The Forest for the Trees: WEST HEART KILL (2023)

Originally posted May 15, 2024.

People hunger for epiphany, you think, they clamor for it, but given a chance, who among us would actually recognize it?

Happening across West Heart Kill by Dann McDorman at the library, I was intrigued by its promise of a metafictional murder mystery (“the only missing piece of the puzzle is you, dear reader”) that combined elements of noir and fair-play detection, and in which “everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective”. Given that description, I wasn’t expecting a conventional solution, but unfortunately I still came away disappointed—as much as it was the initial draw, I almost wished that this hadn’t been metafiction at all.

West Heart Kill is aggressively fourth-wall-breaking, but I’ll start with the in-universe plot: It’s 1976, and private investigator Adam McAnnis has joined his university friend James Blake for a Fourth of July party at an exclusive hunting club owned by the Blakes and five other wealthy families: the Garmonds, Talbots, Mayers, Burrs, and Caldwells. The only other guest is prospective member (and prospectively the first Jewish club member) Jonathan Gold. Naturally, the families are severely dysfunctional, and everyone at the club is hiding something, including McAnnis. For the third year in a row, someone turns up dead—this time in an apparent suicide. Later, the club president is found shot in what is definitely a murder, and thanks to a storm, the authorities can’t be called. McAnnis, already here to investigate on behalf of an unknown client, seizes the opportunity to play the outsider detective. That forms the basis of the novel up until the locked-room climax (more on this later).

It’s a familiar style of plot about crumbling old-money families, with added noir concerns relating to Vietnam, organized crime, and the papered-over antisemitism and racism of the American establishment. This was a solid premise in the Knives Out (2019) mould that I was engaged in for as long as the story engaged with it. What sets West Heart Kill apart from others of the type is that much of the book is written in second person, directly addressed to the reader.

I’m not opposed to the idea—I’ve read If on a winter’s night a traveler—but I found this metafictional conceit to be more intrusive than anything. That’s because frequently, “you” are ascribed reactions to events that I simply didn’t experience. I read mysteries (I was told) for “the suspense and the anticipation” and not the “all-too-often disappointing” solution. I was “distressed by the lack of women […] so far” (the book informed me) in the first couple pages, and apparently “I” find crime fiction to be misogynistic generally (I generally assume fiction will be misogynistic until proven otherwise, but this is not unique to mysteries, and really depends on the author; not to mention that this genre has plenty of pioneering women). Similarly, when McAnnis meets James’s sister Emma:

McAnnis does in fact remember her, from a trip to the Blakes’ apartment in the city, during college, but she was just a kid then, with the full horror show: braces, acne, awkwardness. But now she is an altogether different creature… and you think, as you read the passage that follows, of how all novelistic descriptions are essentially exercises in voyeurism and fantasy, especially when, as here, the words evoke the tropes of what academics call the male gaze: tanned thighs, ripped jean shorts, star-spangled red-white-and-blue-bikini-topped breasts, blond shag framing cheeks dotted with summer freckles… descriptions that, you’ve always suspected, reveal more about the writers than the characters they’ve invented.

“Revealing” is one word for it, I guess, but Laura Mulvey coined the male gaze as an argument against the supposedly objective televisual eye of the camera. Here, we are quite literally in the male perspective of the male protagonist. Sure, as a lesbian, I might roll my eyes at being in the head of a heterosexual dude looking at a woman, but this is all pretty tame—I’m not sure how I would write a straight man differently. If I was shocked to hear that this guy noticed an adult woman’s breasts, it was mostly because I’d assumed up to this point that he and James were lovers (gay bias). McAnnis is a sleazebag, but I did actually like him, and his worst crimes are having served in Vietnam and his actions during a horrible case before the events of the story which still haunts him. This all just felt like a very out-sized reaction to be told I was having.

Basically, this narrative technique didn’t work for me. It felt distracting, unmoored in places, shifting not just between persons but tenses. Apparently Dann McDorman’s previous work is in television, and I wonder if that informed moments where “the perspective shifts, transparently mimicking the language of film,” and the endgame which shifts entirely to script format. Right, about that: I’ve been talking around what happens in the ending, but there’s no way I can discuss the nature of this plot shift without…

S P O I L E R S

.

.

.

West Heart Kill‘s final act dispenses with the fiction of the story entirely, and has the reader (who we are told “is a woman”) enter the novel to address the characters directly and solve the case. In the very last chapter, which seems to be modelled off of the epilogue of a certain Agatha Christie book, the reader is addressed directly by the author, who confesses to being the true culprit who made the narrative decision to kill off his characters. Described like that, I would imagine that the initial concept for the book was “a mystery where the detective is the reader and the culprit is the author”. But while actually reading the book, my impression was that the central mystery had been written in seriousness, and the metafiction was there to… I don’t know, criticize the type of novel that it was? Preempt criticism? I’m not sure. It was a very strange reading experience.

Again, I enjoyed the actual noir story, for the most part, and wished it had wrapped up in-universe too—investigated by Emma, for example. The ending even flirts with that idea, but doesn’t commit to it. Maybe that’s what I found lacking in West Heart Kill: a stronger commitment to any one element of its concept.