The Killer Inside Me

‘This book knocked my socks off. I’d always loved crime fiction, but at university, I’d tended to read spy novels, police procedurals, and private detective fiction. I’d never even heard the term crime noir as applied to literature. It was a revelation to read a book where the protagonist was the criminal. I’d never realised that the villain could be the central character in a novel, and that such a book could furthermore conclude with the protagonist coming to a bad end. This subversion of traditional crime fiction tropes – unlikable characters, no epiphany or happy ending – appealed greatly to me, and I became obsessed with crime noir fiction and immersed myself in the great writers of the subgenre. I began to grasp that the narrative trajectory of noir is disruptive in a way that mainstream crime literature is not. Much later, I came to realise that crime noir literature is especially suited for Native Americans. American Indians know all too well that wrongdoers are not always caught, and justice is not always served. Indeed, I wrote a short story, also titled Winter Counts, that introduced the characters in the novel, but it was written as a noir tale. In the story, Virgil Wounded Horse is killed at the end, realising that he’d made too many bad choices. Needless to say, I later made the decision to expand the story into a novel, but to abandon the noir angle and write the book as a literary thriller. But I remain a fan of the crime noir genre, and have a noir short story forthcoming in 2022 in a crime anthology titled Denver Noir.’