A Conversation with Dwyer Murphy, author of An Honest Living

After leaving behind the comforts and the shackles of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney makes ends meet in mid-2000s Brooklyn by picking up odd jobs from a colorful assortment of clients. When a mysterious woman named Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with ten thousand dollars in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband Newton, an antiquarian bookseller who she believes has been pilfering rare true crime volumes from her collection, he trusts it will be a quick and easy case. But when the real Anna Reddick—a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy—lands on his doorstep with a few bones to pick, he finds himself out of his depth, drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers, aspiring flâneurs, and seedy real estate developers.

Your novel is a love letter to New York City during the aughts of this century . . . from Williamsburg to the Village to the Upper West Side, the bridges, subways, and architecture that make up the city. NYC is a character in many ways. How did you develop such a clear love and respect for the city, and how did you communicate that on the page?

I’ve spent most of my adult life in New York. Even if I hadn’t, I probably would have felt that way about it from books and movies. We all have an idea of it as a character, right, for better or worse, hero or villain? I moved here while I was in law school. I knew some people with an open bedroom in a duplex near the Brooklyn Museum. The rent broke down to four hundred a month so long as we provided upkeep on a two-story organ built into the apartment. How can you beat a thing like that? It was a couple hundred blocks from campus and I got in the habit of jumping off the subway and wandering the streets when I should have been in class. In my mind, the city was mapped out as a series of bookstores, movie theaters, good food, and erratic subway connections.

As far as getting it onto the page, it wasn’t too hard to conceive, I’ve always loved flâneur novels. Get the characters walking, breathing air, talking to people, wearing out shoes. That melds perfectly with the tradition of private eye fiction, which this turned out to be, an accidental detective novel in the middle of a city full of arcane laws and a million people ignoring them in their own distinctive ways. That’s the town of my dreams—a city of well-read scofflaws.

Your semi-anonymous protagonist is an attorney. You were a lawyer before becoming editor-in-chief at CrimeReads. Why did you give up the law for writing and crime fiction?

Giving up the law always seemed to me the only decent thing to do with it. I practiced at a corporate firm in New York. I was a litigator. For a while it appeared to me a pretty genteel if inherently cruel profession and I always knew that I would quit it as soon as I could, before it worked its way too far under my skin. I did meet a lot of interesting people during that time. Strange clients with midnight crises, judges, prosecutors, opponents. A lot of gruff litigators schooled in the old New York lingo of chits and power brokering. It wasn’t a bad way to spend your formative years, but at some point you had to get the hell out. For me, books were the way out. I didn’t have any intention of writing about lawyers or the bizarre mysteries they sometimes get mixed up in, but when the time came that was the kind of story I wanted to read and to tell.

How has reading and reviewing hundreds of mysteries and thrillers as an editor at CrimeReads. informed you on writing a crime fiction novel?

It’s given me a deep appreciation for mystery fiction as a means of telling vivid, passionate, provocative stories of human striving and misunderstanding, a form passed down through the centuries, built around the dark art of suspense, entertainment and respect for your readers. The crime fiction world today is full of new voices telling timeless stories. I wanted to be a part of it.

An Honest Living is set in the early 2000s, at the tail end of the analog era and before Internet culture fully took over. Why did you want to write about this time period?

There was a mystery to everyday life during that time, some of which was snuffed out by the full onset of the digital era. I used to sit around bars and living rooms forever debating questions that could be answered by a google search. My pockets were lined with calling cards and I spent a good portion of every evening trying to get ahold of people I knew to find out where we were going or what time a movie was playing. Your roommates disappeared. Your bodega shuttered without explanation. The 2 train ran on the 4 line and it was up to you resolve all these little puzzles. That was the kind of mystery I wanted: full of odd, bewildering, lonely moments.

An Honest Living is a tip of the hat to noir mysteries and mentions “worlds colliding” 1950s films like Touch of Evil, Roman Holiday, Rear Window and, especially, from a later era, Chinatown. In what ways do the plot, atmosphere, and characters mirror Chinatown?

I can’t be the only one who thinks of Touch of Evil and Roman Holiday as a nice double feature, right? Or Rear Window as a guide to life? Chinatown was a movie I got obsessed with while my wife was first pregnant. I would fall asleep watching it, and in the morning we’d talk through various vindictive lawsuits the characters might have brought against one another. Lawyers get up to strange activities left to their own devices with a major life event looming on the horizon.

So, Chinatown worked its way into my life. I started seeing it everywhere, which I think is a little how Robert Towne might have felt when he was writing the thing, and certainly how Jake Gittes felt living through it. The fiction seeped into my New York existence and colored the way I saw friends and neighbors, new building developments and old bastards who mispronounced my name. I started writing a novel where Chinatown, the movie, has an outsize influence and Chinatown, the ambiguous unknown metaphor, prevails over ordinary logic.

What was your process for developing the noir feel the novel has? Did any crime fiction books from another era influence you? If so, which ones?

Ross Macdonald and the restrained, bighearted poetry of the Lew Archer novels were my touchstones. I was reading a lot of Margaret Millar at the time, too. Nobody writes a perplexing, insidious phone call like Margaret Millar. (She happened to be married to Ross Macdonald, aka Kenneth Millar, and imagining what that marriage might have been like no doubt influenced the direction of the ruthless literary relationships I was writing about, too.) God, I love classic noir. And from later eras, Donald Westlake, Lawrence Block, Elmore Leonard, with all those schemers and operators talking a mile a minute, mixed up in one another’s lives. Then returning again to Walter Mosley, Megan Abbott, Roberto Bolaño, Santiago Gamboa, Idra Novey, Laura van den Berg, all these writers capturing an uncanny, unmoored feeling at the heart of great noir.

Is there a second crime fiction novel in your future? If so, what can you tell us about it?

I’m at work on a sequel to An Honest Living . It’s another off-kilter murder mystery in the world of arts and letters, similarly obsessed with classic movies and noir atmospherics, but this time the characters go to Miami. It must be my homage to Elmore Leonard and another beloved lost city.

Can Romances Set in the Outdoors Be the Great Equalizer Between Men and Women?

By Stacy Gold

The times are changing, and nowhere more than in romance. We’re seeing more books with diverse casts, from diverse authors. And we’re seeing all kinds of people find their happily ever after or at least, happily for now. As both a romance reader and a romance author, I love this!

What’s still missing for me, though, are romances featuring women who are just as physically capable — if not more so — than the men who adore them. I want to read about independent, athletic, boss-ass bitches finding men who love, respect, and support them for all that they are. Not damsels in distress looking for a knight in shining armor (or sexy millionaire) to come to the rescue.

I mean, if that’s your jam, enjoy. It’s just not mine.

In fact, I almost missed out on everything wonderful about the romance genre (including writing it) because of the prevalence of this trope. I stumbled upon my first romance, a bodice-ripper complete with Fabio cover, as a teenager. Like all things with words on them that passed through my fingers, I read it.

All I remember is something about his turgid manhood entering her moist, deep well (I had to look up turgid). And how much I liked absolutely nothing about the story because I could not relate to the heroine in any way, shape, or form.

What I wanted, what I needed, were examples of outdoorsy, independent women who enjoyed sex unabashedly. Women who built their lives on their own terms and were celebrated for their power and uniqueness. The kind of stories that would show me I could celebrate my own strengths and abilities and choices and goals as an avid outdoors person—even if they didn’t include getting married or having children—and still find love.

These are the same kind of stories I still want and need in my life.

Don’t get me wrong… Strong Alpha female characters are out there and so are Beta males. And I am starting to see more, particularly in indie publishing. But it’s still not enough, and it’s still not showing the kinds of women I most want to see represented in romance novels—especially in outdoor adventure and sports romances. That’s a big part of why I write them.

If you’re a strong, capable woman a good man can be hard to find—in life, and in romance novels.

From the time we’re born, society tells us women are the weaker sex. That we definitely need protecting, if not outright saving. That our only value lies in finding a man, raising a family, and supporting our spouse on their path to success.

Because we women are too weak, too emotional, too fragile, less intelligent, and wholly incapable of taking care of ourselves or succeeding on our own abilities and merits. I say, “Screw that!”. 

I don’t believe any woman needs rescuing just because she’s a woman, any more than I think every man should come to a woman’s rescue just because he’s a man. Or he happens to own a nice, white horse.

Thankfully, we’re finally seeing more young girls in real life crushing it rock climbing, mountain biking, surfing, skiing, skateboarding, and more (in addition to team sports, where we’re fighting hard for equal pay and recognition). Historically, though, we’ve seen too few examples in romance novels of women who are smart, sexy, athletic, and capable of taking care of themselves.

One of my goals as a romance writer is to change that. So, my stories are full of women who are kick-ass outdoor athletes, and the men who admire and adore them. These women want equal partners, not saviors.

Outdoor adventure sports can be the great equalizer between men and women in romance novels.

Throughout my more than 30 years of rafting and kayaking and backpacking and skiing and mountain biking, I’ve faced my fair share of doubters simply because I’m a smaller woman. But what I learned is: most women might not be as physically strong as most men  pound-for-pound, but we more than make up for it with technique, finesse, knowledge, and inner strength.

 Also, Mother Nature will issue a beat down whenever she wants. To whomever she wants.

She does not care about your sex, gender, or income level. She doesn’t care where you went to school, or what you do for a living. She doesn’t care whether you have the latest, lightest, most expensive gear or you’re still using the same equipment you bought on clearance five years ago.

Even in less adrenalized outdoor activities like hiking or backpacking, anyone can miss a turn on the trail and end up lost or at least far from where you thought. Or sprain an ankle or break a leg. Or miscalculate food needs and spend days hungry, or break a tent pole, or have to deal with any number of other mishaps or misjudgments.

A fun outdoor adventure can always, easily, turn into a not-at-all-fun epic misadventure. Or a rescue. Or worse. This makes it fertile ground for raising the stakes on my characters—and flipping the power dynamic between the men and women.

I want attractive, feminine heroines who are equal to or better than men in athletic pursuits that have historically been male dominated.

Give me a story about Olympic skiers where the woman wins Gold and falls for the competition’s coach. Or an enemies-to-lovers romance where the man is too cocky, and the woman kicks his ass on the climbing wall. I’m not a big team sports person, but I’d love a hockey romance where the women are the ones out on the ice. Then they fall in love with someone sweet and thoughtful, who appreciates them and supports them and thinks they’re amazing (and of course great in bed!).

Since I couldn’t find these kinds of stories, I started writing what I wanted to read based on my lifetime of experience working and playing in the outdoors. My first books were three, steamy ski romance novellas, and I am releasing a full-length backpacking romance, Wild at Heart, in May 2022.

Incorporating my love of outdoor sports lets me level the playing field by putting my characters in unique situations that test their mettle and show who they truly are. I also like to flip the script on my men and make them softer. Sometimes not as good at the sport as the woman. Usually more ready to listen and talk and compromise—at least by the end.

In my stories, I show women who are highly capable, often muscular, and usually kick-ass outdoor athletes. They might wear makeup and do their nails, and they might not. What they all have in common is they’re never looking for a man, or anyone else, to rescue them.

Sometimes, the women are the experts at the sport or the ones doing the rescuing. At least physically. Emotionally it may be the other way around.

Either way, the men in my stories are willing to step back and realize life isn’t all about their needs and agenda. That a woman doesn’t need to give up her goals and happiness in service of his. Most importantly, they find physically strong, successful, boss ass bitch ladies sexy as hell and want to be supportive, loving partners to them.

Regardless of whether a woman fits in society’s tiny box of what’s supposed to make us attractive and desirable, I believe they deserve the same love, respect, adoration, and orgasms as anyone else. And in my outdoor adventure romance novels I make sure they get all of that and more.

Award-winning author Stacy Gold gave up her day job as Communications Director of a nonprofit mountain biking organization to write steamy romance novels filled with independent, adventurous women – and the men who can’t resist them. After making a living writing all kinds of non-fiction for more than fifteen years, it’s the most fun she’s ever had with a keyboard and screen. When Stacy’s not busy reading or writing, you can find her dancing, laughing or playing hard in the mountains with her wonderful hubby and happy dog.

A Conversation with Lauren McBrayer about LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE

What would you do if you found the spark that made you feel whole again?

After twelve years of marriage and two kids, Merit has begun to feel like a stranger in her own life. She loves her husband and sons, but she desperately needs something more than sippy cups and monthly sex. So, she returns to her career at Jager + Brandt, where a brilliant and beautiful Danish architect named Jane decides to overlook the “break” in Merit’s résumé and give her a shot.

Jane is a supernova—witty and dazzling and unapologetically herself—and as the two work closely together, their relationship becomes a true friendship. In Jane, Merit sees the possibility of what a woman could be. And Jane sees Merit exactly for who she is. Not the wife and mother dutifully performing the roles expected of her, but a whole person.

Their relationship quickly becomes a cornerstone in Merit’s life. And as Merit starts to open her mind to the idea of more—more of a partner, more of a match, more out of love—she begins to question: What if the love of her life isn’t the man she married. What if it’s Jane?

What inspired you to write LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE?

The idea for Like a House on Fire came to me like a tropical storm—swiftly, and with an intensity I didn’t expect.  I was on vacation with a group of women of various ages, most of whom I didn’t know very well, celebrating a friend’s fortieth birthday at a beautiful house on the Pacific Coast of Mexico (a house that makes an appearance in Like a House on Fire , when Merit and Jane get away for three nights and everything changes for them).  My own trip was four nights, and by the third, we all felt comfortable enough with each other to bare our souls over margaritas and guac.  I spent the rest of the trip thinking about the nature of female friendships and the ease with which women seem to be able to “go deep” with each other while struggling (and so often failing) to connect emotionally with their male partners.  I remember asking myself the very what-ifs at the center of Like a House on Fire  as I sat on a stone ledge overlooking the ocean and watched the other girls dance unselfconsciously beside the pool:  What if sexual attraction was part of the equation between women?  How far could a female friendship go if there weren’t a limit on what two women could be for one another?  And, over time, these questions would lead to a more personal one for me:  what if the dissatisfaction I’m feeling in my marriage isn’t an obstacle to overcome but a clue?

Like a House on Fire  explores the sensation of friendship as it transforms into romance—something we’ve also seen happen with public figures such as Elizabeth Gilbert and Glennon Doyle. Why do you think this is becoming such a timely and relevant conversation today?  

I don’t think friends-becoming-more is new.  I think the idea of a platonic friendship exploding into a hot, fiery romance has always been appealing because it captures our desire for our romantic partners to be “everything” to us.   The difference, now, is that we’re finally willing to explore what that might look like for friends of the same gender to cross that line.  I think there are a lot of reasons we’re seeing more and more “straight” women coming out and saying that they’ve found romantic love with another woman.  Part of the explanation is the fact that women are finally empowered enough culturally to define for themselves what they want out of life beyond being wives and mothers and helpmates to men.  As society has given women more and more and agency to tell their own stories, to be protagonists instead of just supporting characters, we’re questioning what the heteronormative ideal really offers us.  For women seeking deep, sustained intimacy and true equality, a marriage to a man might not be the answer.  This is ultimately where I ended up.  I stopped lamenting everything my husband wasn’t giving me and allowed myself to wonder whether the woman I was closest to could ever be more than a friend.  Once I let myself go there in my head—aided in large part by Merit and Jane, whose story was making space for my own—the floodgates opened and there was no forcing them shut. 

The novel is a realistic portrayal of what it feels like to be a like to be a parent, particularly a working mother, and captures that loss of self that comes after children and years of marriage. Are you writing from personal experience?

I am absolutely writing from personal experience – and the experience of so many of my mom friends.  For me it wasn’t so much a loss of self as a fracturing of self.  I found myself wearing all these different hats and playing all these different roles, with very little overlap.  It felt like I was constantly toggling between all these different identities, all these separate modes.  Mom mode.  Work mom.  Wife mode.  Nowhere was I integrated into one holistic person.  A mom wasn’t supposed to be sexy.  A wife wasn’t supposed to act like a lady boss.  An ambitious professional wasn’t supposed to get distracted by how much sleep her toddler was getting.  A thriving creative (I was trying to write my first novel right after my first baby was born, much like Merit was trying to mount her first gallery show) wasn’t supposed to be scouring the internet for age-appropriate lingerie.  It was all very confusing and I never felt like myself anywhere.  This is the essence of what I was trying to capture in the early chapters of Like a House on Fire .

Merit and Jane are at two different ages and stages in life, and yet they were able to overcome that, and be so drawn to each other. Why do you think that is?

This is an excellent question, but my answer is to question the question.  Why do we assume that age is such a barrier to intimacy among adults?  We’ve also been sold a lie by the patriarchy that women can only be understood by women who are like them—moms should gravitate toward moms, single women should find single friends, working professionals should “network” with similarly-minded women. The truth is, many women I know feel alienated and lonely in groups of women “just like them.”  I certainly did.  It wasn’t until I went back to work after kids and met a diverse group of women with whom I had few life circumstances in common but shared a similar temperament and sense of humor that I began to question the idea that “my people” were thirty-something women with kids and husbands.  The cynical side of me wonders whether we’ve been programmed to think of ourselves as only the roles that we perform, and that’s why we so often gravitate toward women who are also performing those roles.  I call bullshit on this.  Merit and Jane connect so deeply because neither woman needed the other to be any particular thing other than who they already were.  It didn’t matter that they seemed so different on paper, because they (like all of us) weren’t defined by their life circumstances.

Religion is a topic that comes up throughout the novel in regards to Merit. Was it important to you for that to be included, and why?

Faith has always been an important part of my own identity, and I was interested to explore how being a person of faith would affect Merit’s decision-making as her feelings for Jane changed and deepened.  I think in some sense, it is because Merit has a relationship with God (albeit not the one her parents wish she had) that she is able to recognize the uniqueness of what she and Jane find in one another.  I wanted to explore how faith intersects with the messiness of life for a person who has left organized religion but hasn’t abandoned God.  For Merit, the sense of connection to something deeper that she feels when she and Jane are together is reminiscent of other moments in her life when she has felt connected to the Divine, and while their relationship is certainly complicated and morally fraught, she experiences an inherent goodness in her intimacy with Jane, which in her mind keeps it from being completely black and white.  I love the nuance of this.  While I was working on Like a House on Fire , I heard a sermon at church about the verse in Genesis where God says “it is not good for man to be alone,” and it resonated deeply: it isn’t good for any of us to be alone!  And yet Merit is very alone in her marriage and the opposite of alone when she is with Jane.  With Jane, she belongs.  Though that may be an oversimplification, it really is the heart of why Merit is willing to do what she does.

Like a House on Fire  is a vivid depiction of what many marriages look and feel like. Why do you think so many fall into the same marital unhappiness?  

At the risk of over-generalizing, I think that modern marriages – particularly American marriages – have become unsustainably imbalanced.  Women who are equal or even main breadwinners are so often expected to be the primary parent, the keeper of the house, the organizer of tasks, and the handlers of all manner of emotional and invisible labor.  The lack of partnership so many of us feel is incredibly demoralizing.  It’s not that women are being asked to take on too much (though we absolutely are), it’s that there’s an unspoken expectation that childrearing and domestic tasks are either ours to do or ours to manage.  This may have made sense when there was a division of labor in married households, with the husband working outside the home and the wife working inside the home, but that’s not the typical scenario anymore.  And yet, women are still responsible for the domestic work.  Sure, for affluent working women, this means hiring nannies and housekeepers and gardeners to do what the stay-at-home wife once did by herself, but managing these people and keeping the house running smoothly is no small task (which, I imagine, is why so many men have cleverly opted out of it!)

If you could give Merit one piece of advice, what would it be?

To trust herself.  When we meet her, she’s spent 39 years of her life trying to satisfy everyone else’s ideas of who she’s supposed to be.  And, I think, waiting for someone to believe in her, which her parents never did and ultimately Cory didn’t either.  At the beginning of the novel, this desire is wrapped up in her art career—she feels let down that her husband didn’t truly support her when she quit her job to paint full time.  What she comes to understand is that it wasn’t actually about whether she could make it as a painter, what she wanted was someone who loved her for who she really was.  Not the heteronormative ideal of the competent working-mom-multitasking-wife but a passionate, thoughtful, sexual being with desires and interests outside her role as mother and wife and friend.  I want Merit to trust that who she really is underneath—passionate and complicated and unapologetically queer—is exactly who she is supposed to be.  I’m learning in my own life that dismantling a false identity is a messy, sometimes painful, but ultimately exhilarating process that requires humility, a sense of humor, and lots of grace.

Did you plan on the events in the epilogue unfolding from the start?

I didn’t.  The draft of this book that I was prepared to send to publishers didn’t have an epilogue at all.  The story concluded with Merit ending her relationship with Jane because of her inability to disappoint Cory and her kids and her friends and her mother.  But the Friday before we were planning to go out with the book, I had this nagging feeling in my gut that their story ended a different way, and that I owed them—and, honestly, myself—that ending.  So I sat down to write an epilogue, at first just for myself, and typed without stopping until I wrote the last word.  After I sold the book, my incomparable editor, Gabriella Mongelli helped me make the story better, but not a word of the epilogue has changed since that afternoon I wrote it.

What is next for you?

I’m working on a new novel about a woman who comes to the end of herself and journeys into the darkest depths of her soul to find the truest essence of who she is and what she wants.  I want to explore the nature of colonization, using California as my backdrop, to ask questions about what it means for each of us – collectively but also as individuals - to assimilate to the dominant (white, male, cisgender, straight) culture, and what happens when we internalize someone else’s ideas for what it means to be “good.”  I’m also already dreaming about the TV version of Like a House on Fire  and how I might bring Merit and Jane to life on screen.