Mrs. Carver comes in at two with the Pinterest photo ready before she has even sat down. Same photo as the last three times. She has been coming to the same chair for six years.
She talks the whole way through about her husband, her son’s tournament in Lakeland, and what she has told David about where she is. She talks freely because the woman sectioning her hair does not count as a person who is listening.
That chapter was the first thing I wrote, and everything grew outward from it the way it always does with these books. Drop one concept on the page, drop others near it, write outward from each, and wait for the islands to join.
What I was after was a dark comedy about serial killers. The idea underneath it is that these two are not clever people. Nobody suspects a stupid person of being capable of killing that many people, so they get through it by being dumb, and there is a Keystone Cops quality to how it all keeps not falling apart.
Why does the invisibility matter in Killer Cuts and Dead Letters?
Because between them, these two women have complete information about a neighborhood.
Jackie has spent seventeen years behind a chair on Henderson Avenue. She knows what her clients say, what they mean, what they are not saying, and what they have been doing at home to their hair that they will deny doing. Six years of Saturdays with the same woman produces a file nobody realizes is being kept.
Keisha carries the mail on the same blocks and holds the other half. Who is home when. Whose bills are stacking up. Which houses have gone quiet.
Neither of them counts as a witness, because service workers are invisible in the specific way service workers are invisible. People talk in front of them the way they talk in front of furniture.
That turns out to be useful.
The book on this: Killer Cuts and Dead Letters is a dark comedy about a salon owner and a mail carrier who between them know everything about a neighbourhood and are underestimated by everyone in it.
How does a book about serial killers work as a comedy?
By refusing to make the killers competent.
Fiction usually hands this territory to a genius. The methodical mind, the elaborate plan, the detective who is the only one clever enough to keep up. That is a flattering version of murder and it is not the funny one.
These two are working it out as they go, and a good deal of what saves them is that nobody is looking, because looking would require somebody to first entertain the idea that they could manage it.
The comedy comes from the gap between what they are doing and how thoroughly they are underestimated, and both of those are the same fact viewed from opposite sides.
Who are the main characters in Killer Cuts and Dead Letters?
The agent working the case from the outside, and he keeps arriving at the right questions in the wrong order.
He is not stupid. That would be a different and much lazier book. He is doing competent work on a case where competent work leads you steadily past the answer, because the answer requires an assumption no trained investigator makes.
Watching a good detective be systematically defeated by a premise he cannot bring himself to hold is most of the pleasure of the middle section.
Why does the book alternate narrators?
Because the two halves of the information sit in different heads.
Jackie has the interiors. What people are like, what they are hiding, what they are working on and how long they have been working on it. Keisha has the exteriors. Movement, timing, absence, and the paperwork of a street.
Neither picture is complete on its own, and the reader gets both while every other character in the book gets neither.
Who do Jackie and Keisha go after?
People whose paperwork is perfect.
Marcus Webb manages eight properties through a company named after his wife’s maiden name. His method has been running four years. Documentation, lease terms, and the slow accumulation of paper that precedes legally defensible removals. He has done eleven of them.
He has never been connected to anything anybody could call wrong, because the documentation is real and what it documents is not.
Keisha has been delivering to his Seventh Avenue building for four years. She has delivered every piece of it.
That is the shape of the book. Two women who have watched a process work legally for years, and who have the one thing an investigation would need and no way to give it to anybody.
How does Jackie talk about what she is doing?
As a system, and she notices herself doing it.
She thinks about it the way she was taught to think about anything she noticed. Without rushing to a conclusion. Just noting. The system was running correctly. She was pleased with the system. She would need to think about what it meant that she was pleased with the system.
Then she thinks about the word system. She has one. She built it incrementally and she is maintaining it correctly and she will keep building it.
Then she drives south on the interstate thinking about what a second location would mean for the system, and the answer is that it would make the system better.
That is a woman applying small business logic to something else entirely, and the reason it reads as comedy is that she is not wrong about the logic.
What does the investigator have on his whiteboard?
Thirteen names and a question he wrote in the corner.
WHY MALE, in the lower left, small, deliberately out of the sightline of the main work. He wrote it and stood back and looked at what was up there.
His office is a corner room on the fourth floor with two windows. The east one gives him the parking structure. The south one gives him the interchange and, on clear days, the bay. He does not use the south window for the view. He uses it to track the light, because when the light moves off his whiteboard in the afternoon it means he has been standing there too long.
That is a competent man doing careful work, who has already written down the assumption that will defeat him and put it somewhere he does not have to look at it.
What does the salon chapter do that exposition cannot?
It shows the information arriving without anybody handing it over.
Mrs. Carver mentions her son’s tournament in Lakeland next Saturday, that she said she would go, and that David thinks she worries too much about the drive. Jackie asks whether he is right. She says probably.
Nothing in that is a confession. It is six years of Saturdays, and it contains a schedule, a marriage, a driving route and a habit of mind.
Meanwhile the lavender diffuser runs, a car goes past with music, the Dominican restaurant smells like sofrito, and a man walks a large calm dog with the dignity of a dog that knows it is large. Henderson Avenue doing its Saturday thing.
A book about surveillance that stages it as surveillance would be tedious. Staging it as a haircut is the whole trick.
How dark does Killer Cuts and Dead Letters get?
Dark. The comedy does not soften the violence and is not there to.
The book carries a content warning for violence beginning in chapter two, shown directly and not glossed over. A dark comedy that flinches at the dark half is a farce with a body count, and that is a less interesting book.
The tone holds because the humour is in the people instead of in the killing. Nobody in this novel treats what is happening as funny. The reader is the only one positioned to see the absurdity, and that is the entire arrangement.
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