This had never happened to me before, and it was both exhilarating and terrifying. I knew their relationship, and I knew what many of the plot points in the book would be. I knew who wrote the list, and I knew who the killer was. And by the time I was back in the air conditioning of my car I knew almost the entire story. For the remainder of my walk I began to plot.

The first was: What if someone made a list of the best fictional murders? And then my immediate second thought: What if someone else used that last to commit actual murders?Īnd there was the book.

As I was going over fictional murders in my mind, trying to remember some of the best ones, I had two thoughts in a row. As usual, when I’m searching for inspiration, I don’t think about real life. On the day that I conjured up Eight Perfect Murders, I had just begun my walk and I was trying to come up with a clever idea for a murder in a short story that I was writing. It’s beautiful, but it also has the added advantage that if I get hot walking, there’s a lovely pond for swimming. I try and walk every afternoon, and in the summer times I do much of my walking at Walden Pond. I was taking my usual loop around Walden Pond in Concord, a locale made famous by another writer, one with higher aspirations than thinking up perfect murders. I was out walking, so I supposed the idea didn’t drop into my lap, per se. But with my newest book, Eight Perfect Murders, the idea dropped in my lap as close to fully formed as a book idea can be. It can take a year, sometimes more than a year. More often than not, these imagined novels wither on the vine. A premise will occur to me, then stick in my brain for a couple of months before another idea joins that first one. Most of the ideas for my books come in dribs and drabs.

Peter swanson rules for perfect murders