Earlier this week, we met up with Michael Marshall—and having spent the better part of a weekend afternoon riveted by his latest novel, Bad Things, just as we’d been hooked by The Intruders last year, we thought to ask about how he weaves supernatural elements into stories with strong psychological suspense elements—as in Bad Things, where a man still reeling from the sudden death of his son returns to the remote town where it happened and finds himself caught up in a chain of inexplicable, terrifying events…
He explained that, after a visit to the Pacific Northwest a few years back, he became captivated with the region, which is why his most recent novels take place in Washington and Oregon—”My life would be a lot easier if my books were set in London,” he admitted, but “it just felt really right for the kinds of things I was doing.” His latest novel, though, is set in New York City, and he was actually doing research during this visit. “Although when I say research, I mostly mean walking around the city in flypaper mode, soaking everything up.”
We also discovered how his literary career began under his full name, Michael Marshall Smith, until just before the publication of The Straw Man, when his publisher told him that Martin J. Smith had come out with Straw Men. Since then, he’s also had a Michael Marshall Smith story, The Servants, published in the UK under the name M.M. Smith. “Maybe I’ll get a fourth name eventually,” he joked. “Maybe just M.”