On Where We Get Our Ideas

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There is more than one devastating murder in my debut novel One Night, New York. It would, of course, ruin the book to reveal who dies at whose hand, but what I want to do here is poke around a little bit in the who and the when and the how of writing these murder scenes. For someone who hasn’t killed or been killed (adding a ‘yet’ here seems ill advised either way) murder scenes can be tricky. As writers we are told to write what we know, to mine our own emotional experience so that our characters might rise up off the page and cling to the reader as full-bodied, living, breathing souls. And so, we dig. We pull up old loves and resurrect them, we sift through traumatic conversations for nuggets of gold, we pan our lives for passion and spite and heartbreak and despair. But what happens when we haven’t experienced something, when we have no idea what it might be like to murder someone or to suffer the most violent of deaths? I turn, as I have always done, to films and photographs, to books and paintings and buildings and lethal creative minds for inspiration. These are the words and images, the faces and spaces, that have helped give life to the deadliest scenes in One Night, New York.

The Film – Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932)

Gunfire. Loud and terrifying and breathtakingly close. Bullets ricocheting off walls. Soft bodies falling on hard floors. Running and hiding and screaming. There are some scenes in Howard Hawks’ original 1932 film Scarface that still make my heart shudder and my breath short after all these years. But it’s the hysteria not the fighting that really marks this film out. We can all imagine the devastating toll that killing a person might take on the self – the heartbreak, the horror, the guilt – but for these mobsters and molls and especially for Tony our charismatic and dangerous antihero and Cesca, his unusually sexually assertive teenage sister, killing is figured as both a necessary aspect of everyday life and a hysterical, almost joyful past-time. Forget the sex, when murder and mayhem look this fun, it’s no wonder the film was banned in five states as well as a number of cities including New York, Seattle and Chicago (where the film is set). It’s the craziness that gets me every time I watch it – the unadulterated horrifying fun of it all. Of course, there are terrible consequences, but no-one seems to care. In the final scene as we wait for Tony and Cesca’s fate to play out, barricaded in an apartment, surrounded by cops with no hope of escape, the pair run around the room firing weapons and laughing with gleeful abandon, overcome with a maddening bloodlust. It’s electrifying.

The Photograph – Their First Murder (Weegee)

In Their First Murder, the famous NYC crime reporter Weegee turns his camera away from the body on the street to the manic crowd gathered at its feet. In the image, murder is a sideshow, an event, an entertainment. Black-eyed, wild-haired children fight for a front-row seat wielding rictus grins beside weeping, swaying housewives. It’s the sense of movement that matters here. The scuffle and the scrum, the battle for the best view. The photograph is arresting and unsettling and somehow manages to visualise one of the most obvious, yet lesser-discussed, aspects of murder – the distasteful fact that many of us are fascinated, if not excited by it. It’s the reason crime fiction both on screen and on the page is so popular. Humans are transfixed by the very thing that they are most terrified of and this single image manages to embody this sensation in all its uncomfortable, magnetic violence.

The Book – Perfume (Patrick Suskind)

While films and photographs can help us imagine what murder looks and sounds like, how might we come to understand what it feels, smells, or, horror of horrors, tastes like? Perfume is one of the few books that has continued to surprise and repulse me since I first read it two decades ago. Only a handful of other novels have left such a sensuous mark. It is my go-to book for when I have forgotten how to write with and for all five (or is that six?) senses. I am still awed by its capacity to evoke the horror and the stench and the delicious, disgusting, derangement of murder. Between its pages death in all its rotten embodiments becomes so intoxicating one feels transformed from reader to accomplice. It is atmospheric writing at its most evocative and deadly.

Extract from Perfume’s opening page:

In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots.The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.

The Painting – Automat and Nighthawks (Edward Hopper)

Murder scenes aren’t just dead bodies and rage. For the characters involved they are often the culmination of days and weeks and years of heartbreak and pressure and planning. Sometimes the quiet stillness on either side of a killing is as important as a much anticipated moment of agitated violence. Edward Hopper’s city paintings from the thirties and forties have been invaluable for me in this regard. His New York diner series aches with isolation and yearning, with lonely individuals in almost empty cafes thinking, dreaming, possibly scheming. The images are ripe for verdant imaginations to fill in the gaps around the edges, to wonder about who these people are, to insert backstories and desires and motives. Wild minds thrive amidst their contemplative desolation.

The Building – The Empire State building

My novel, One Night, New York, begins with two young women waiting to kill a man atop the most famous skyscraper in the world. The scene ignites a number of questions at the heart of the book – who is the man they are waiting for? Why do they want to kill him? Will they go through with it? I still struggle to believe something so high (1,250ft) was built between 1930 and 1931, at the start of the Great Depression, when a home entertainment box called a television had only recently been mass produced. Since then it has been the location of countless films and tv shows, of reels of photographs (as both subject and vantage point), of thousands of romantic proposals (one of them my own). But for all the hope that the building suggests, it has also been marked by death. First, it was the unlucky carpenters and stonemasons who crashed onto the fresh asphalt below during the vertigo-inducing years of construction. Then, until they erected high enough fences, it was the suicides, the lonely and the lost, the heartbroken and the terrified who believed the only option left was to climb up and jump off. Killing yourself from up there made a statement. It meant something. And so, because the building represents the very essence of the American dream—the hope and the promise, the wonder and the possibility, the romance and the lies and the decay—it seemed like the most pertinent location for the most pivotal potential murder scene in the novel. Life and death immortalized in stone, thrusting towards the stars.

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