The Kind Worth Killing

"I hadn’t thought about it that way, but you’re quite right, there is a bit of Strangers on a Train to it. I found I was turning the pages and wanting to follow this strange situation. It’s about a man who meets this girl at an airport with red hair. I always wondered when I read that line—because an author is always looking for the clue that will give everything away—is the red hair going to be a clue? He sits next to her at an airport bar and tells her he’d like to murder his wife. Then, they happen to be on the same plane and they end up sitting next to each other. It’s about what happens after that, because he gets off the plane thinking, ‘Oh, well, that was just a plane journey with a woman I’ll never see again.’ But it wasn’t. For me, it was. I loved it and recommended it to a lot of people at the time because I’d never read Peter Swanson before. I have been reading him since, so it was a book that turned me into a fan. Absolutely right. The truth is that we’re all in that category. I spend my life saying to people, ‘Tell me someone I haven’t read! Tell me a book I ought to read!’ I do it all the time and get some very surprising and wonderful results. In fact, that’s how I discovered Stefan Zweig , who I think is arguably the greatest writer and storyteller of the last 100 years. I didn’t discover him until I was 60. A lady said to me, ‘It’s amazing you’ve got to this great age, Jeffrey, and not come across Stefan Zweig! He is one of the most respected authors of the last century.’ So, if you haven’t heard of Stefan Zweig, if you haven’t read his masterpiece—and I don’t call anything a masterpiece lightly—then you should. It’s called Beware of Pity . On the first page, his writing ability will hit you between the eyes. On the second, you will see why you have to turn the pages. He only wrote a couple of full-length novels. Sadly, he ended up committing suicide. He believed Hitler would take over the world and the Jews were doomed because of it."