We are very excited to sit and down and talk with Melanie Anagnos. Melanie’s debut novel, Nightswimming, is set to release on June 26, and it’s received solid praise from early readers.
Thriller Magazine: Nightswimming vividly brings 1970s Paterson, New Jersey to life. What drew you to set a crime novel in this particular time and place, and how much of it is shaped by personal memory versus research?
I wanted a setting that felt natural for the kind of crime fiction that interests me (a little gritty and very realistic) and that led me to Paterson. It’s urban, but not necessarily impersonal or alienating in the way that NY and LA are often depicted, and more the kind of city a police officer can patrol and see the same handful of people every day.
Having 1970s Paterson as the backdrop is definitely escapist; both the time period and the locale take readers out of their everyday experience. I also like going back to the 1970s as a return to the basics. Crime fiction is built as an intricate puzzle, and giving myself the logistical constraints of what good detective work looked like in that era (before computers or smartphones) shaped an investigation rooted in instinct and gathering clues.
I was able to draw on personal memories of both Paterson and the 1970s with the setting, but there was quite a lot of research I had to do on policing. I read Tom Walker’s, Fort Apache (1976), as well as other nonfiction books on weapons and day-to-day police work. I listened to podcasts featuring former detectives unraveling their investigations. When I scoured newspaper.com, I often looked for 1970s particulars, like the price of a cassette player, but I also found the “Rules and Regulations Governing the Paterson Police” (those were printed in the local paper). I went online to find out what cars the police drove in Paterson (they weren’t black and white). I have a good friend who educated me about guns, and he eventually took me to a pistol range so I could shoot a Colt Python.
TM: Your protagonist, Jamie Palmieri, is not only navigating a double homicide but also his own personal grief. What inspired his character arc, and was he always meant to be a former boxer turned cop?
One of the longstanding tropes in the genre is the lone wolf detective, and while I was honoring that detail with Jamie as a young man who isn’t tethered to family, crime fiction always allows room to explore the emotional undercurrents.
A lone wolf suggests a kind of freedom that’s appealing, but I wondered if Jamie was seeking something more. I think emotional connection is important for many people, particularly someone who’s lost theirs. I saw Jamie as a loner because of circumstance, and I thought about what he would striving for, which were solid relationships.
The idea of Jamie as a former boxer came up because I knew that balance would be key as a theme, and also for Jamie emotionally and as a physical strength. As a backstory for a character, I’ve always liked watching (or reading about) athletes who never quite achieved their goals and had to face walking away when the time is right. That tells me something about their self-awareness and the experience they’ve gained getting to know themselves a little better. It takes work to find your place in the world, once you’ve had to let go of early dreams.
TM: The prose in Nightswimming is richly textured—slow-burning, atmospheric, and laced with noir elements. How did your background in law and your MFA training shape your voice in crime fiction?
That’s such an interesting question. I never considered my background in law, but it has given me a lot of discipline as a writer, and it helped to have the research skills necessary in writing a crime novel. I never do a formal outline when I begin a novel, but I like to have an idea of the story’s arc. Having written many legal briefs, which are highly structured, was probably a useful background in putting together the basic scaffolding around Nightswimming. That said, legal writing can be quite dry. If you think of a story as a house, my legal background let me put up the framing but having worked towards my MFA, and being a reader who’s always studying storytelling, helped with the scenes and the setting and the dialogue.
TM: Many crime novels prioritize plot over character, but your story seems deeply character-driven. What’s your approach to balancing suspense with emotional depth?
Several years ago, I was writing a novel that never really came to life the way I’d wanted. It was a literary novel that had a minor character—a rookie cop—named Jamie. Even though I moved Jamie into a police procedural, character-driven novels are exactly the fiction that interests me most, and what drives my writing. I never see that as separate from the core mission of fiction, which is creating tension, but also engagement. As I knew Jamie more and more, I was able to get that person on the page and convey a compelling individual for readers—someone they’d want to follow along on a journey. It’s that engagement with Jamie that really moves the plot. Having a character with emotional depth set the stage for the stakes to become personal, and that fit in effortlessly with the pacing and rising tension in the novel.
TM: Women in Nightswimming, like Lorraine and Cindy, are layered and significant. How did you approach writing their perspectives in a genre often dominated by male voices?
This is always the dilemma: the trope of women as victims in crime fiction and how do writers escape (or confront) that? In real life, women are very often the victims of violent crimes, particularly women on the fringes. In declining East Coast cities, like 1970s Paterson, employment was drying up and these were women faced with limited economic choice, which was bad enough on its own, and limited economic choice frequently led to bad choices in men.
It often seems the basic plot device in gritty detective novels is to feature a certain kind of woman, but the goal for me, and many of the crime novelists I admire, has been to break free from stereotypes and distinguish each woman as vibrant and meaningful. Writers like Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö used crime fiction as a venue to explore how society viewed women at a certain time, in a certain place. Today, that’s an area Val McDermid covers exceptionally well. In nonfiction, Robert Kolker’s investigative reporting into the victims of the Gilgo Beach murders on Long Island shows how women who are too often seen as two-dimensional stereotypes can become fully rendered characters in narrative. His work was a real inspiration for me.
TM: Your Substack, Cherchez La Femme, draws on 1970s media and pop culture. How did those cultural elements shape the atmosphere of Nightswimming?
I’d been doing light research while writing Nightswimming, looking for late 1970s background color in the form of Norman Lear sitcoms and punk rock and gas-rationing when I became sidetracked with the decade’s social upheavals and fell deep into the rabbit hole that is the internet. I somehow stumbled onto the curious media treatment of two issues of Playboy that were both published in 1979 – one issue celebrating the magazine’s 25th anniversary and the other featuring models from Ivy League schools. Feminist protest was almost solely aimed at the Ivy League issue (soon followed by op-eds from high level columnists). The disparate reaction made clear the “type” of woman who was expected to model in Playboy, and (inadvertently) exposed how much social class was driving conventions on female behavior.
Writing a police procedural where a young man, steeped within a traditionally male environment, begins to understand how women can be marginalized within society and how that impacts their vulnerability to crime really aligned with the writing I’d been doing on the era’s media and pop culture.
TM: You’ve been a waitress, attorney, and a stay-at-home mom. How have those roles informed your storytelling, particularly in crime fiction?
Anytime you’re using different life skills, and learning new ones, it’s a way to gain perspective. It adds to your worldview. And the broader that worldview is, the more you can draw on when creating characters. Just one example is understanding there isn’t one basic reaction to a given situation, whether it’s having a neighbor unexpectedly ask a favor when you’re already late for work, or having your spouse unexpectedly announce a divorce. These are the things that show a writer how different people engage with the world, and that adds layers to storytelling—vital for crime fiction, which is full of characters facing the unusual and the unexpected.
TM: Can readers expect more Jamie Palmieri stories in the future, or are you exploring other settings and characters for your next book?
I have a few projects in the works. Right now, I’m finishing the second Jamie Palmieri mystery. Police procedurals focus on the investigator as much as the crime and that lends itself to a series format, which is a plus for me, because I so enjoy having Jamie as a character to work with.