In a Chris Whitaker novel, the decisions people make and traumas they endure early in life define who they become. In 2017’s All the Wicked Girls, a model student disappears and her troubled sister risks everything to find her. His 2020 breakthrough We Begin at the End tells the story of a California police chief who once put his best friend behind bars, alongside that of a pair of adult siblings who’ve been scarred by their upbringing under a self-destructive single mother.
Whitaker’s new novel, All the Colors of the Dark (Crown, June), follows suit, centering on two young children whose lives are upended when they cross paths with a serial killer. Whitaker’s work gives credence to the idea—espoused by William Words-
worth and others—that the child is the father of the man. Like film noir heroes, Whitaker’s characters are forever trying to outrun their pasts.
“It feels sometimes like there’s a cloud, or a shadow is cast and you’re constantly trying to get out from under it,” Whitaker says via Zoom from his home office in Hertfordshire, just outside his native London. “I sometimes wonder if the same is true of me. Would I be here now talking to you as an author had things not happened to me? I’m not sure.”
Whitaker, a boyish 42 in a black T-shirt, has survived his share of trials. When he was 10 years old, after his parents divorced, a new man in his mother’s life broke his arm and burned him with a cigarette, sending him into a spiral of sleeplessness and anxiety. The pain lessened with time, but when he was 19, he was stabbed one morning when he refused to hand over his phone to a mugger. And just like that, the pain and trauma of the past returned. As he wrote in a 2020 essay for the Guardian: “I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. I so desperately wanted to shrug it off and move on, but I couldn’t work out what was happening to me.”
Drug and alcohol use followed. So did suicidal thoughts. “There was this bleakness—this feeling that there is absolutely no way out of this,” he says. “That I’m not going to get better.”
It was around this time that Whitaker started writing—not to get published but to regain his sanity. At the library, he found a book about the therapeutic value of putting pen to paper: write down what happened, change the principal players into fictional characters, change the setting to the last place you were happy, and then change the outcome.
“That got me through those nights where I felt like I could have done something really stupid or desperate,” he says. “And then I didn’t really think about writing much after that.”
But Whitaker had yet another trial to endure—this one of his own making.
When he was in his 20s, he became a stock broker. He was good at it. He drove a nice car and made his bosses rich. Until one day, he made a disastrous trade, lost £1 million, and tried—and failed—to hide the losses. Instead of calling the police, his bosses agreed to let him work off half the debt.
Once again, the sleepless nights returned. Once again, he turned to drugs and alcohol. And once again, he found solace in writing. Except this time, Whitaker had burned down his life so thoroughly that he needed a new career. He had always liked crime fiction, and he stumbled upon an interview with one of his favorite authors, John Hart, who had left a successful law career to write. Whitaker wondered, why can’t I do that?
Success didn’t come immediately. His debut novel, Tall Oaks, was published in 2016, followed by All the Wicked Girls. But his third novel, We Begin at the End, was a bestseller and put Whitaker on the map in the United States, which is, coincidentally, where all his novels take place.
And setting—his choice of locales and the skill with which he renders them—is an intriguing aspect of Whitaker’s work. How does an Englishman, who has ventured to the U.S. but a handful of times, crank out work steeped in Americana? And not big-city America; Whitaker captures out-of-the-way regions of the U.S. with eerie vividness through imagination and maniacal research. (Until recently, he worked as an assistant at his local public library and loved every minute of it.) For example, in All the Colors of the Dark, one of the protagonists, Patch, works in a Missouri mine; Whitaker “spent a month, maybe two months reading about mines,” he says. “And that’s just for what will ultimately be cut down to a paragraph. I tend to do that for a lot of the book.”
For Whitaker, the U.S. is a fully realized state of mind—a symbol of personal liberty and escape, even in its darker corners. “I can’t imagine setting a book in London,” he says. “I don’t know if that’s just because some of my bad memories are in London and I just can’t disconnect from them, but America feels... There’s a freedom to it. I can just create anything I want and any kind of character I want in a way that I don’t think I could here.”
Whitaker’s characters, meanwhile, also seek to escape. All the Colors of the Dark follows Patch and Saint, a boy and a girl from small-town Missouri. Patch is abducted by a serial killer who locks him in a dark room with a mysterious young woman whom he falls hopelessly in love with, though she may be a figment of his imagination. Saint rescues him, and Patch grows up to be a roguish man obsessed with finding the girl he left behind. Saint, meanwhile, falls in love with Patch despite the different trajectories of their lives.
All the Colors of the Dark is certainly a crime novel, with echoes of Hart’s The Last Child and Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River (another book that Whitaker adores). But it also pushes beyond genre—a quality that Amy Einhorn, Whitaker’s editor at Crown, has come to appreciate.
“He’s doing something where it’s such a mix of different kinds of books in one,” Einhorn said. “This book is a mystery. It’s technically a serial killer story. It’s a love story. It’s a coming-of-age story. He’s just not very easily classified. And for books that are about very dark things, there’s a real sense of humor, and a tremendous amount of heart.”
Today, Whitaker is a successful novelist, married, and has three children, ages 13, 10, and three. It was adversity that got Whitaker to this point—and that’s what fuels his work. Transforming his life took pain and effort, but Whitaker now finds himself exactly where he wants to be.
“I don’t really believe in fate or anything like that, but if everything bad that happened to me was leading me here, it feels like there’s a bit of payoff,” he says. “I get to do something that I love, and that in itself is quite hard to find, isn’t it? I think you’re lucky if you end up doing something that you love.”
Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer and was the 2009 Nieman Arts and Culture Fellow at Harvard University.
