Jenna Blum’s Murder Your Darlings is one of many current thrillers that takes place in some realm of the “literary” world. It’s a trend. Maybe 2021’s The Plot was the kick starter? (Overrated, I just can’t see what all the excitement was about!) Recent titles in this burgeoning sub-genre include The Man on the Endless Stair by Chris Barkley and The Award by Matthew Pearl, with at least one other due in April, The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke (and looks quite promising!).
Three main characters drive this murderously snarky satire of publishing and the cult of the author. The story begins with a prologue, a cryptic narrative by a person referred to as “The Rabbit.” Next, we encounter Simone (Sam) Vetiver, a moderately successful mid-list, 40-something writer of historical fiction. Sam needs a hit. Her agent is behind her, but Sam’s past few books haven’t cracked the bestseller lists. She finishes the final reading on her lackluster book tour for her latest, The Sodbuster’s Wife and opens a dating app in her hotel room. “Sam worked from home, and her publishing colleagues were, like her readers, 98 percent women and 2 percent men who tended to play for the other team. Unless Sam wanted to wait for a sexy, hyperliterate window-washer to come crashing into her living room, she had to swipe.”
She’s got a serious case of writer’s block, lies to her agent about the next novel’s progress (as in “none”) and is mired in lonely despair. “Only the biggest- name authors, the ones who could sneeze into a napkin and publish it and make the list every single time, could afford not to worry.”
But salvation comes in the form of an email from the legendary William Corwyn, a perennial best-seller known for the sensitive portrayals of women in his novels. He and Sam share a publisher, and Corwyn writes that he was given a copy of Sam’s latest novel, “The Sodbuster’s Wife” and he was blown away. He says he’ll be in Boston, where Sam lives, on his next tour and … would she like to meet him for dinner?
His mash note is dripping with gooey, cringy compliments such as “I loved your bravery in depicting the pioneers’ slaughter of the Sioux. I wept. The white man’s subsequent hanging. I raged. And the fuck by the wagon, the farmer taking his wife from behind as she clung to the wheel to keep from falling in the mud. Unforgettable.”
Heady words to a disconsolate, blocked novelist! She ends up going to meet him at the Boston reading. Meanwhile, The Rabbit is lurking, shadowing, stalking – Corwyn and now Sam, too. As the story proceeds, we learn that The Rabbit was a neophyte writer who took part in a group called The Darlings – a kind of support group run by Corwyn for frustrated writers. And, yup, she slept with him. We see where this is heading, and the pages begin to turn faster.
The wooing of Sam becomes intense. Naturally, Corwyn seduces her. She thinks, “This is it!” Corwyn moves her into his palatial, isolated Maine home, they have copious sex, and he eventually asks her to marry him. He says he will help her get the new novel on back on track, be her muse.
However, there is a slight glitch: in an effort to overcome her writer’s block, Sam tells Corwyn she has a new idea for a thriller about a writing group (sort of based on the Darlings) that is shattered by the suspicious death of one of its members. Except Corwyn freaks out. No way, he tells her, if you write that we are through. And for a time, they are.
The perspective shifts to Corwyn in the first person in Part 2. Such a sleazebag, such a misogynist. He’s screwing around with a hotel chambermaid as he pursues Sam. He muses: “Simone is no sportfucker; most women aren’t, and I’ve come to recognize the mutant subspecies who are by the feral miasma they emit and, like any wise man, stay far, far away.”
Will Sam wake up and escape Corwyn’s controlling? Has she sold her soul for a shot at a bestseller? Why is The Rabbit now ensconced in Corwyn’s basement, hiding? Blum skillfully builds the tension, as we realize (it wasn’t difficult) the depth and extent of Corwyn’s coldly duplicitous personality. The Rabbit, who’s seemed nutty as hell, actually has a serious backstory and Sam begins (finally) to grasp Corwyn’s lies she’s been in deep denial about.
For readers who are interested in the publishing world, books and writing in general, Murder Your Darlings is a treat, laced with raunchy humor and just enough twists to keep those pages turning.
Publishing can be a dirty business! A sizzling, yet elegant episode of violence, involving an old-fashioned fountain pen near the end, is just right. In an original twist, The Rabbit and Sam become allies. It’s not difficult to imagine them on another adventure. Here are two richly developed protagonists we’ve surprisingly watched grow into friends. Hmmmm.
Peter Handel has been writing about crime fiction since the early 1990s. His reviews, interviews, and profiles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Reader’s Journal, The Rap Sheet and CrimeReads. Join his Substack here.
