Ian Fleming Steel Dagger; Her Every Fear, an NPR book of the year; Before She Knew Him, and Eight Perfect Murders.
[My Book, The Movie: The Kind Worth Killing; The Page 69 Test: The Kind Worth Killing; Writers Read: Peter Swanson (February 2015)]
His new novel is Kill Your Darlings.
At CrimeReads Swanson tagged "seven books and one play on the theme of marital homicide," including:
The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) by James M. CainRead about another novel on the list.
Cain wrote two classics of this particular genre, the other being the equally brilliant Double Indemnity. What sets this novel apart is its depression-era setting, and the seediness of the affair between drifter Frank Chambers and Cora Papadakis, the wife of the owner of the diner that Frank finds work at. Cain was great at digging into the psychology that would lead a pair of lovers to murder together, and then showing how that same psychology would eventually destroy any love that had ever been there in the first place.
The Postman Always Rings Twice is among Bob Rivers's top ten noir novels for beginners, Emily Temple's fifty great classic novels under 200 pages, Douglas Kennedy's ten favorite "novels on the agonies and ecstasies of the extramarital adventure," Vincent Zandri's top ten doomed and deadly romances in noir fiction, and Benjamin Black/John Banville's five top works of noir.
--Marshal Zeringue