With a string of successful mysteries and a new thriller just out, best-selling author Peter Swanson ’90 keeps readers spellbound
By Abe Loomis
Photos by Kathleen Dooher
For anyone who has ever pulled an all-nighter to finish a term paper, Peter Swanson’s technique as an undergraduate might sound familiar.
“If it was a 10-page paper,” he says of his early writing assignments, “I’d start it 10 hours before it was due. I’d write a page an hour. If I finished a page early, I’d take a break.”
For many, such feats of academic derring-do could be written off as youthful folly. For Swanson, a member of the Trinity College Class of 1990, they turned out to be essential training.
“I wasn’t always great at getting my stuff done early,” he says, “but I always got it in on time. And now I’m one of the few writers I know who always hits their deadlines.”
These days, Swanson’s deadlines demand more than 10 pages. The Sunday Times and New York Times best-selling novelist is the author of eight books, several of which have been optioned for feature films. His most recent, Nine Lives—which, as usual, involves malice and murder—hit shelves in March. His stories, poetry, and features have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Guardian, and The Atlantic Monthly, among other outlets. The Boston Globe has praised his plots’ “audacious and spectacular twists,” and The Wall Street Journal has compared his writing to that of Alfred Hitchcock—who happens to be one of his heroes.
“I’ve always been drawn to the notion of a moral gray area,” Swanson says. “My favorite filmmaker is Hitchcock, and his favorite subject, I think, is ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I love the idea of basically good people crossing over into criminal behavior. It’s really my favorite thing to explore.”
Swanson’s work habits have changed a lot since his college days. Nowadays, rather than waiting until the last minute, he spends every morning at his desk in the home on the North Shore of Massachusetts where he lives with his wife, steadily putting words on the screen. Barring emergencies, he writes 1,000 words a day, seven days a week. It’s in some ways an unlikely vocation for an English major who once aspired to become a high school teacher, worked for 20 years as a project manager at a Cambridge nonprofit, began his professional career publishing poems and short stories, and didn’t try to write a novel until he was in his mid-30s.
“I found I liked having a day of writing where I woke up and I got back to my computer and my story was half told,” Swanson says of his first forays into long-form storytelling. “I just needed to move it along a little bit, and that was my day’s job. I really turned out to love that.”
Nevertheless, his first years as an aspiring novelist were tough. He wrote three novels and hundreds of query letters without any signs of interest from agents or publishers. Six or seven years went by without a nibble. Then, when he was almost ready to give up, persistence met serendipity. Days after publishing The Girl with a Clock for a Heart in novella form in an obscure online magazine, he got an email from Nat Sobel, a veteran literary agent in New York.
“The first thing I did was look him up to find out if he was legitimate,” Swanson says. “And he was.”
Sobel asked Swanson if he could turn the novella into a novel. Swanson agreed to try, and the book that resulted, plus the promise of a second, sold to William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins.
“It was a completely amazing event,” Swanson says. “I didn’t have any kind of following or any kind of writing career at that point. And the lesson I learned is, it can’t hurt to get your stuff out there, because you never know who’s going to read something. I mean, if it’s in your drawer, no one’s going to read it. If it goes out somewhere, someone might read it.”
Swanson’s own love for books started early. Growing up in Concord, Massachusetts, he haunted the local Annie’s Book Swap, scouring the shelves for Agatha Christie, John D. MacDonald, and Stephen King. In high school, he developed a taste for literary fiction, and at Trinity, his passion for reading and writing found fertile ground. He fondly remembers studying the classics with then-Professor of English Dirk Kuyk and developing a thesis on zombie films with then-Charles A. Dana Professor of English and American Studies James Miller, both now deceased.
“At Trinity I learned a lot about how to write, how to read, how to parse texts,” Swanson says.
He also made some lifelong friends.
“Ultimately you leave a college behind,” Swanson says, “but the part that continues is the people that you met. I made some very good friends at Trinity, and we stay in touch. For me, that’s the most important part.”
Among those with whom Swanson remains close are classmates Liz Horn and Nina Tiger.
“One of the best things about my Trinity experience has been enduring friendships like the one Peter and I have,” Horn says. “Since graduation, we have never lived in the same place but have always remained close. A group of us from Trinity, along with our spouses and kids, have made it a cherished tradition to get together one or two weekends a year (interrupted recently by COVID). Since we live within two hours of each other, I’ve been able to go to many of Peter’s book-release parties. It is wild to be in the audience and see ‘fans’ of your college friend line up to get his autograph!”
From the earliest days of their friendship, Tiger says, Swanson’s broad knowledge of culture and enthusiastic appetite for the macabre made a strong impression.
“Peter was always passionate about music, movies, and books,” she says. “That’s one of the things I remember about him from college. And he had really good taste in all of those things. He made me watch The Exorcist when I hated scary movies! He said, ‘This is a really good movie—you need to watch this.’ ”
The three remember hanging out in the residence halls, snacking at the Cave, talking late into the night at the Arts and Leisure coffeehouse on Zion Street, and watching countless new and classic films at Cinestudio, the independent film theater on campus where Horn and Swanson volunteered. They also studied in Mather Hall, the name of which appears in several of Swanson’s books as that of a small New England college with a campus—including a chapel—that Bantams might find unnervingly familiar.
“I chose Trinity, oddly, because I fell in love with it on a sort of aesthetic level,” Swanson says. “It has a classic college feel that borders on the Gothic. I loved the Chapel for the way it looked and felt—the gargoyles and carvings and secret spaces around it. In Girl with a Clock, there’s a sequence involving a secret staircase in the chapel that leads up to a balcony, and I included that. I’ve also included some secret underground passageways, which I never personally saw—although there were rumors—in some of my books as well.”
Horn and Tiger have both noticed these resemblances—and others. When they attended the party in Cambridge to celebrate the publication of Swanson’s first book, figuring out the fictional connections to real life became a kind of parlor game for the Trinity people in the crowd.
“In the spring of junior year, a group of us from Trinity shared an apartment on a study-abroad program in London,” Horn says. “I have so many great memories from that semester—and there are many allusions to that time and place in Peter’s novel The Kind Worth Killing. It is so much fun (and sometimes a little creepy) to read all the tiny details or references to our time in college woven into Peter’s novels.”
Tiger’s still not sold on horror or suspense—she generally stays away from scary stories. But she deeply admires Swanson’s writing, and his books have a place in her heart and on her shelf.
“I’ll continue to read them,” she says, “because of how much I love Peter.”