These new mystery novels are 'whodunits' that might as well be called 'whydunits'

Summary

NPR's Book of the Day

Episode: These new mystery novels are 'whodunits' that might as well be called 'whydunits'

Date: October 10, 2025
Host: Glenn Weldon

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Overview

This episode of NPR’s Book of the Day explores two innovative mystery novels that subvert the traditional “whodunit” formula. Instead of focusing on uncovering the perpetrator, these books, Janice Hallett’s The Killer Question and Peter Swanson’s Kill Your Darlings, delve deeper into the “whydunit”—the psychological motives and messy secrets beneath each crime. Interviews with both authors reveal their creative processes, observations about the genre, and the unique structures of their novels.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Killer Question by Janice Hallett

(01:22–08:48)

British Pub Quiz Culture and Motive

• The story opens with the classic mystery premise—a body in the river—but instead of an obvious motive, the murder revolves around a British pub quiz, highlighting how high the stakes of fairness and rules can feel locally.
• Janice Hallett: “It’s not just about winning. It’s about fairness and everyone being equal. And when people perceive that not happening, you know, tempers can run high.” (02:24)

Characters and Setting

• The pub, The Case Is Altered, is run by Sue and Mal—former police officers with a shady past, hiding their history from the tight-knit village.
• The central conflict arises with the arrival of “The Shadow Knights,” a mysterious quiz team, led by “the General” (short for General Knowledge), who start dominating the trivia nights and raise suspicions of cheating.
• Janice Hallett: “They don’t get a single question wrong. And out of several hundred questions, including the marathon, that’s a feat that twitches the radar…” (03:27)

The Epistolary Format: Emails and Texts

• Hallett tells the story through an assemblage of emails, texts, and WhatsApp messages, lending immediacy and the possibility of concealment or misdirection.
• Janice Hallett: “If you’re a screenwriter, you deliver everything via dialogue. That’s character, place, atmosphere, pace. And I’ve simply adapted that for the page…” (05:58)
• The challenges lie in revealing physical details and location, since those are less likely to be explicitly discussed in messaging.

Human Nature and Deception

• Hallett and interviewer Scott Simon perform a brief reading, showcasing the clipped, wry banter between characters investigating the crime.
• Janice Hallett: “Plausible? That’s the sign of a good criminal, Arthur. They look you in the eye and lie without a flicker…” (05:23)

Reflections on Modern Communication

• Hallett comments on the evolution from letters to emails to texts, suggesting literature’s form will keep evolving with communication trends.
• Janice Hallett: “Maybe 40 years ago, we’d have been bemoaning the decline of letter writing, we’re now bemoaning the decline of emails. But for the moment, I don’t think books or literature are going anywhere.” (07:45)

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2. Kill Your Darlings by Peter Swanson

(09:51–18:12)

Inverting the Whodunit

• Swanson’s thriller starts with Wendy contemplating the murder of her husband, Tom; the suspense comes not from who commits the crime, but why, and how their relationship fractured so completely.
• Mary Louise Kelly: “Peter Swanson’s new thriller...turns all that on its head. You know who the killer is from the first pages. You spend the rest of the book trying to figure out why.” (10:24)

Structure: Reverse Chronology

• The narrative is told backwards, moving from the present crisis to the couple’s early days in the 1980s, slowly exposing the secrets that fueled their mutual destruction.
• Peter Swanson: “What if we could just really literalize that and have a story go entirely in reverse, so that we slowly learn the events that led to the version of Tom and Wendy...that unhappy version of them in their 50s?” (13:58)

Character Insights

• Tom and Wendy: both writers, but creatively and emotionally adrift.
  • Tom: academic, plagued by creative failure and alcoholism.
  • Wendy: published poet, more detached and less concerned with ego than her husband.
• Peter Swanson: “I think Wendy’s kind of...blase about the whole thing. I mean, it doesn’t mean as much to her ego as it does to Tom, who...feels like he can salvage some of his life by becoming this great writer.” (15:19)

Real Locations & Memorable Details

• The infamous “Exorcist Steps” in Georgetown—a real location—play a symbolic and literal role in the murder plot.
• Mary Louise Kelly: “I live around the corner...those steps have nearly killed me more than once. Not because anybody pushed me, but because they are extraordinarily long and steep. Yes.” (13:07)

Secrets, Guilt, and Relationship Decay

• The couple’s shared and private secrets ultimately break them.
• Mary Louise Kelly: “The thing that has bound these two characters...for decades is a shared secret that they need to keep. And the thing that ultimately breaks them...is that they each have a huge secret or two that they do not share...” (16:50)
• Peter Swanson: “Everyone deals with guilt to a certain degree, and we all deal with it in slightly different ways. And that’s one of the major themes of this book.” (17:20)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Janice Hallett on pub quiz passions:
  “Passions run high at the pub quiz, and it’s not just about winning. It’s about fairness and everyone being equal.” (02:24)

• Janice Hallett on liars:
  “The best liars are the people who convince themselves they’re telling the truth.” (05:44)

• Peter Swanson on backwards storytelling:
  “I thought, what if we could just really literalize that and have a story go entirely in reverse, so that we slowly learn the events that led to the version of Tom and Wendy...” (13:58)

• Swanson on writerly shame:
  “There’s shame attached to him in writing, and I think I felt a little bit of that. I used to not tell people I was a writer because it felt, I don’t know...a little embarrassing.” (16:13)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:22 – Introduction to The Killer Question and Janice Hallett interview
• 02:12 – Hallett discusses the intensity of pub quizzes
• 03:23 – Introduction of “The Shadow Knights”
• 04:10 – Sue and Mal’s secret past as police
• 04:35 – Excerpt performance (Hallett & Simon as Mal and Arthur)
• 05:58 – Discussion of the challenge and craft of writing in texts/emails
• 07:45 – Reflections on the future of literature and communication
• 09:51 – Introduction to Kill Your Darlings
• 10:24 – Reverse “whydunit” structure explained
• 11:30 – Read aloud: Wendy’s murderous thought process
• 13:07 – The Exorcist Steps and crime scene
• 13:56 – Swanson on writing the novel in reverse chronology
• 15:19 – Connection between author and character (Wendy & Tom as writers)
• 16:50 – Secrets and their impact on the marriage
• 17:20 – Guilt as a central theme

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Tone & Style

The episode’s conversation is sharp, witty, and psychologically probing. Both authors and their interviewers have a knack for finding humor in dark material, and the tone is engagingly literary and warm—perfect for book lovers and mystery aficionados interested in genre evolution and the deeper “why” behind the crime.

Transcript

[Glenn Weldon]

This is NPR's book of the Day. I'm Glenn Weldon. Today we've got a couple of whodunits that it might be more accurate to call whydunits. In a minute, we'll hear about a book that turns the traditional mystery novel on its head, revealing the murderer up front to instead spend its time slowly unpacking the motive behind the deadly act. First up, though, is a mystery novel that starts off in the usual way with the discovery of a body. But in Janice Hallett's the Killer Question, the apparent motive for the murder is tied to the world of British pub quizzes. Now, anyone who's ever taken part in trivia night at a bar knows that tempers can run hot even when the prize pot is small. As Hallett told NPR's Scott Simon, it's not the money that matters to pub quizzers. It's about playing by the rules. And when you break those rules, well, the consequences can be anything but trivial. Here's Scott.

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[Scott Simon]

Okay, here's the pitch to Netflix for true crime doc from a producer, Dominic Eastwood. His aunt and uncle sue and Mal run a country pub called the Case Is Altered that offers a Monday night trivia quiz. But a new team calling themselves the Shadow Knights become so successful, Eyebrows are raised, egos are hurt. Then a body is found in the river. Emails, WhatsApp and text messages fly who would cheat, much less murder, for a prize that's barely $25. The killer question is the new mystery novel by Janice Hallett, former journalist and government speechwriter who joins us now from London. Thanks so much for being with us.

[Janice Hallett]

Well, thank you for having me, Scott. It's delightful to be here.

[Scott Simon]

You enjoy a pub quiz yourself, I gather.

[Janice Hallett]

Yep. I'm a member of a pub quiz team and we win sometimes, we come bottom sometimes, and mostly we're mid table.

[Scott Simon]

They can be important to people.

[Janice Hallett]

Well, the quiz team can take on a level of importance that far outweighs its actual subjective importance in the world. Passions run high at the pub quiz, and it's not Just about winning. It's about fairness and everyone being equal. And when people perceive that not happening, you know, tempers can run high. And I've seen quite a few altercations, shall we say, that almost end up getting physical.

[Scott Simon]

Over pub quizzes, eh?

[Janice Hallett]

Yeah, absolutely. Over questions that are perceived as wrong. If the quiz master says it's one answer, but a team thinks that the quizmaster is wrong, that can lead to a big row. If a team is considered to be cheating, that's another basis on which fights can break out. It's a lively old world.

[Scott Simon]

Tell us about this new team that appears, the Shadow Knights, and their mysterious leader known only as the General.

[Janice Hallett]

The General or General Knowledge. The Shadow Knights are an enigma. They roll into the quiz unannounced one day and, well, they not only walk away with the top prize, they get almost top marks. And the next week they do the same. Except they do get top marks. They don't get a single question wrong. And out of several hundred questions, including the marathon, that's a feat that twitches the radar of Mal, the question setter, and it disgruntles all the other players. So nobody is happy with the Shadow Knights. And Mal determines to find out whether they really are that good or whether they've simply found a way to. To cheat without him knowing.

[Scott Simon]

Sue and Mal kind of have a secret of their own, don't they?

[Janice Hallett]

They do. They once had a past life. They. Five years earlier, they were police officers in another part of the country, and they were part of a very serious police operation that might have gone catastrophically wrong. And if it did, something might have followed them into this life because they don't want anyone to know that they used to be members of the police.

[Glenn Weldon]

Hmm.

[Scott Simon]

You tell the story through emails and text. If it's all right with you, I'll be Police Community Support Officer Arthur, and you be Mal. Okay, let me begin. Want to know the latest?

[Janice Hallett]

You can never know too much, Arthur. Fire away.

[Scott Simon]

Murdered male, pulled deceased from water by yours. Most likely died by single blunt force trauma to the head.

[Janice Hallett]

Thanks for keeping us in the loop.

[Scott Simon]

Trained as an actor up north.

[Janice Hallett]

Heard he was an actor. Yep.

[Scott Simon]

Couldn't find work. Moved down here. Still couldn't find work, but found drugs and alcohol instead. Got in with a rowdy lot.

[Janice Hallett]

Shame.

[Scott Simon]

Cena. Heard anything from the others he was with?

[Janice Hallett]

Thankfully not.

[Scott Simon]

He's spoken to them now. All profess their innocence and seem quite plausible.

[Janice Hallett]

Plausible? That's the sign of a good criminal, Arthur. They look you in the eye and lie Without a flicker, Such commitment to the facade of innocence. They believe it themselves.

[Scott Simon]

Oh, my word. I must say, as an old crime reporter, I thought, you know, there's something to that.

[Janice Hallett]

I think it's true. I mean, the best liars are the people who convince themselves they're telling the truth.

[Scott Simon]

Yeah. Why don't you choose to tell the story in this form? What are the challenges of writing in emails and text messages and WhatsApp messages?

[Janice Hallett]

I've written all my novels like this, one way or another, and it comes from my past life actually as a screenwriter. And if you're a screenwriter, you deliver everything via dialogue. That's character, place, atmosphere, pace. And I've simply adapted that for the page in my novels, and now it comes completely naturally. As for the challenges, occasionally I do need to communicate to the reader where people are and what people look like. That tends not to be something that we would naturally text about. So I have to find clever ways to get around it. But otherwise I have a ball writing in that way.

[Scott Simon]

Don't a lot of people use text messages not to reveal, but to conceal and misdirect?

[Janice Hallett]

I think when we're reading the text messages here, we're reading between the lines all the time, and that's true of life. I think we're all portraying ourselves in a particular way, whether it's social media, whether it's the short form communications we're using. We want to come across in a particular way to different people. And that's what I want the reader to unpick in this novel. What do people really mean in the bit we read now? Mal doesn't always respond very loquaciously to Arthur when he's chatting about the chap who was pulled out of the river. And maybe there's a reason for that, or maybe there isn't.

[Scott Simon]

Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. As a working, highly successful novelist, do you have any concerns about readers of the future just subsisting on text messages and social media posts and you know, what we now call literature disappearing.

[Janice Hallett]

Well, that's very interesting. Will literature ever disappear? And what is literature in these days and where is it going now? I don't think books are going anywhere anytime soon. But looking further to the future, who on earth knows? Because we're already getting very, very short formats of communication in our everyday lives. I'm reliably told by young people that nobody emails much anymore. I wrote my first novel, the Appeal, in Almost all emails, and that was a piece of feedback I got from my younger readers. Everybody texts now. Emails are for old people. And whereas maybe 40 years ago we'd have been bemoaning the decline of letter writing, we're now bemoaning the decline of emails. But for the moment, I don't think books or literature are going anywhere. Anywhere. But I think literature might change and more books might be written in the way that I'm writing them now.

[Scott Simon]

The Killer Question, the new novel by Janice Hallett. Thank you so much for being with us.

[Janice Hallett]

Well, thank you, Scott. It's been delightful speaking to you.

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[Scott Simon]

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[Peter Swanson]

Time is very limited.

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That's why at Better Help, our therapists try to have sessions, sometimes at night, depending on the therapist, or during the weekend. So I think that's what we need to tell the parents. You're not alone. We can help you out.

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[Glenn Weldon]

In author Peter Swanson's Kill your Darlings, we meet a middle aged couple, both writers. The woman is contemplating killing her husband from the very opening pages. Then the book moves backwards in time, gradually revealing how they came to that state of affairs. We learn that they share a very dark secret, one that's caused them to splinter apart and keep other different secrets from each other as well. It's not the recipe for a great marriage, but it is the makings for a juicy page turner. Swanson talked to NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about the book and the infamous set of stairs that features prominently in it.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

The basics of a whodunit are just that. You are trying to unravel the who, what, when and where of a dastardly crime. Peter Swanson's new thriller, Kill youl Darlings, turns all that on its head. You know who the killer is from the first pages. You spend the rest of the book trying to figure out why.

[Peter Swanson]

It was not an easy book to write. I think about halfway through I almost quit because I was getting jumbled up thinking about it. But I did Keep going and kind of pull it together.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Swanson told me how he pulled it together, starting with the who. The main characters, Tom and Wendy Graves, married the in their 50s, both writers living on the North Shore of Massachusetts.

[Peter Swanson]

On the outside, they'd be an upper middle class look quite happy. But inside the house, their marriage is definitely falling apart. Tom is drunk most of the time and seemingly guilty. Wendy is concerned about Tom and what he might give away about their lives. And in fact, she's so concerned that, as we learn very early in the beginning of the novel, she's thinking it might be a good idea to kill him.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Yeah, read us the bit where Wendy makes up her mind. It's not just a good idea to kill him, but she might actually do it. And just to set the scene a little bit, they have just thrown a dinner party for colleagues and Tom has once again had way too much to drink.

[Peter Swanson]

She could see it in his blank eyes and the way his mouth was slightly ajar, lower lip hanging. She took a tiny sip of her wine. He had put his empty glass down and was mimicking playing the piano along with Ahmad Jamal. God, she despised him. She'd also known that he was never gonna change, but she hadn't admitted to herself yet that she truly hated him. I should just kill him, she thought. What are you smiling about? Tom said. Just murder, she said back. Your murder. He laughed and moved his hands along the imaginary keys.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I hate to laugh, but it's so. I mean, there's no doubt she's about to do it. And she does. And I will say the wearer of this murder mystery, the famous Exorcist steps, famous from the movie the Exorcist in Georgetown in Washington D.C. describe them and describe what happens there.

[Peter Swanson]

Well, my first trip to Washington dc. Unlike most people who want to see all the monuments, the first thing I wanted to see was the Exorcist Steps. You know, those are the steps that Father Karras tumbles down to his death. So that was my first tourist stop in D.C. and I'd always remembered them. They are genuinely very long and quite steep and quite deadly. I think nowadays they're being used as an exercise facility. People run up and down them.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I run up and down them. I will inject. I live around the corner.

[Scott Simon]

Oh, you do?

[Mary Louise Kelly]

And those steps have nearly killed me more than once. Not because anybody pushed me, but because they are extraordinarily long and steep. Yes.

[Peter Swanson]

And again, we're at the very beginning of the book and we know that Wendy's thinking of how to kill her husband. And she's already kind of tried to kill him by pushing him down the stairs in their house, which isn't long enough. So she thinks going to need a longer set of steps.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

You can see all the pieces coming together then, though, the reason that we don't give up reading after the first chapter is you do something fascinating, which is tell the whole story, their whole marriage, in reverse. So the book is moving backward in time from when Wendy pushes Tom down the steps. That's 20, 23, all the way back to 1982.

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Why?

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Why tell it that way?

[Peter Swanson]

Well, I mean, the genesis of this book was really two ideas coming together. And one was the desire to write a book in reverse. I mean, I had thought about this, as someone who loves crime novels, is that they often do go a little bit in reverse in the sense that we start with a corpse, and by the end of the book, we know what happened before that corpse arrived. I thought, what if we could just really literalize that and have a story go entirely in reverse, Reverse, so that we. We slowly learn the events that led to the version of Tom and Wendy, that unhappy version of them in their 50s. And then the other thing that really got me into the story was this idea of a young couple that plot to kill in those stories that we're familiar with, it doesn't go well. But what if it did? What if this young couple got away with it and then lived happily ever after? What would they be like 30 years down the line and those two ideas together and created this book?

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Peter Swensen, you are a writer. Obviously, we're talking to you about your book. You're writing here about characters who are both writers. Tom is an academic and has tenure at a university and keeps trying to write the great American novel. Wendy is a published poet. Did you relate to either of them as a fellow writer?

[Peter Swanson]

Yeah, I think. I mean, especially Wendy, because I began my writing career as an aspiring poet. That was all through my. Through my 20s. I was really solely writing poetry, Unlike Tom, where he has this vision of being a great novelist. You know, I think Wendy's kind of. She's blase about the whole thing. I mean, it doesn't mean as much to her ego as it does to Tom, who I think feels like he can salvage some of his life by becoming this great writer. And it's tied up in his ego.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I was laughing because you show us many of Tom's awful first drafts, which he abandons after, like, three paragraphs, and then he goes back and reads them and feels even worse. I thought only another writer could have come up with that because it's so true.

[Peter Swanson]

Yeah. I think he has one point where he's written a few paragraphs and then he's just read an awful, awful, awful, awful, awful underneath it. There's shame attached to him in writing, and I think I felt a little bit of that. You know, I used to not tell people I was a writer because it felt, I don't know, like you're trying to like you have something to say to the world is a little embarrassing.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

It felt pretentious or something.

[Peter Swanson]

I don't know. I think a lot of writers don't feel this way and are happy to shout it to the world. But there are maybe there's two types of writers. So he lives with a lot of shame, some for good reason.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

So it struck me. Peter Swanson, the thing that has bound these two characters, Wendy and Tom, for decades is a shared secret that they need to keep. And the thing that ultimately breaks them both as individuals and as a couple is that they each have a huge secret or two that they do not share that they're carrying all by themselves.

[Peter Swanson]

Right.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

What's the lesson there?

[Peter Swanson]

I mean, one lesson is, you know, don't live your life like Tom and Wendy. But when we meet them as young lovers, they're very much like a lot of a lot of us, like, we'll never lie to one another. We're in this together. This is our lives, our shared lives. But as things progress and it happens, it happens pretty fast that they start to hide things from one another. You know, it does make you wonder if along the way they had remained completely open, if maybe they'd have existed longer. Everyone deals with guilt to a certain degree, and we all deal with it in slightly different ways. And I think that's one of the major themes of this book.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Peter Swanson telling us about his new book, kill your Darlings. PETER Swenson, thank you.

[Peter Swanson]

Thank you so much for having me, Mary Louise.

[Glenn Weldon]

That's it for this week on NPR's Book of the Day. If you want more, you can sign up for our [e-mail] Newsletter Books I'm Glenn Weldon. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Sullivan. Our founding editor is Petra Mayer. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Julia Corcoran, Emiko Tamagawa, Jacob Fensten, Elena Tuarek, Justine Kennan, Lena Muhammad, Adriana Gallardo, Milton Guevara, Taylor Haney, Fernando Naro, Roman Martin patience, Ashley Brown and Mallory Yu. Yolanda Sanguini is our executive producer. Thanks for listening.

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