CLEAN HANDS follows a detective investigating a murder case with two hundred potential witnesses, all of whom claim they know nothing about what happened. What inspired you to create this unusual mystery setup?

I’ve spent forty years being sent into companies after something has already gone wrong. Nearly fifty of them. A dozen bad enough that somebody had to be flown in. And in every one of those engagements you do the same thing first: you interview everybody. Not the six people you suspect — everybody.

Here is what I learned doing that, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to see it. Almost nobody lies to you. What people do instead is tell you a true thing that isn’t the thing. They answer a slightly different question than the one you asked, and they do it so smoothly that it takes a second interview and a document in your hand to notice.

Anybody who’s lived in a small place knows exactly what this feels like. Something happens. Everyone hears about it before supper. And then you go around asking, and the whole county turns into the most polite group of people you have ever met in your life. Nobody’s rude to you. Nobody tells you a thing. When two hundred people are potential witnesses, no one is a witness. Testimony stops being evidence and becomes weather.

That’s the whole book, really. I wanted to write a mystery in which the evidence is what nobody says. Gus spends the book trying to find one person who decided. That search is the plot.

Rourke’s colorblindness shapes the way he experiences and interprets the world. What inspired this aspect of his character, and what did you want it to reveal about perception and investigation?

In forensic work the first thing you’re taught is not to trust your eye. The eye is fast and it is confident and it is wrong constantly. So you don’t look at a set of books and form an impression, you tie things out. You take the number on this page and you find the same number somewhere it had no reason to be, and if the two don’t agree you have found something. It’s slow. It is also the only method that survives cross-examination.

There’s a kind of detective who walks into a room and the room simply hands him the answer.  They see more than we do.  I’ve never met that person. I wanted one who sees less and knows precisely how much less, because that’s the investigator I’d actually hire. Gus can’t take a glance and be satisfied by it. He has to count, verify, and — this is the part I think matters — he has to ask somebody. Every time he asks, the asking is a piece of evidence about the person answering.

Everyone else is certain. They saw what they saw. Gus is the one who has to say I can’t tell, describe it to me — which is, paradoxically, what makes him the most reliable perceiver in the county.

Colorblindness makes a man ask for help. That’s the whole thing right there. Gus has to turn to whoever is standing next to him and ask what color is that, and he has to do it in front of people, and he has to believe the answer. For a proud man in a small county that is an enormous concession, and it happens forty times in the book.

So he spends the novel depending on other people’s eyes while trying to find out which of them is lying to him. That struck me as a fair description of being alive in a place where everybody knows you.

Family relationships are woven throughout the mystery, from Gus and Casey to Eleanor Grant and her daughter Lily. Why was it important to include these personal connections alongside the larger conspiracy?

Because that’s what a county is. In a place like Calder County nothing travels through official channels. It travels through somebody’s sister-in-law. You can’t write an honest small-town mystery where the investigation and the family life are two separate departments, because in a small town they’re the same department, and half the trouble comes from a detective having to question people he’s going to see again in the grocery store.

And personally — I did not want to write the lonely detective with the apartment and the bottle and the ex-wife who calls to complain. Gus has people who need him at genuinely inconvenient moments, which is most of what adult life consists of.  And it gives his character depth.  Eleanor and Lily are the reason the book has a temperature. You can follow a conspiracy with your head. You follow a mother and a daughter with something else, and that’s what people actually remember six months later.  They’re where the reader learns what Gus actually values, as opposed to what he says at work. A detective’s ethics are cheap when they cost him only a case; they get expensive when they cost him somebody at his own table.

Can you give us a glimpse inside Book 2 of the Calder County Novels? 

Clean Hands was about a place where two hundred people knew nothing. Book Two is the opposite problem, and in my working life it’s the more common one: people who knew exactly what was happening, wrote it down carefully, filed it correctly, and were never once asked to explain it.

That’s the situation I’ve walked into more times than any other. Nothing was hidden. Everything was disclosed. The disclosure was simply written in a form that guaranteed no one would read it or understand it — which is a more sophisticated thing than lying and considerably harder to prosecute.

Gus is still in Calder County. He’s still colorblind, still stubborn, and after everything in the first book he is now a man that people in town have opinions about — which turns out to be worse for an investigator than being a stranger.  Gus doesn’t arrive at Book Two intact.  He starts the second novel with the one thing that’s most dangerous for an investigator, which is a settled opinion about his neighbors. Watching that opinion be wrong is a large part of the pleasure I’m building.

So the second book puts Gus up against paper instead of people.  My ambition for the series is that by the fourth or fifth book the county reads as a single long ledger, and every volume is one more entry that changes the balance of the ones before it.

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