PETER SWANSON says “Kill Your Darlings”

Written by Ali Karim

Here at Shots Magazine we’ve followed the work of Peter Swanson eagerly from his 2014 debut novel ‘The Girl with a Clock for a Heart’ right up to his latest, ‘Kill Your Darlings’ which is released on 3^rd July 2025 – a date to mark boldly in your diary.

We wrote about Swanson’s latest novel –

“Thom Graves is a tenured English Professor in his mid-fifties. His wife Wendy also works in academia, and was a published poet in her youth. She considers that her husband drinks too much, has a wandering eye and worryingly has started writing a novel – a murder mystery. Wendy can tolerate his drinking and even his flings with younger women at the University – but what she cannot accept is his writing.

At a dinner party she ponders what her life would be like without him so she decides to murder him.”

‘Kill Your Darlings’ is a difficult book to review without revealing spoilers, as the narrative unspools in reverse. I pondered upon Søren Kierkegaard’s assertion that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

“I sat in silence when I put the book down, and have been pondering the narrative as Kill your Darlings provokes deep thought – contemplation of fate intertwined with free-will to form our lives and our deaths and that of others that we interact with.”

Read the full review [free from spoilers] HERE

So after putting down “Kill Your Darlings” I had a few questions for the author, which Peter kindly answered and which we now present for our readers -

Ali: Welcome to Shots Magazine

Peter: Hey, great to be here

AK: We were floored by your latest novel KILL YOUR DARLINGS so could you let us know where the kernel for this novel’s idea came from?

PS: It came from two places. One was the desire to write a novel in reverse. So much of crime fiction is about how the bad deeds of the past effect the present, so I wanted to explore that by going backwards. The second spark for this novel was really thinking about what would happen if the adulterous couple in Double Indemnity or Body Heat, or really any story in which a married woman talks her lover into killing her husband, got away with it. What would their lives look like in thirty years?

AK: I find your female characters so very intriguing and perhaps the adage that “the female of the species is deadlier than the male” to be especially applicable in your work, including in your latest – would you care to discuss?

PS: Maybe it’s because historically men are more violent than women that killer female characters are so interesting. They have to overcome their natures in order to kill, unlike men, who are overcoming their natures in order to not kill. I’m sure that’s reductive, but I think there is some truth in it. Anyway, I enjoy writing deadly females probably for the same reason people like to read about them.

AK: There is complexity in your work, but it’s deft [in so far as the narrative appears effortlessly constructed to the reader]. So are you a plotter or do you just follow the muse and hope everything will turn out fine?

PS: In general, I’m a muse-follower, hoping for the best. However, in writing Kill Your Darlings I had to, by necessity, do a little more classic plotting. I needed to know what happened in the past, of course, in order to explore how these characters were acting in the present. That said, I never did an outline for this book, and there are some elements to the story that I discovered in the course of writing.

AK: The subtle details embedded in the narrative of KILL YOUR DARLINGS added nuance making it [deliciously] thought provoking. The mention / references of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, Herge’s Tintin in Tibet, William Peter Blatty…..even the title of Wendy’s debut poetry collection……. Did you plan these [and others] or did they appear naturally?

PS: A lot of the references appear naturally, in the sense that when I am working on a novel my mind is filled with favourite books and poems and movies that might have some relevance to what I’m working on. But, of course, there’s some manipulation. Once I knew that Jason, Thom and Wendy’s son, was a Tintin reader, it made sense for the story for him to be carrying around Tintin in Tibet, the book that Herge claimed originated from his middle-aged dreams of dying.

AK: Which of your previous novels did you enjoy writing the most and why?

PS: Well, it wasn’t Kill Your Darlings, which got very tricky to write for a period of time, so much so that I almost abandoned it. The book I loved writing was The Rules for Perfect Murders (Eight Perfect Murders in the States), mostly because I could spend so much time exploring the plots and intricacies of some of my favourite crime novels. As you’ve already mentioned I do love references, and I didn’t need to hold back with this particular book.

AK: I find your later novels to be particularly memorable especially, RULES FOR PERFECT MURDERS , A TALENT FOR MURDER and NINE LIVES as I still think about them from time to time. Do you find the writing process to have gotten easier than when you started over a decade ago or has each novel gotten harder to shape?

PS: All novels are hard to write, and it doesn’t get any easier. I do think that now that I have written a dozen novels maybe I’m allowing a little more quirk and personality into my stories than I did when I first started out. Maybe I trust my instincts (for better or worse) more than when I was a younger writer.

AK: I found your novella THE CHRISTMAS GUEST to be very dark, but told in an engaging manner – will we ever see a collection of shorter work from you?

PS: I think I have enough stories right now to be a collection, but I’m not sure they are good enough. However, I’d like to come out with a short story collection one day but maybe there would be only one. I find short stories really hard to write, and I’ve yet to write one that I am a hundred percent pleased with. I think I would be more likely to come out with a novella collection, since that is a length I am very comfortable working in.

AK: And any more information about film rights to your work as we heard Julia Roberts has expressed interest in KILL YOUR DARLINGS?

PS: She brought on James Gray to write the script and direct the film, if it gets made. That’s pretty much all I know. I suspect that the next element will be finding a male lead. They really keep the writers in the dark about this whole process, or maybe they just keep me in the dark. Regardless, it’s an exciting possibility, one I have very little to do with.

AK: And what Books and Films have you enjoyed recently?

PS: I liked Steven Soderbergh’s film Black Bag. It sold itself as a spy thriller but it was much more of a kind of classic who-dunit, a chamber piece book-ended by two dinner parties. I really loved Janice Hallett’s next book, Killer Question, all about a murder wrapped into a weekly pub quiz. Very clever. And I also loved William Boyd’s new book, Gabriel’s Moon, about a travel writer in the 1960s who gets recruited by the secret service.

AK: And would you care to share what are you working on currently?

PS: I’ve written another Christmas novella, and that will be coming out in the autumn of 2026. And now I’m getting ready to start a new novel that would come out in 2027.

AK: Thank you for your time to speak with our British readers.

PS: My pleasure, Ali.

Shots Magazine would like to thanks Sopha Cerullo and Angus Cargill of Faber and Faber [London] for their help in facilitating this interview with Peter Swanson.