PicoBlog

West Heart Kill has been on my radar for a while. As a huge Agatha Christie fan and a lover of the murder mystery genre, I had seen some early articles about this book and then saw some early reviews praising it. I had high expectations, but I was unprepared for what Dann McDorman had in store.

Our Murder, The Read book club (named after the iconic Angela Lansbury tv show Murder, She Wrote) meets on the first Monday of every month at P&T Knitwear on the Lower East Side. It’s a cozy time to chat about murder, and this month’s book club was no different.

West Heart Kill isn’t the whodunit one would expect. It’s a suspense novel but it takes you behind-the-scenes at moments that both alleviate the suspense and also somehow add to it. West Heart Kill, at its center, is a love letter to the detective genre.

The overall reception of West Heart Kill at book club would probably be, in a word, mid. This book is very much for a certain reader. If you are not the kind of thriller and murder mystery genre reader that is familiar with the classics there might be some things that go over your head a bit. What you think is going to be another And Then There Were None situation quickly turns into a strange deep dive into the relevance of a genre and trope such as this, and how the reader relates to what they’re reading.

In a way, that is what West Heart Kill is about. It is another isolated murder mystery. There’s even locked room murder elements, and other beloved tropes pop up for fan service. But on another level, there is quite a lot more in the works.

West Heart Kill moves from a narrator in third person to a narrator in first person all interwoven with segments of second person perspective. In between scenes, McDorman imparts his wisdom on the detective and murder mystery genre paying homage to the classics and explaining the origins of some of the most well-known thriller tropes within the genre. The detective will make a statement only for the narrator to switch and the author to say, “Now I bet you noticed the statement he made there.”

Let me set the scene for you.

Adam McAnnis is a detective joining an old college friend on the Fourth of July at the West Heart Club in upstate New York. His friend comes from a wealthy family who are amongst other wealthy elites all awaiting McAnnis’s arrival as the outsider for the weekend. This book starts on Thursday and by Sunday there are three dead. And you, dear reader, are also involved.

I’ll share some of my own thoughts on the matter before sharing our final book club discussion. I wonder having now read the book if I would have picked it for book club or if it would have made a better cozy personal read. Regardless, here we go.

Review: Zoë

As someone who has been reading murder mystery books all her life, my education of the genre is a little more in-depth than most (maybe) and I picked up on a few things right from the beginning. In between what are the main sections of the plot, McDorman has added a few pages in regards to the history of the genre. He speaks of Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to name a few. There’s a very meta feeling about this detective tale and though it was interesting, I also found it exhausting. I understood most of the references made to the genre, but I can only imagine how those who weren’t as acquainted with it could have felt having to look things up to understand what was being said.

It’s a visit to the classic mystery with homage to the Golden Age of the whodunit. But strangely enough, you never truly come to find out whodidit to add to the craft of the novel. Or do you? The reader is so closely interwoven within the narrative that sometimes it felt that I, as the reader, didn’t have any independence of make my own decisions or conclusions. I pride myself on two things: always knowing who the murderer is and always knowing who the winner is going to be for The Great British Baking Show. These are my two most redeeming qualities as a human and what kept throwing me off was the conclusions the narrator kept assuming the reader was making.

McAnnis, the detective, would say something or a character would react strangely to a statement and the second person perspective would cut in to say, “and as the reader you’re probably thinking this -” when in reality, that was not what I was thinking at all. But to keep up the story the way we’re supposed to be reading it, I would then have to switch my brain to think that way so I could see where we were going.

The thing that was the most interesting for me is the idea of who the murderer is. At the end of the day, if we’re going to get meta about it, the author is the killer. The author decides who lives and who dies and contains all the power to make every decision about every character. McDorman wraps the novel up and then adds a little epilogue to state that though that’s “The Ending” we truly don’t know if that could be only “A Ending” or “One Ending” amongst any potential outcome. The reader is not all-knowing and therefore the mystery always stays slightly intact.

I’m going to get to the book club conversation because I found it incredibly intriguing and I loved hearing everyone’s thoughts, but overall I would say I was personally amused. I do share a lot of the thoughts the book club had in the next section, but I also enjoyed the way this explored a genre I love and though we are no longer in the Golden Age of detective novels and have entered a different age, (which I will go more into depth soon) it was an interesting take on a genre and trope that we all feel we know already.

Review: Book Club

As I said, reaction was mid. What’s interesting about our conversation is we all agreed the marketing threw us off. It kept saying it wasn’t like a classic whodunit, but doesn’t every book say that to hook the reader? If we’d been a little more aware of the scope going into this maybe we would have had more focus going in. But instead, we were hit face-on with a little thesis wedged into the pages of a detective novel stuffed so full of characters we forgot who was who.

There’s a handy little chart at the beginning that gives information on who is part of what family and is involved in the club in what way. Our recommendation when reading is to take a photo of those pages to refer back to or have those pages marked to easily turn back to as well. It’ll be a huge help.

I’m going to consolidate the book club’s feelings towards this book into three parts: how book club felt about the book as a whole, as a part of the genre, and how we engaged with this book as readers.

As a whole:

Overall the writing was strong but the characters were difficult to connect with. There are just so many of them and with the perspective changing back and forth from first to second to third we couldn’t seem to find common ground for which character was important to the story in any capacity. For a detective novel that talks so much about the detective, McAnnis, the actual detective, is more of a side character in his own book.

At one point the book switches to first person and it’s never explained who is talking. The narrator keeps saying “I watched” and “we felt” and “I saw” but the narrator is never spoken to so it is never identified who is providing us this information. I at one point made a chart of who had been mentioned and who hadn’t to see if I could figure it out that way, and there is one character not mentioned so realistically it could be that person. But then later as the book carries on and we as readers realized there were multiple levels to this book, it became more obviously the first person could also be the reader? But still, the mystery of who the narrator was and who could be talking might have been meant to be a fun quirk but for most of us took us out of the reading and made us focus more on the craft than the actual story.

In the genre:

If you maybe want to read up on the genre prior to starting this book it might be of interest to you. Of course, not knowing anything about the history of the genre would not be a detriment to your read as everything relevant is explained. But the sections on the history of the genre and origins of tropes or concepts within the genre can be jarring and take you right out initially. One of the things I noticed from reading those sections is the author actually pretty much tells you what is going to happen and how the book will end within the context of those sections through subtle hints and storytelling. It was kind of like a clue within a clue, but easily would go over ones head without any close reading.

The breaking of the fourth wall wasn’t always seamless and left us having to double check if there had been a transition or not. We questioned at one point if the sections in relation to the genre were quirky and fun, or if it made us feel as readers as though the author/narrator was attempting to prove they knew what they were talking about and come across as smarter or trying to prove their intellect over us.

This brings us to how this book made us feel as readers.

All throughout the book McDorman keeps referring to, “you, the reader” and mentions the reader as a character within the book. And, heads up, this paragraph might be a bit of a spoiler warning for anyone who would like to read the book. But in the end, the reader literally does become a character. As all the characters are being rounded up in the room to figure out the infamous whodunit scene, the detective isn’t the one going around explaining, (for reasons I will not get into too much for spoilers) but instead the reader enters the page. McDorman literally writes the reader into the book as the character to explain everyone’s secrets and who the murderer was. They pop out and McDorman wrties the screenplay of the reader monologuing all they’ve learned since page one. But an interesting point that we all caught was McDorman takes a moment to point out that the reader is a woman.

Now, we all know that women dominate the true crime scene. I for one was one of the early murderinos so hooked on My Favorite Murder that I had listened to every episode as they came out. I once attended a murder mystery panel discussion at the Center for Fiction where thriller authors spoke on why women love true crime. I remember one author saying that women have more empathy so they connect more with the story, but also because women are the victims in so many of these crimes. Reading about them, listening to them, watching documentaries about them is a way for women to cope with this terrible thing so that we can then explore our own vulnerability. I’m not going to get into this too much because I’ll literally write an entire essay with citations and everything, but we found it interesting and wondered what the significance was of McDorman, a man, taking the time and page space to make sure the audience knew the reader was a woman.

Our Murder, They Read book club is mostly all women. We’ve had a few men come through, but we are 90% a femme-presenting space. So as we all sat around on Monday looking at one another and asking ourselves why this was important, we realized it changed our perspective on how the narrator spoke to the reader. It made us feel a little bit belittled when looking back at the moments the narrator would take the time to say, “and you, as the reader, probably didn’t note this …” or how the reader was the one interested in this story for their own entertainment.

Maybe it’s the feminine rage that’s always two seconds away from bursting forth like a phoenix rising from the ashes and making me say dumb shit about what sets me on edge every turn I make, but apparently this feeling was a bit valid at how annoyed I was by this notion as book club members also said they felt the same way.

When it comes down to it, the narrator is just messing around with the reader and that’s the whole point is throwing them around and putting up that murder board so the reader can be lulled into a false sense of confidence that they know who the killer is until the narrator, and in extension the author, throws that twist in there and blows us all away.

The queen of the twist is Agatha Christie who was truly known for having the most random ass and wack things come out that no one saw coming. She built this genre for what it was and McDorman knows that from what he wrote about her. He is very knowledgable about the genre and we all said that we would sit through a lecture he’d give on the genre as a whole and the history of it. We would read his academic paper and we would probably love it. However, in this setting of West Heart Kill we all felt the interjections of the narrator didn’t leave us feeling too hot.

It was giving Ken serenading Push by Matchbox Twenty to Barbie. Y’all know what I mean. Let me just mansplain murder to you babe, you’re going to love it.

We also speculated that maybe the narrator was alluding to the fact that women had control in this book basically the entire time while all the men characters were basically carbon copies of one another and didn’t seem to share anything special. The women are the ones providing the clues, and the ones giving background information, and the ones speculating who the killer could be by putting together moments and comments from the people around them. They’re the ones holding back information to keep all these men from getting in trouble, and they’re the only names out of all the characters any of us remembered by the end of the book.

A really interesting point that was made during book club was that women are the ones with agency within this context, and they are the ones who are disrupting the confines of the narrative by making their own decisions and expressing this agency. Women are deconstructing the system by breaking the social norms and rules that were always in place to keep detective novels running.

And this now takes us back to this Golden Age of detective fiction. I, for one, am always going to be a slut for an old timey detective. Who isn’t when you have Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes to keep you warm at night. But this “Golden Age” of detective novels and the male perspective of thriller fiction ended because Agatha Christie disrupted the entire genre and made decisions for characters not based on society’s perception of them and how they should act, but on the secrets people keep and the emotions people have. Normal people, not polished versions.

Our conversation ended discussing what era we’re in with thrillers today. The concept of the detective being necessary for a thriller has faded a bit in recent years. Because, my friends, we have entered the Gone Girl era. We are unhinged and we are loving it. If the shoe fits, laces that bitch up. Anyone can be anything, and do anything, and get away with anything.

I could go on for hours and clearly this review is spiraling into something I’m not entirely sure is coherent. But this discussion sparked something in us and I enjoyed every second of it.

I would never not recommend a book, and I think West Heart Kill does something clever and amusing for those who love to pick up a thriller to read at any hour of the day. Someone said that it kind of reminded them of The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which they really, really enjoyed. It kind of reminded me of the recent Australian thriller Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone which, hear me out, I think is a comedy. But really clever and integrates the subversion of genres and tropes with a laugh. I also think if you’re interested in the legacy of Agatha Christie and would like to read something close to her work that pays homage to what she built for the genre, please give Alice Feeney a read. I bow at her feet.

As a debut, West Heart Kill is quite strong. McDorman has done his research and he knows how to write. I’d be fascinated to see what comes next from him and West Heart Kill is going to stick to my ribs for a while during my insomnia hours.

Thank you for taking the time to read this book club review. Our next Murder, They Read book club is meeting Monday, January 7th at 6:30pm at P&T Knitwear to discuss The Other Half by Vassell Charlotte. Tickets are still available if you’d like to join us.

In the meantime, I hope you’re reading good. Or, if you’re reading something shitty I can’t wait to hear you talk about it.

From one book hoe to another,

Zoë

Leave a comment

ncG1vNJzZmian6S4qbvErGWsrZKowaKvymeaqKVfpXyzsdWinLBlp5rAtXnHnpirrF2gtq24jJuwZpyRo7tuucKdpqulkaM%3D