Published in the Sunday Times
The Kind Worth Killing
Peter Swanson
The book began as a simple premise. I pictured a drunk man on a plane, telling the stranger next to him that he was thinking of killing his wife. I knew this man pretty well. He was not a natural-born killer, he was just a betrayed husband, full of rage. And I knew the woman next to him almost as well. She listened to this man’s story and decided that his wife deserved to die. But that was all I had.
At varying points before I ever started writing I would imagine how this story would play out. For a long time, I thought that the woman would begin to stalk the man after this airplane flight. I even imagined that the man would suffer a blackout and have no memory of the plane flight at all. The story nagged at me, so I decided I should just start writing and see what happened.
I was really just writing by the seat of my pants. I gave the man a name — Ted Severson — and had him narrate the story. The woman in the seat next to him became Lily Kintner and she turned out to be a narrator as well. I decided that they would tell the story in alternating chapters.
Then an interesting thing happened. Ted Severson was always going to be the lead of the story — he was the one who wanted to kill his wife — and Lily was just going to be extra motivation for him to achieve that goal. But then Lily, who starts her own story by recounting a murderous encounter when she was 13 years old, began to take over.
She was just so much more interesting than Ted. For one, she had spent a larger part of her life thinking about murder, not just as an instrument of revenge, but as a very practical survival tool. Even though she’s villainous, she would never think of herself as a villain. She was a protagonist, and I realised that she had staked that claim in my novel.
Readers read to find out what happens next. And sometimes writers write to do the same thing. That was the case with The Kind Worth Killing — writing it kept surprising me, right up to the very end.
Book details
- The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson
EAN: 9780571302192
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