When I started writing crime fiction, what I worried about most was all the stuff you had to know. I had never been a criminal, a detective, a private investigator, or a lawyer. I didn’t know how to steal a car or bury a body or fake an alibi. Of course there was always Google, and there were books about various specialized aspects of crime, but I wasn’t sure I could pull it off. I’d barely even gotten a speeding ticket—how could I possibly write from the point of view of someone who had made their peace with far more serious breaches of the social contract?

When I did an event with the novelist Elle Cosimano earlier this year, she joked that her Google searches had probably put her on half a dozen watch lists. I knew immediately what she meant: the main character in her Finlay Donovan series (Finlay Donovan Is Killing It, Finlay Donovan Knocks ‘Em Dead, Finlay Donovan Jumps the Gun, and the forthcoming Finlay Donovan Rolls the Dice) kills people in a variety of ways that somehow end up being both plausible and hilarious. For this month’s installment of The Backlist, Elle and I sat down to talk about Steven Hamilton’s The Lock Artist, an absolutely unputdownable thriller about a teenage safecracker who has lost the ability to speak after severe childhood trauma. Like Elle’s work, it’s a page-turner full of great authenticating detail that also happens to be surprisingly funny.

What makes The Lock Artist by Steven Hamilton stand out to you?

Looking back, I don’t think this is a book I would have found on my own. I heard about it from another author’s recommendation, and when I read the description, I was grabbed. It had pretty much swept the awards the year it came out, but the one that really got my attention was the Alex Award, which recognizes crossover appeal for young adults. At the time, I was writing predominantly for young adults, and I was fascinated by stories that bridge that gap between formative childhood experiences and adult life. And since I first read it, the book has stuck with me on a bone-deep level for all these years. 

I’d love to come back to what you said about this novel as a YA crossover. The protagonist’s childhood trauma is such a big part of the story, and it’s very dark. What did you think of the way Hamilton handled that material?

I think that’s probably one of the most brilliant parts of the book. I could go on for hours about the craft that went into creating this story—you have to read it, maybe even twice, to really appreciate how much thought and care went into it. But the author holds back the information about the traumatic events that Michael experiences until very, very late in the book. He teases it out. We know that Michael has survived something horrific, we just don’t know what it is. I think holding it back was the most brilliant decision, because by the time we get there, we’ve grown so deeply connected to this character, and that connection is separate from his childhood trauma. His childhood trauma doesn’t define him, or determine my level of connection or sympathy with him. If I’d learned about that trauma early on, I don’t know if I would have felt it as deeply. I don’t know that I would have cried the way I cried when I read that book. 

It comes down to the fact that Michael is speaking to the reader when he isn’t speaking to anyone else. He’s sharing all this information with me about who he is except for this one thing, and I have to earn that trust. It comes with time. Then, when I feel I’ve earned that trust and I hear the story about his past, it feels very powerful, but it doesn’t change the way I see him as a person, because I’ve known him before this. 

There’s also the fact that Hamilton allows this character a lot of agency. Throughout the story we see Michael taking charge of his life, making decisions, and owning his decisions, even in situations where his life is feeling a little out of control, and he’s being forced into doing something he really doesn’t want to do. Even in those moments, he’s making conscious decisions within those scenes that show his strength and his intellect and his character. That makes it easy for us to cheer for him, and it also keeps us from ever thinking of him as an object of pity.

I know nothing about safecracking, and I’d never heard of a boxman before I read this book. There’s a lot of detail in here about the logistics of cracking a safe, and Hamilton somehow manages to make it fascinating.

I felt the same way. It was compelling, and it was intriguing, and it was exciting to be in his head as he’s working through the mechanics and the technical aspects of his job. I think we’ve all been in that situation when we’ve read a book in which a writer takes us to deep into the nuts and bolts of whatever it is that they’re an expert on, and we get bogged down, and it takes away from the flow of the story. Hamilton keeps those scenes very spare. He’s very careful to only tell us what we need to know when we need to know it. He keeps the scenes moving, but then he also connects us to Michael’s process in metaphorical ways. Michael’s mentor sometimes compares the safe to a woman, or he’ll talk about touch and feel and intuition and how those elements play into his process. Hamilton strikes a really beautiful balance between the technical and the emotional aspects of Michael’s job.

We’ve talked a little bit about the pacing of this book, but Hamilton is also cutting back and forth between timelines. What do you think about the structure of this book?

The structure continues to strike me as one of the most impressive parts of this book. We jump back and forth in Michael’s life from his adult life to his late teens, and we’re seeing his backstory unfold, but it’s not unfolding in the linear pattern that we might be accustomed to. I never really knew what to expect when I saw the next chapter break, and that’s so hard to pull off. I assume that it must have taken a lot of revision to make it work as beautifully and as seamlessly as it does. 

The other thing that stands out to me is that the stakes are high, and they’re clear in every element of this character’s backstory. This is a thriller and there are some very violent scenes, and he’s doing criminal work under time constraints. There are some very bad people involved, and his life at times is in danger. We see those kinds of stakes that we’re accustomed to seeing in thrillers, but we also see the deeply emotional ones. We see what all of these things mean to him, all the losses and small victories. It seems to me that the author made the choice to tell the story in a way where we’re constantly seeing those emotional stakes grow.

Michael is a talented visual artist, and while he talks to the reader through the words on the page, he’s talking with his girlfriend through the drawings and cartoons they pass back and forth. In a sense, it’s a story about how to communicate—through words, through art, or through touch, as Michael does when he feels his way into a safe. These are some pretty deep themes, but I definitely get the sense that they came out of the story organically rather than Hamilton imposing them on the story. How do you think about theme, both in this novel and in your own work?

In my experience, I never know the themes of my stories until I’m about 85% of the way in. When I’m at the end of my first draft, then I go back and ask, “What is the story I’m really telling here?” I think that comes from getting to know my characters through their choices and through their experiences, and that’s when I go back and start the book over. Of course I don’t know what Steven Hamilton’s process was when he was writing this book, but I can only imagine that these themes were discovered through multiple drafts, multiple rounds, multiple rewrites. I think maybe that’s why it feels so organic, because instead of presenting a theme upfront at the beginning of the story with the story built around it, it probably emerged in the process of getting to know the characters.

The novel is also fearlessly emotional: there’s a love story at its center, and in a sense, Michael does everything he does for love. How does Hamilton establish the pace of a crime novel while also making us believe in the romance?

This story does blend so many elements. You could call it a young adult crossover, and there are romance elements, and of course it’s a thriller. The romance, I think, does so much to help us understand Michael’s desire for connection, and it gives the reader a sense of hopefulness too. Hamilton does a lovely job of keeping the romantic elements central to the theme of human connection and communication. 

Despite the bleakness of the subject matter, there’s a lot of humor in this novel, and that’s a quality it shares with your work.

I think the humor here comes from the character’s reactions. Michael can’t speak, so it’s not a dialogue that he’s having with another character; it’s a dialogue he’s having with himself, and with the reader. Those are the moments where I see his dark sense of humor, and it definitely lightens the mood. That’s one of the things I strive for when I’m writing Finlay, because there are so many things she can’t say—not for the same reason, but because she’s keeping a lot of secrets. I need to bring the reader inside and give them access to her thoughts and reactions. There’s a self-deprecating humor that goes along with that, and I think Michael is the same. Even in these very dark moments, he finds reasons to laugh, and that makes him so relatable, and so human.