Silas House Channels Agatha Christie
The Southernmost and Lark Ascending author takes inspiration from some of his favorite mystery writers for his latest book set on the border of Kentucky and Tennessee.
Departing from his past novels of literary fiction, Silas House’s new mystery Dead Man Blues makes it seem as though the author is a veteran of the genre. Two gruesome murders have occurred in Shady Grove on the Kentucky/Tennessee border, leaving the small town in an uproar and forcing the once-revered and now disgraced Dave Hendricks to jump back into action to solve the cases. Hendricks is forced to confront the ghosts of his recent past in order to help the place that he loves most. Exploring the depths of friendship, humanity and community, Dead Man Blues asks us to take a closer look at the lives of those around us, allowing us to reckon with our neighbors and ourselves.
Silas House is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels, a book of creative nonfiction and four plays. His novel Lark Ascending was a USA Today and indie bestseller, a Booklist Editor’s Choice and is winner of the Southern Book Prize and the Nautilus Award. In 2025, he releases two books: All These Ghosts, a poetry collection, and Dead Man Blues, a mystery under the pseudonym of S.D. House. He served as the Kentucky Poet Laureate for 2023-2025.
Haley Roberts spoke with him over the summer about trying out a new genre, evoking a sense of place and putting out both fiction and poetry at the same time.
Haley Roberts: This is a departure from your ordinary genres. What inspired you to write a mystery?
Silas House: I have always loved mysteries. I grew up on Agatha Christie, and I would just fly through her paperbacks as a teenager. I love an Irish mystery writer named Tana French. I love a British mystery writer named Ann Cleeves and the three shows based on her books called ‘Vera,’ ‘Shetland’ and ‘The Long Call.’ What I love most of all about these books is that they rely really heavily on the sense of place, and sense of place has always been really important to me in my literary writing. I love the murder mysteries because they’re propulsive, the pages turn, and they’re plot driven, but they also rely a lot on vivid characters and vivid sense of place. Those are two of the things I love to do most in literary writing.
I also grew up in a little lake town. Tourists come to this town to get on the lake. We didn’t want to go to the lake that was where we lived, so we went down to the one on the Tennessee/Kentucky border. Dead Man Blues is very much based on a combination of those two lakes. I like the idea of it almost being a no-man’s land and that people sometimes don’t know what state they’re in. You don’t know what authority to call. It just gives it an extra layer of mystery. When you grow up going to the lake, there’s a lot of lore of what was lost in creating that lake. Often, we go to these lakes and have a good time swimming and fishing. We don’t think about how people were forcibly removed so those lakes could be built for recreation or flood control. There are layers to explore with a mystery like this.
HR: You talk about enjoying writing from a sense of place. How do you evoke sense of place that is so universally relatable to small-town life?
SH: It helps that I grew up in a really small town. I understand the culture and the politics. To some degree, I really think you can’t totally understand that unless you were raised in it, but I also don’t live in a small town anymore. When I go back home, my antenna are up, and I notice all the little specific things about it. I think something that always troubled me growing up in a small town was when I went to college, people would says things like, ‘Oh, it must have been so boring there,’ or ‘There must have been nothing to do.’ I don’t feel that way. There was always something to do. Our lives were as complicated as anybody else’s. I like writing about small towns and showing that small-town people are just as complex as anybody else. They have the same joys and sorrows. One of the things I want to do in all of my writing is to complexify rural lives and small town lives. This book absolutely gave me the chance to do that. You have this little town on the Kentucky/Tennessee border, but you also have a little land around it—all the way from a little marina to a creepy section of the community that’s way out in the hills. A mysterious murder happened there but you don’t really know what happened. That’ll hopefully be revealed in the future if this becomes a series.
HR: Revisiting the creation of the lake, why did you want to explore such a deep and impactful topic?
SH: Most of the mysteries that I love the most really follow the people, but there’s also some element in the background that’s brought about violence. In this case, it’s the fact that their land has been taken, and there are a lot of grudges that have been held because of that. I thought that was a good way to keep the motor running. You have this huge, big corrupt thing in the background and these lives of people who are trying to live the best they can.
HR: Though this book is labeled as a mystery, the story focuses much attention on humanity and friendship. Why did you decide to lean into these aspects?
SH: I think the best mysteries are really about human relationships. If you read an Agatha Christie book, you probably won’t remember why the murder happened, but you will remember Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. You remember the characters. You remember the villages where the Jane Marple mysteries take place. Or you remember the epic scopes of the Poirot mysteries on the Nile or the Orient Express. You remember the place and the characters more than you actually remember what the murder was. The murder mystery element keeps the pages turning, but the people and the places make you love it and make you endeared to it.
HR: What’s next for you?
SH: I also have a poetry book that came out in September. It’s called All These Ghosts. It’s my first collection of poetry. Most of it is poems from the last few years, but some of them go back 20 years. I’ve been writing poetry my whole life, even though I’m not known as a poetry writer. In 2023, I was chosen by the governor to be the Poet Laureate of Kentucky. When that happened, I got some offers to publish a book of poetry, and I finally felt like I had a collection in shape to do that. It’s strangely similar to Dead Man Blues in that it’s a lot about a place and people and complicated nostalgia. It’s a lot about loving a place, but also critiquing the place and knowing that you can even though you love it. I’m really excited about that. These books come out a month apart, so I’ve never had that happen before.
Dead Man Blues by S.D. House comes out on September 30. It is one of our Fall/Winter Reads for 2026-26.
