travis McGee and Travis McGee was kind of a boat bum in Florida who would solve people’s problems. And this was sort of late 60s, early 70s, that type of thing that if you were like a 14-year-old boy like me, and discovered these books at your local used bookstore, really warped your idea of what the life would be like, but they were fun. They’re an interesting combination of male wish fulfillment. He’s a heroic figure. He sort of beds a new, beautiful, interesting woman in every book, he kills the bad guy, but he’s also quite philosophical about it. And he even gets depressed and stuff in the series, which is kind of interesting. Those Travis McGee books, in his standalone thrillers, John D. McDonald’s, were books I loved, along with Agatha Christie, that are very different.

B&N: It’s funny, to me, that as classic as these stories are, and there are not necessarily all of the details that age, well, necessarily, but at the same time, there’s sort of a style that happens within a genre for a while and you were talking about locked-room mysteries, and then you find something else. And then you come back. Colson Whitehead, when I interviewed him about Harlem Shuffle, he was talking a lot about the Parker novels, which I’d forgotten Donald Westlake had written these Parker novels, right? This very accomplished, and they’re kind of fun, and they’re kind of zany and they’re kind of dark.

PS: They’re very amoral. He just sort of brutally, I mean, he has a code, which is, but his code is pretty broad. I mean, he’ll kill pretty much I think in the first one, he kills his girlfriend, and he’s the hero and he’s the hero and like, 12 books, so yeah, and those were 60s into the 70s around there. Those were creepy books.

B&N: Yeah, and I read some Ross MacDonald when I was 12 or 13, or whatnot. I don’t really remember them. But I do remember thinking oh, okay, fine, because I think my aunt had a couple in Florida and I was like, well, I’ve run out of stuff to read, I’ll give this a whirl. Besides Agatha Christie and besides John McDonald, who are some of the folks that you come back to?

PS: I’d say the number one that I keep coming back to is Ruth Rendell. So, there were a couple. You know, you always want to put these writers and just slots and there were too big British crime novelists — P. D. James and Ruth Rendell, who were both considered they’re sort of the heir to the Agatha Christie crown. I like P. D. James. She writes these kind of detailed police procedurals that are a little bit Gothic. Adam Dalgliesh is her detective, but I greatly prefer Ruth Rendell. Ruth Rendell was someone who brought, they’re Christie like a little, but they’re really twisted psychological thrillers mixed in with sort of English countryside police procedurals, but she has really interesting deviant characters, not always the villains sometimes the heroes. I mean, first of all, she’s just a brilliant writer. So, even if it’s not the greatest story, you’re going to be reading great paragraph after great paragraph. So, I love that about her. She kind of went back and forth between these more complex psychological things and whodunnits. And then she was writing so much that she wrote under the pseudonym Barbara Vine and wrote these much more Gothic tales that were really about buried crimes. So, I’ve been reading her for 20 years now. And if I’m stuck in a reading rut, or just don’t know what to read next, and I’m close to having read all of her books. Fortunately, she wrote a lot. I go back to her, I love her.

B&N: Are you doing screen work as well? Are you primarily working with books?

PS: If anyone’s listening, I’d love to do some screen work. I haven’t been asked. A few of my books have been optioned for them. Four of them. And I think three are currently under option. And it’s such an interesting thing. They’re such different industries; film and books. So, I got this from Paul Tremblay, the writer. He said the publishing industry is no, no, no, no, no, no, yes. If you’re lucky enough to get published, and the film industry is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, no. Which has been my experience, which is the few times that I’ve met with like producers who want to produce one of my books, it’s like, they talk different than publishing people. They’re very enthusiastic, and they make you feel like you’re about, you know, own the world. Because they tell you things like, you’re the hot next writer, and this movie’s going to be so big that you should probably start thinking about writing the sequel right now, because of how big the movies going to be. And then you don’t hear anything, and nothing happens. So, there’s a lot of building up the products that don’t exist yet. Whereas in publishing, I think when I first got published, I heard from my agent and the people in the publishing house is like Well, congratulations, we liked this book enough to publish it. And who knows, maybe we’ll sell some. It’s kind of that attitude, which I prefer. So, I’m not too interested in going into the industry that’s the movie industry because of I think you can do a lot of work, and nothing ever comes out of it. For right now, I’m happy to write books. That said, I don’t have interest in adapting my own books. But one day, I wouldn’t mind adopting a novel I love. Maybe a John D. MacDonald, maybe Ruth Rendell, maybe one of those, for a movie. I think that would be fun.

B&N: Part of why I ask is it seems that a lot of British crime writers have been somewhat successfully adapted and there seems to be a cultural moment that happens in the UK, and I don’t know if it’s just sort of culturally, they love their crime novels. I mean, we love crime novels here in the states too. But it does seem like there’s a little bit more of an opportunity for sort of a Shetland or a Vera.

PS: The detective series in England. It’s amazing the appetite people have for these stories. You know, a good murder mystery, an interesting detective, and we’ll happily sit and watch. It’s definitely the most read genre in the UK, is the mystery genre. And I think it’s creeping up close to that in the US.

B&N: We’re doing what we can. We quite like it.

PS: Yeah, it’s kind of amazing the enduring popularity of this genre and also just the quality of the English television detective series is kind of amazing to me. I think a lot of them are really good. In fact, I just mentioned P.D. James and Dalgliesh. This one’s a little hard to find, but they just did three of her books and it’s on, I want to say Acorn, which is like an English television streaming service, but the new versions are really good. And Ruth Rendell, oddly enough, never had a really successful English translation. But her books have been turned into several well-known French thrillers. She’s extremely popular in France, partly because I think her psychological side to her thrillers. There’s been lots of French versions of Ruth Rendell novels, there are certain things that just take off in France and you don’t necessarily know what they are. But I mean, Patricia Highsmith was always popular in France and Europe, in general.

B&N: You may not be doing adaptations. But do you have something recently that you’ve seen that sort of has knocked your socks off? In terms of crime fiction on the screen?

PS: Not necessarily that’s come out new. I mean, I watch a lot of old movies. This past year, the film I was really looking forward to was Nightmare Alley, which is the Guillermo del Toro version of the Grisham novel about a sort of amoral carnival drifter grifter, which was made into a 1940s film with Tyrone Power. And so, this is the new version with Bradley Cooper. I watched them back-to-back, so I had never actually watched the original. So, I went to the theater and saw the new one. And then I watched the 1940s one, and I think if you took the best parts of the new one and the best parts of the old one, you’d have like a perfect film. There was something not quite there on both those films but go see the new one just for the beautiful cinematography. I mean, it looks amazing. I just think it sort of sags there a little plot wise it goes on too long and gives itself away a little too much. The first one moves faster, but is not visually appealing. So together, I think they’d be a perfect film. And then there was a kind of an interesting detective movie that came out this year called The Dry based on Jane Harper’s book about a small Australian town and a police officer with Eric Bana. It almost felt like a throwback. It didn’t have like big twists, it was kind of this guy returns to his hometown and solves a crime. It’s kind of something you’ve seen before. But it was done so well. And the town itself was so interesting, because it was this sort of dying town in Australia dying, literally dying, because it’s under this drought. That’s just drying it up to nothing. And then I thought it was a good solid thriller.

B&N: So, there’s something in your bio that I thought was interesting. And I’ve been wanting to ask you about, too. It looks like you have multiple MFAs? I mean, you went to UMass Amherst, and also Emerson College?

PS: My degree from UMass Amherst was to teach English. That was a teaching degree. That was an M Ed. Okay. And then I started to teach high school English. And it was an interesting experience, it was one of my dreams, and it didn’t happen. And I’m always amazed when I hear of a teacher, especially a high school teacher, who’s also a writer, because I realized after teaching high school English, that I would never write, again, because it takes everything, it’s so much hard work. It may be after you’re there for five years, it becomes less work. I don’t know, I had nothing left. So around that same time, I was offered up sort of a free ride at Emerson College as an MFA student in poetry, very different, and did that instead. And that’s how I wound up becoming more of a full-time writer than a teacher.

B&N: Okay, how do you go from poetry to crime writing?

PS: Well, I don’t know if you noticed, but I think in the two books that we’ve been talking about, there’s a fair amount of poetry involved. I think I went from poet to crime writer because I essentially failed as a poet, which sounds miserable, or sounds like I’m putting myself down. But I think I’m a better crime writer than I was as a poet. And even though I desperately wanted to be a great poet, or a good poet, or published poet, and I was a semi-published poet, it’s like when you’re like, I’m an amateur painter. And I always picture what that painting is going to look like. And then I painted, it just looks like an amateur version of what I thought it would look like. It’s a little like that with poetry. I never quite got to where I wanted to be. But I kept at it because I loved it. And it was in my 30s and I had not tried writing a novel. But I thought to myself, well, maybe I should try writing a novel now that I’m a little older. And what kind of novel should I write and I thought, Well, what I really love to read are crime novels. And I originally came up with this idea that combined poetry and crime, which was this kind of amateur, sort of down on his heels poet, slash teacher character in Boston, who sort of amateurly solves crimes. It’s kind of a cozy poet whodunnit. And I wrote two of them. They were not published, by the way. So don’t go looking, don’t go typing through your Barnes and Noble site to look for these things. They only exist in my drawer, which is probably the best place for them. But what I discovered was that I loved writing a novel, it was really fulfilling. And I loved being in the middle of a story that I can get up and sort of continue on with. And I love that process. Eventually, my fourth novel got published and this is now what I do. Poetry is really in the rearview mirror, except for reading.

B&N: Who are some of your favorite poets?

PS: I love Philip Larkin. I like those sort of English, 20^th-century cynical poets. I just went on an Anne Sexton kick, and read all of her poems and love those. I mean, she’s just such a brilliant poet. Her imagery is incredible. I like Wendy Pope, who’s a funny British poet who is currently writing poetry. Whenever she has a new book, I’m excited about that. And then poet I just discovered who’s sort of under the radar. His name’s Louis MacNeice. He wrote in the 30s, 40s and 50s, in England, and a really perceptive beautiful writer. Wrote something called Autumn Journal, which was actually a long poem he wrote in 1938, where he’s talking about his life in the countryside, and then also thinking about what’s happening in Europe in 1938. And was a beautiful book.

B&N: I had a summer where I did Anne Sexton and Cowl Lowes poems. It was kind of great having the two of them in conversation. At some point, I sort of want to do the whole Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, but time is a little harder to get.

PS: But that sort of moment in time, I think poetry kind of blossoms in these moments. So, in the 30s, in England, you had these sort of war poets Siegfried Sassoon. And then you had Auden and Eliot, and you had this sort of blooming poetry, fertile ground thing. And then you had that again, I think, in America when Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, and you know, they’re all taking the same class in Boston, and then writing these absolutely devastating poems, just kind of amazing.

B&N: What do you want listeners to know, about Nine Lives?

PS: I think, first of all, that it will be an entertaining ride. When I sit down to write, you know, I write in a genre, and that genre is mystery and suspense and thriller. So, I think first and foremost, I’m trying to write something that will make the reader be like, what’s going to happen next? And why is this happening? And I need to know. And that’s the sort of basics and I hope I got that, that would be first. And then, second of all, I like to think that there’s a little bit of a philosophical underpinning to this novel, which is about the fact that we are all going to die. And this is, of course, the great poetic theme as well, which is what poets are always grappling with, which is our impending deaths, and how do we live our lives? And that underpins this book, which is that all these characters are having these moments, some of their lives are going well, some not well, but they’re all kind of heading toward the same door. You know, I don’t want to oversell that part of the book. But it was something I was thinking about when I was writing it. I’m hoping some of it sort of crept into the novel as well.

B&N: Oh, it definitely does. Do you have a favorite moment from Nine Lives?

PS: Without giving anything away, some of the people on the list reach out to one another, and two of them, and this was a little bit of a surprise to me, but two of them start writing. First text messages, and then emails, and then they talk, and it becomes a little bit of a love story. So, there’s a moment with them, which was kind of my favorite bit in the book, and my least favorite as well.

B&N: Because you knew they were going to die?

PS: Yeah.

B&N: It was very sweet. It was a very lovely moment. I have to admit, I was definitely surprised by the method by which they were dispatched. It’s not exactly what I was expecting. It was kind of great. What’s next for you? Are you working on the new book?

PS: Yeah, so I have a new book, and it’s actually the first time I’ve ever written a book, I’m calling it a semi sequel to my second novel, which is The Kind Worth Killing. What makes it a semi sequel, not a complete sequel, is that it kind of introduces new characters and a new story, but then into the story arrive two characters from that previous book they become enmeshed. So, in other words, it’s the sequel, for sure, but you don’t need to know the plot details of the The Kind Worth Killing, to follow it. It was the first time I really returned in full force to a character that I loved writing. The first time, Lily Kintner, who’s from The Kind Worth Killing, it was really fun to get back and see what she’s up to.

B&N: So maybe there’s hope for Sam.

PS: Yeah. Do you want Sam to return?

B&N: I think he’s a smart guy. And I’m also trying to stay away from the very big twist at the end, because I would also like to see that person. Okay. I think that person was kind of nifty. And yeah, I am dancing on the edge there. But that was a moment I was absolutely not expecting. So, I was I appreciate that. It’s fun to puzzle through the story with the characters and with you. Obviously, you’re driving, but at the same time, puzzling through those bits, but I was not expecting the very, very end of this book.

PS: Okay, I like to hear that.

B&N: Did you know that was going to happen? Or did that sort of come out of the writing of the book?

PS: It was a late thought. And as soon as I had it, it kind of made sense. As a sort of counterintuitive twist. It was not always intended.

B&N: It’s a very cool moment. Peter Swanson thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Nine Lives is out now Eight Perfect Murders is available in paperback, too. And if you haven’t read that, we really think you should pick it up.

PS: Thank you, Miwa. This was a lot of fun.