Writing Kill Me Twice: When the Setting Becomes the Character

Some ideas arrive with a complete set of instructions. This wasn’t one of those.

What I had, at the start, was a skeleton — barely even that. Hard-boiled detective fiction. Liverpool. A protagonist who was damaged in the specific way that interesting protagonists tend to be damaged: not heroically, not cinematically, but in the grinding, managed way of someone carrying injuries that haven’t healed and probably won’t. An ex-cop doing PI work above a bookmaker’s in Kensington. The bones of something, waiting for the thing that would make it worth writing.

The genre has a problem, and the problem is that it’s been done extraordinarily well. Chandler set a bar that most of us are still ducking under. If you’re going to write in this space you need a reason — not just a setting or a character, but a structural idea that justifies the project. What’s yours? What are you doing with the form that someone else hasn’t already done better?

My first instinct was personality. I’m drawn to the internal partnership story — the character who carries a second self, an alter ego, a voice that operates from a different set of rules. There’s a rich tradition of it, and there’s something about that internal duality that maps naturally onto detective fiction, where the investigator is always part observer and part participant, always watching themselves watch.

But the more I turned it over, the more it felt like a borrowed answer. And then a different question arrived: what if the duality wasn’t internal? What if it wasn’t about who the character was, but about where he was? What if the world itself became the other half of the equation?

That was the thing I’d been looking for.

The idea: a man for whom the world, under certain conditions, physically transforms into a black-and-white 1950s American noir. Not a hallucination. Not a metaphor. Not altered perception. The world becomes that world — the cars are long American iron with chrome and whitewalls, the money in his pocket is dollars, the people around him speak in a different register entirely. Liverpool doesn’t go back in time. Liverpool becomes Chicago. The streets are the same streets, the buildings are the same buildings, the bookmaker’s is still a bookmaker’s — but the cultural reality overlaid on all of it is straight out of a Howard Hawks picture. He remains himself, entirely — Scouse voice, Liverpool memories, twenty years of serious crime — a stranger in his own city wearing someone else’s decade. The incongruity is the point.

The practical logic came quickly once the concept arrived. His phone still works. His car remains his car, though it looks nothing like itself. Digital things revert to their analogue originals. The bookmaker’s is still a bookmaker’s, just with chalked odds in the window instead of fixed-odds terminals. Same function, different costume. The world transformed but not replaced.

Once I had that, I started to see the story I was actually writing.

About halfway through the development I noticed something I probably should have noticed earlier. A struggling detective whose world keeps shifting into a stylised past version of itself — there’s a television series that did something in that territory, and it’s an extraordinary piece of work. Life on Mars is a show I have a lot of time for, and the structural rhyme was impossible to miss.

But the distinction matters, and I think it’s the right distinction: in Life on Mars, Sam Tyler is genuinely transported — the past is real, his presence in it is real, the consequences are real. What I’m doing is different. My protagonist isn’t in the past, and he isn’t in America. He’s in Liverpool — but Liverpool as it would be if it existed in a 1950s American noir film. The geography is his. The culture laid over it is entirely foreign. Chicago wearing Liverpool underneath it. He can never quite forget that the world he’s in isn’t the world he belongs to, because his own accent gives him away every time he opens his mouth. That’s not a technicality. It’s the whole emotional texture of the thing.

Because what the black-and-white world represents, eventually, is a kind of clarity that the colour world can’t offer. Every room tells its story. Every face presents its archetype. The hard-boiled world is a world where things mean what they look like — where the corrupt man in the expensive coat is legible as a corrupt man in an expensive coat, where the lone detective in the rain is exactly what he appears to be. For a man running from the consequences of a traumatic past, from PTSD and addiction and guilt and the managed damage of injuries that won’t quite heal, that clarity has an obvious appeal. The black-and-white world is where certain things become possible that the colour world keeps making difficult.

Liverpool was never in question. The city has the bones for this — the docks, the underworld, the specific texture of a place that has been working-class and mythologised and left behind and reinvented so many times that it contains multiple versions of itself simultaneously. That’s the right soil for this kind of story.

I’m still in it. Working through the architecture of the plot, finding the places where a reader’s investment will build or release, navigating the structural reveal that makes the whole thing click into place. The novel has a shape now that it didn’t have six months ago, and the shape keeps sharpening.

Whether I’ve found the right answer to the genre’s problem — that’s for someone else to say. But I think I’ve found my answer, which is probably the only place to start.