Matt Plass

Matt Plass has lived in Azerbaijan, Istanbul and New York, and now resides back in the UK, where he has a farmhouse on the edge of Dartmoor National Park, and a study overlooking the 600 trees that he and his wife Elana planted during the Covid pandemic.

He regularly returns to America and considers New York a second home.

Plass's new novel is The Ten Worst People in New York.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The Ten Worst People in New York wasn’t my first choice of title, or even my second, but now I can’t imagine the book with any other lettering along the spine.

The novel began life in 2017 as The Murder Club, based on my 2015 Kindle Single of the same name (a B-side to the Lawrence Block short story "Gym Rat"). When Richard Osmond released The Thursday Murder Club to wide acclaim in 2020 (Damn you, Richard!) I had to think again. The Murder Club became The List, then The Reckoning, and finally—at the suggestion of my amazing editor, Sara J. Henry—The Ten Worst People in New York.

Who are the ten worst people in New York? Imagine a television talk show host launches a new nightly feature: a live list of public hate figures, updated by online and audience votes. On the list you might find a real estate mogul who’s really nothing more than a slumlord, a conspiracy junky who targets the victims of gun massacres, a climate-change denying scientist, a corrupt local politician, a wealthy financier who everyone suspects of being a sexual predator... Each night on the show, the audience enjoys sniggering and booing at the very worst people in the great city of New York, and it’s just a bit of fun.

Until people on the list start dying.

We spend most of the book either with FBI Special Agent Alex Bedford, or with young filmmaker Jacob Felle, as they investigate the murders from different angles. But we also get to step inside the minds of individuals on the list of the ten worst people in New York. Seeing the world through their eyes is a reminder that no one is the villain in their own movie, and in many ways, the ten worst are the stars of the show—however grisly and gruesome they might be—so it’s fitting that they should own the book title.

What's in a name?

Names in fiction matter, especially in a book like The Ten Worst People in New York where the reader is asked to keep track of three different groups of people. We have FBI Special Agent Alex Bedford and her team, Jacob Felle the filmmaker, his estranged sister Elizabeth Felle and the adrenaline junkies in Elizabeth’s club for modern adventurers, and of course, the ten worst, who have a habit of turning up dead.

Like most modern writers, I don’t go the full Charles Dickens (no cruel Headmasters named Wackford Squeers teaching at Dotheboys Hall) but I notice clever naming when I see it. For example, what a slick move by Thomas Harris to allow a typo on a birth certificate to render his serial killer Jame (not James) Gumb in Silence of the Lambs, making him seem somehow less like the rest of us, a bad sound in the mouth, all Js, Gs and Ms.

The biblical Jacob tricked his brother Esau out of his inheritance, and there’s something tricky about Jacob Felle—he has a selfish streak and he’s not above manipulating others when it suits him. Felle is an Irish name and suggests a past act of falling. Falling from grace, perhaps, the way Jacob has with his sister?

Alex Bedford, the FBI Special Agent, takes her surname from the street I lived on in Brooklyn for five years: Bedford Avenue, the western boundary of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. For me the name Bedford suggests a strong feeling of community and also the common decency that Alex embodies throughout the book, as well as a sense that something that has been one way for a very long time, now faces rapid and disruptive change. For the real life Bed-Stuy neighborhood, that change is the creeping tide of gentrification, creating winners and losers as it washes through the streets. For Alex Bedford it is adjusting to life as a widow. The name Alex I borrowed from a friend, a strong, single-minded and determined woman, just like FBI Agent Alex Bedford.

Elizabeth Felle, Jacob’s sister, is a force to be reckoned with. There’s something regal in the full form of Elizabeth—never Liz, Lizzy or Ellie—with echoes of formidable queens from the near and distant past.

Of course, most readers won’t make (or care about!) any of these connections, but they matter to me, and they might just tickle the back of the brain for some.

As for naming the ten worst people in New York, when it comes to two of them—Dallas Johncock and Emil Hertzberg—you’ll have to read the book to learn just how important those names are to the story.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

As a teenager I inhaled books. I probably read more between the age of 14 and 18 than I did between the ages of 20 and 35, happily switching between classic literature, modern day thrillers and even comic novels—a genre I rarely read now. Back then I could—and given half a chance, would—give you a pretentious (and no doubt highly annoying) lecture on authors ranging from Hemmingway to Harper Lee, with stops along the way for Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis.

So how surprised would my teenage reader self be if he read The Ten Worst People in New York? With that peculiar mix of self-doubt and arrogance that young adults have, my teenage self would probably be amazed that I had managed to write a novel at all, even more stunned that it had made its way out into the world, but also annoyed that it wasn’t as good as Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, or John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. That’s okay. Even back then, I think I appreciated that you have to aim as high as you can, even if you know your arrows will never fly as far as those of your heroes.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

The wonderful thing about endings is that once you have them locked in, you can go back and change beginnings—and middles—to line everything up neatly, making you look a lot smarter than you are!

When I began The Ten Worst People in New York, I had a strong sense of the emotional journey the characters would go on. While the story morphed several times over several drafts—different scenes, different locations, different real-world outcomes—the characters’ emotional journeys changed very little from day one to final manuscript.

I knew from the first chapter that any victory for Jacob Felle would be a pyrrhic victory at best; he would lose as much as he gained from the resolution of the mystery. I also knew that FBI Special Agent Alex Bedford would learn something about herself that would allow her to move past her grief at the loss of her husband. I had no idea how the scenes would unfold until I wrote them—the where, when, and how only came to me when I embarked on the final section of the book—but the what and the why was always clear.

Is it harder to write a beginning or an ending?

The problem with beginnings is how to identify the start line. A phenomenal writing coach I worked with—Allison K Williams—encouraged her students to get into a story or scene as late as you can, and get out as early as you can. Good advice. It’s why so many crime novels start with the discovery of a dead body. Do you want to open a book and see our detective getting up in the morning, brushing their teeth, eating cereal, dropping the kids at school, driving to work, grabbing a coffee in the morning, all before they get the call that a body has been found? Or do we want to be introduced to them standing over a corpse—a pacy start to any story—and then learn about them across the span of the book?

There could, of course, be good reasons for spending quality time with our character before the main action kicks off. Maybe we learn something important from witnessing a morning routine: maybe breakfast is a shot of whiskey; maybe our hero leaves her husband in bed, sleeping off a drunk; maybe one of her kids is demanding her attention, something that might become a source of tension and pressure later in the book... All good character-defining stuff! But it’s probably more reflective of real life to uncover those facts over time. After all, when we meet someone for the first time, we typically meet the version they choose to present to the world. It’s only later that we start to glimpse the real person behind the facade.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

Jacob Felle is a white, British, male filmmaker in his late thirties, and he is, essentially, a younger, better-looking, and smarter version of me, but with perhaps a slightly more feckless or error-prone personality.

Alex Bedford is a middle-aged African-American, female FBI agent, so in some ways she and I could not be more different. However, Alex is dogged and determined, loyal and compassionate—personality traits I’d like to think I share with her—and she has blind spots that can prevent her from seeing straight and which lead her into mistakes and missteps. I know the feeling.

As for the ten worst people in New York, I spent many enjoyable hours inside their grisly minds, and maybe I learned more about myself than I would have liked. You can empathize with anyone if you put your mind to it, and to understand is not to condone, but let’s just say that I might have had a little too much fun inhabiting a corrupt real estate mogul, a disgraced Cardinal, a climate-change-denying professor...

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

With characters such as a ‘crooked real-estate mogul’ or ‘wealthy financer who is also a sexual predator’ or ‘conspiracy junkie who targets school shooting victims’, you could be forgiven if certain names from the real world spring to mind.

The truth is that aside from a headline resemblance to real-world individuals, all the characters in the book are figments of my imagination, and I tend not to be too influenced by current events.

That said, occasionally real life and fiction come a little too close for comfort, and one recent real-world event appear to validate a theme in The Ten Worst People in New York. You may have read about the fatal shooting on a New York street of a senior executive at a pharma company. The murder was portrayed by some media outlets not as a murder but as a vigilante slaying, and the killer was lauded on social media as a hero.

So my concept that the killers of the ten worst people in New York might attract a cult following for their crimes, and be lauded by the public for removing bad people from the city of New York, now appears to have a real-world precedent.

The vigilante slaying of the Ten Worst People in New York. It could happen.

Visit Matt Plass's website.

--Marshal Zeringue