The October List

Foreword

We have Stephen Sondheim to thank for this book. Several years ago I was listening to a National Public Radio interview by the inimitable Terry Gross, on her Fresh Air program, with Sondheim, one of my favorite musical theater composers and lyricists. One of the plays he discussed was Merrily We Roll Along, which happened to be perhaps the only play of his I had not seen. I was fascinated by the fact that it began in the present and moved back in time. Of particular interest was his comment about a song that meant one thing in the present, and meant something different when first (well, later) introduced.

I happen to love the concept of a fractured time line. Look at Stanley Kubrick’s second best film, The Killing (Strangelove — not 2001 — is my number one), or Pulp Fiction, Memento, Back to the Future. And, of course, the classic Seinfeld episode “The Betrayal,” which was an homage to Harold Pinter’s own reverse-chronology play, Betrayal.

I began wondering if it was possible for a thriller writer to pull off a backward-told story that was filled with the cliffhangers, surprises and twists and turns that are, to me, the epitome of good crime fiction. The task, of course, is to present the twist (the “reveal” as they say in Hollywoodspeak) before giving the facts that led up to it and still make the surprise thrilling. It’s like telling a joke’s punch line first, then giving the setup itself — yet making the audience laugh just as hard as if they’d heard the gag in proper order. It can be done:

Many, many Post-it notes later I plotted out and wrote The October List — a novel that begins with the last chapter and then moves backward in time, over the course of about two days, to the first chapter. Though it’s a bit shorter than most of my novels, I can say that it was more challenging, byte for byte, than anything I’ve previously written.

Because of my heroine’s passion for photography, I thought I would include images throughout the book, at the beginning of each chapter. Some are merely illustrative. But some are clues as to mysteries the book holds, and some are twists in themselves. As Gabriela has said, “There’s something seductive about taking reality and controlling it. Sometimes I make a literal image, sometimes I start there and manipulate it. Sometimes the end result is obscure, abstract; only I know the truth.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Rather than give the titles to the pictures where they appear in the book, I thought it was best to include them in the table of contents. That surprise thing, again.

— J.D., Chapel Hill, NC