The Good Samaritan
The Good Samaritan
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John Marrs on The Good Samaritan
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
One remark from a crisis line volunteerThe entire premise of the novel grew from a single offhand comment. Marrs heard it not in a research setting but in ordinary conversation, and it lodged: what if the person answering a crisis line wanted the caller to die?
The Good Samaritan appeared through a chat with a friend’s partner who volunteered for a helpline.
That conversation landed on ground that had already been prepared. After 25 years writing celebrity profiles for national newspapers and magazines, Marrs had grown restless with surfaces, and he was explicit about what he wanted fiction to do instead.
As a journalist, I’d spent so long writing light and fluffy pieces around celebrities I’d interviewed I wanted to do something that was going to challenge me. Fiction allowed me to explore something deeper. Of course, there’s a light side to life, but it’s the dark side people want to read about. We’re drawn to the darkness of others.
The Good Samaritan, his fourth novel, was where that appetite found its sharpest expression.
How he wrote it
Inside a killer’s head, in first personMarrs singles out two things that made this book harder than anything he had written before. The second was the subject matter. The first was a structural decision that committed him to Laura’s point of view for every page: he wrote the book in first person, which meant there was no authorial distance from her logic or her pleasure.
Samaritan wasn’t an easy book to write. I had to dig deep for this one, more so than any other novel I’ve written and especially because it was in first person.
Writing Laura from inside her own skull also forced a choice about what the book would actually say about suicide. He could have kept the subject at arm’s length, as a plot mechanism. He chose not to.
Suicide is always going to be a polarising subject to write about, but that doesn’t mean it should be avoided.
Refusing to avoid the subject meant representing it from more than one angle. The novel moves between the person in crisis and the people who survive them, and Marrs was deliberate about that dual perspective.
I have written about it from the perspective of someone who can see no way out other than to end their own life to how it affects those they leave behind.
Once a book is finished, Marrs does not look back. When a reader asked on Goodreads whether he planned a sequel, he declined and explained the exhaustion that accumulates across every draft cycle.
Each book is so time consuming to write and takes so many re-reads and proofs that by the time it is over, I have no desire to ever revisit these characters again.
What he wants us to sit with
The dark side is where the questions liveMarrs has said little in interviews about a specific takeaway he wants readers to carry from this book, but he has been consistent about why psychological fiction, with its capacity for moral ugliness, is where he works best.
The dark side of human nature fascinates me and I get to explore it through my characters. I put them and the readers through their paces.