Crafting a Whodunnit for Our Time: Guest post by Jonathan Santlofer

I grew up on Edgar Allan Poe, the Hardy Boys, Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, and comic books. In between, I read a few adventure stories, The Three Musketeers, Robinson Crusoe (though it’s possible I read the latter in a Classic Comic version and only think I read the book). Reading was difficult for me, so I concentrated on what I considered my only gift: art. Though a poor student, I could draw anything, and that got me into art school where I learned I had slight dyslexia and after a year-long series of exercises, became a voracious reader making up for lost time.
 
When I started writing my first novel—after a successful career as a painter, sidetracked by a fire that destroyed 10 years of my artwork—I chose to write a semi-autobiographical novel (auto-fiction in today’s literary lingo). It was about a mid-career artist who had lost all his work and was professionally and emotionally adrift. Sound familiar?
 
At the time, I was living at the American Academy in Rome where I had a large airy studio with a spectacular view overlooking the eternal city. The only problem was I couldn’t paint; the fire and the loss had left me in doubt, questioning why I had become an artist in the first place. 
 
It was a difficult time, but Rome was glorious, the perfect city in which to be depressed. Every morning, after coffee and a cornetto (a sweet, crescent-shaped pastry that looks like a croissant only denser and sweeter and filled with crema or albicocca, apricot jam), I’d find a church and make exact replications of the interiors and the artwork, eventually filling several sketchbooks. (Little did I know I was in training to later become a legal art forger, but that’s another story). 
 
When I got home to NY and reread the 200 or so pages I had written, I couldn’t stand the main character, a 40-something artist, whiney and entitled. So, I killed him. Instant catharsis. That’s how I found what I wanted to write: a crime story. The book ended up being my first novel The Death Artist, about a serial killer loose in the New York art world. The New York Times Magazine did a feature on me (the well-known artist turned writer) and People Magazine chose my novel as their Page Turner of the Week, both of which helped make the book a success.
 
It followed with a contract to write two more books, but I never wrote a good old-fashioned whodunit until now, Ten Perfect Guests, my ninth book. I wanted to give readers a gift, an entertainment and escape from our troubled times, something fun, and more than a little sinister. But that’s half the fun, isn’t it? If you’re writing a book about a group of nasty characters lured to a deserted island for the memorial of a rich and famous artist with the promise of an inheritance (but only if they show up), you can be sure there will be in-fighting, backstabbing and nefarious goings on.
 
I wanted to take all the whodunit tropes, a large cast (but of fully developed) characters, an isolated locale (in this case a deserted island), and update the genre to the present day with angst and drama and lots of dark humor. I also added drawings, illustrations I made for the five parts of the story, all painted in gouache with the same frame, to give it the look of an illustrated manuscript.

 
I reread Christie’s And Then There Were None and Highsmith’s Ripley books, and caught a fortuitous production of Hamlet at BAM which had me rereading Macbeth, Othello, and King Lear (which I saw three times in different productions over the past few years), and the idea of Shakespearean tragedy and the five-act structure—from exposition and accelerating action to the climactic fall and catastrophic resolution—took root. The challenge was how to keep it all fast and fun, Shakespearean comedy as well as tragedy. I reminded myself that one of my all-time favorite movie directors and writers, Billy Wilder—The Apartment, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, A Foreign Affair (his Nazi rom-com!), always said that the tougher the subject matter the more you’d better make them laugh, something I took to heart.
 
The book required more plotting than I usually do, though the characters often refused to stay in their lanes, the plot deepened, and the climactic confession, which I had imagined as a few pages, ended up closer to 30—I just couldn’t get the killer to stop talking, but I enjoyed recounting that story almost as much as the killer enjoyed telling it. (I know I am the one writing, but the characters always know what they want to say).
 
In the end, Ten Perfect Guests is as much an homage to classic whodunnits as it is a study in greed and how it corrupts, a social satire with plenty of bite and wit and hopefully people will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
 
 
Jonathan Santlofer