Mrs. Carver comes in at two with the Pinterest photo ready before she’s even sat down. Same photo as the last three times. She’s 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’s told David about where she is. The woman sectioning her hair doesn’t count as a person who’s listening, so she talks freely. 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 is that these two aren’t 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’s a Keystone Cops quality to how it all keeps not falling apart. I loved that premise from the first page, because crime fiction that only lets geniuses be dangerous is a rut.
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 aren’t saying, and what they’ve been doing at home to their hair that they’ll 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’s home when. Whose bills are stacking up. Which houses have gone quiet.
Neither of them counts as a witness, because 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 neighborhood 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’s the only one clever enough to keep up. That’s a flattering version of murder and it isn’t 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’re doing and how thoroughly they’re underestimated, and both of those are the same fact viewed from opposite sides.
Who investigates the murders 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 isn’t stupid. That would be a different and much lazier book. He’s 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. I refused to write him as a fool. A dumb cop would have let the reader off the hook. I wanted the reader squirming while a smart man walks past the answer, because the answer is two women he’s been trained his whole career to overlook. Watching a premise systematically defeat a good detective who can’t bring himself to hold it is most of the pleasure of the middle section.
Why alternate narrators in a crime novel?
Because the two halves of the information sit in different heads.
Jackie has the interiors. What people are like, what they’re hiding, what they’re working on and how long they’ve 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.
| Attribute | Jackie | Keisha |
|---|---|---|
| Job | Seventeen years behind a chair on Henderson Avenue | Carries the mail on the same blocks |
| Half of the picture | The interiors | The exteriors |
| What she knows | What clients say, mean, hide, and do at home | Who’s home when, whose bills stack up, which houses went quiet |
| Why nobody notices | Clients talk in front of her like furniture | Service workers are invisible |
| Narration | Alternates with Keisha | Alternates with Jackie |
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’s done eleven of them.
He’s never been connected to anything anybody could call wrong, because the documentation is real and what it documents isn’t. Keisha has been delivering to his Seventh Avenue building for four years. She’s delivered every piece of it. That’s 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.
The book doesn’t pretend what Jackie and Keisha do is right, and I didn’t write it to. I did want the reader to understand exactly why a man like Webb ends up in their sights. He hurts people with paperwork, carefully enough that nobody with a badge will ever touch him, and I wanted that to sit heavy.
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’d need to think about what it meant that she was pleased with the system.
Then she thinks about the word system. She’s one. She built it incrementally and she’s maintaining it correctly and she’ll 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’s a woman applying small business logic to something else entirely, and the reason it reads as comedy is that she isn’t wrong about the logic. Jackie’s the character I had the most fun writing, and she’s the one who unsettles me most. Nothing about her raves or broods. She goes about it the way she runs her salon, one appointment at a time, and that calm is the scariest thing in the book.
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 doesn’t 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’s been standing there too long.
A book about surveillance that stages it as surveillance would be tedious.
That’s a competent man doing careful work, who has already written down the assumption that will defeat him and put it somewhere he doesn’t have to look at it.
What can a scene 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’d go, and that David thinks she worries too much about the drive. Jackie asks whether he’s right. She says probably. Nothing in that is a confession. It’s 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’s 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.
My take
Stupid killers get away with it, and that’s the joke that drives this book. Nobody suspects the dumb ones. Jackie runs murder like she runs her salon, one appointment at a time, and her calm unsettles me more than anything else in it. Read it if you like your comedy dark and your cops a little Keystone. It gets dark, so know that going in.
How dark does Killer Cuts and Dead Letters get?
Dark. The comedy doesn’t soften the violence and isn’t 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’s a less interesting book.
Claude has my whole history and knows me inside and out. Normally an AI won’t let you write about killers. It knew I was writing a novel, so it was fine with this one. I asked it why it was fine with it, and it said, because I know you’re writing a novel.
The tone holds because the humor is in the people instead of in the killing. Nobody in this novel treats what’s happening as funny. The reader is the only one positioned to see the absurdity, and that’s the entire arrangement.
Jackie has spent seventeen years behind the chair on Henderson Avenue, present for everything and noticed by nobody. Killer Cuts and Dead Letters is the dark comedy that grew from that.
