What inspired the idea behind this book?
One day, on a whim, I wrote the dust jacket copy for an imaginary book. It had a detective and a setting but no plot. It promised shocking twists and buried secrets — none of which I’d invented yet. I showed the jacket copy to my wife, and told her I might try to write the novel. She said, “You should!” And so I did.
The context is that I’d wanted to be a writer my entire life, but after years of failure had given up even trying. I raised my kids; I buried my parents. Life rolled on. And then, this miracle: suddenly I’m a 47-year-old debut novelist!
If I looked at your internet history, what would it reveal about you?
Few people’s internet history can withstand much scrutiny! But most of the weird stuff in mine involves the books I’m working on. For West Heart Kill, you might have found some hair-raising FBI statistics on the various methods of murder, an interview Agatha Christie gave to the Daily Mail in 1928, and a spectacularly bad 1975 JC Penney’s catalog. For the book I’m finishing now, you’d find the recorded weather data for Toronto in February 1842, an oral history by the Harvard astronomer who inspired Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” and the transcript of a “conversation” between two computer chatbots in 1973. Of course, you’d also find some dead ends. Why was Dann looking at 19th-century newspaper accounts of Millerite heretics in America? Or the famous Halston dress that Lauren Hutton wore to the Oscars? And what explains his bizarre interest in two foul-smelling and fantastically named compounds released from corpses: cadaverine and putrescine?
How did you think of the title of the book?
West Heart Kill. I knew I wanted three one-syllable words: BAM BAM BAM. And I wanted them to be words that seemed odd together, like in some terrible joke or Dada-Surrealist painting: “A phone, a lobster, and a toilet walk into a bar…” In upstate New York, where the Dutch influence still lingers in place names, you see many sites called kills, after the old word for stream or creek. So that gave me one-third of the title. (I checked first to see if any prior mysteries had used the word in this way; I was shocked not to find any!) The word heart also seemed right to me. And then one day, I glanced down at the beer in my hand: West Kill Brewery. Eureka! (The textual explanation, after all this bumbling around, is that title is the name of the river that flows through my fictional hunting club.)
What was the research process like for the book?
I was terrified that I wasn’t qualified to write a mystery: I knew a great deal about a few writers (Christie, Chesterton, Hammett, Chandler) but very little about many others. So I read a lot of books as I got underway. I found the stuff I was learning about the genre fascinating, and thought readers might too; that’s when I got the idea to incorporate all of this “extra” material into the novel itself. The plot and the research became entwined in a very exciting way.
Who are some of your favourite authors? Or favourite books?
Donald Barthelme and Jorge Luis Borges are my two favorite short story writers. I’m a sucker for the deeply atmospheric, romantic books of men and women caught in extremis during wartime, hot or cold, by the likes of Alan Furst and John Le Carre. I like the melancholy yet hard-edged fragments of Joan Didion and Renata Adler. I like David Foster Wallace the journalist and Samuel Beckett the playwright. John Updike is best in his short stories (especially in the beautifully titled “How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time”). Patricia Highsmith is deliciously twisted. David Markson is achingly sad. I’m astounded by the astrologer bit in Rachel Cusk’s Transit. My old professor, Kenneth Koch, wrote a poem called “The Boiling Water” to which I retreat whenever I’m in need of spiritual replenishment, which in America is pretty often, these days.
Buy a copy of West Heart Kill here.
Meet the Author
Dann McDorman is an Emmy-nominated TV news producer. He’s also worked as a newspaper, reporter, book reviewer, and cabinet maker. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. West Heart Kill is his debut novel.
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