The Heart O’ Chicago hotel hasn’t seen this much action, possibly ever. Not in literature, anyway.
The 1950s motel along Lincoln Avenue’s “hotel row” is just one of the many if-you-know-you-know locations highlighted in Chicago author Jake Hinkson’s latest crime novel, You Will Never See Me.
Hinkson writes noir, the darkest of crime fiction, for which he has been awarded two of the most prestigious awards granted to literary crime fiction in France, where noir is, one imagines, noir-est. France loves Jake Hinkson! His novel Hell on Church Street (L’Enfer de Church Street) won the 2016 Prix Mystère de la Critique, and his novel No Tomorrow (Sans Lendemain) won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 2018. His novels have also been translated to German and Italian.
You Will Never See Me should certainly fit snugly big-shoulder-to-big-shoulder next to Hinkson’s past books, all set in his home state of Arkansas. But is there room in a Hinkson novel for a redemptive tale?
You Will Never See Me centers on university theology and ethics professor Alice Hardy, who is attacked while leaving the apartment of the man with whom she’s stepping out on her marriage. She fights the assailant off—possibly killing him?—but then what kind of help can she get, when she has so much to hide? The body disappears while she’s trying to figure out what to do. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Alice, someone has been watching. Down-on-his-luck private eye Owen Pall was following a man he thought was a cheating husband—until the guy pulls a woman into an alley, and she alone stumbles out, covered in blood. Alice.
The decisions Alice and Owen make in the moments following the attack lead them down a dark road, to desperate measures, into dangerous entanglements, and maybe toward their own deaths. But, as one character remembers being told, “the road to hell runs both ways.” Will anyone turn around before they arrive at their lowest moment?
I talked to Jake Hinkson by e-mail about secrets, writing dirtbags, and when an author transplanted to Chicago can start to trash talk the city they love.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Lori Rader-Day
Where did You Will Never See Me start for you?
Jake Hinkson
It started out as an idea about a preacher’s wife having an affair and getting jumped in an alley on her way home. But I felt like I’d covered the preacher thing enough in my previous books and I wanted to do something a little different, especially since I knew I wanted to set the book in Chicago (unlike most of my previous books which have been set in Arkansas). As the idea evolved my inspirations were The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (one of my top five favorite crime novels) and the books of Jason Starr, one of my heroes.
Lori Rader-Day
Among the characters who share the job of telling us this story, several are making ethical calculations—or are way past that moment, already sunk deep. You seem like a nice guy. How do you get into the mindset of people making dirt-bag decisions, or worse?
Jake Hinkson
I appreciate the personal vote of confidence. As for writing the characters, though, dirtbags are easy to write. Dirtbags make the world go around. Dirtbags run, and ruin, just about everything. Writing fiction is just psychological cosplay. Writing noir is dirtbag cosplay.
Lori Rader-Day
One of your key characters is Alice Hardy, a professor of ethics (uh oh) and theology. What calculations were you making when you gave Alice a starring role in the novel?
Jake Hinkson
She’s the character who started out in early drafts as the wife of a fundamentalist preacher. I’ve written a lot about that world because of where I was born and how I was raised, but it occurred to me that I’ve now reached the age where I’ve spent as much time in academic circles, at department meetings and faculty cocktail parties as I did in the church. I thought it would be fun to put the character in that world. And it was fun. It was a lot of fun. I really loved Alice, and the more I wrote her character the more I wanted to get her right. She’s a classic noir protagonist in a lot of ways, someone who makes a couple of wrong moves and gets in way over her head.
Lori Rader-Day
Another of your key characters is Owen Pall, a private detective making a different kind of calculation altogether, actual dollar signs attached. Of all the characters of this book, he seems like the one who might get a redemption story. You seem to be playing with that idea, even though your work at the darker edges of crime fiction is—I’ve never typed these words before—big in France. Can you talk about the push and pull of darkness in your work and in this novel?
Jake Hinkson
I think there are two kinds of stories. Inspirational tales, which are usually about virtue triumphant and which tell the stories of heroes we will want to emulate. And then there are cautionary tales, which warn us of all the many ways a person can go wrong. This goes back to the Bible, I guess. Stories are either about ‘do this, it’s good’ or they’re about ‘don’t do this, it’s bad.’ For whatever reason I’ve always been more drawn to the cautionary stuff. The stories of bad decisions blowing up in people’s faces.
As a person I’m kind of a mix of my parents. My father was essentially an optimist, and my mother was essentially a pessimist. I’m not sure what I am. I do want to believe in redemption, but I can’t help but notice that the world is a pretty bleak place in many ways. People are weak and they make a lot of bad decisions. And that’s the stuff of drama, at least for me. So that push and pull that you’re asking about, to me that’s just a good story. I love Owen as much as I love Alice, and I hope the reader starts to feel for him, too. I hope he sticks in their mind the way he stuck in mine.
Lori Rader-Day
At one point, Pall digs into the lives of other people he encounters and notes there’s no such thing as privacy anymore, that information about us all is out there—scattered around, but out there for the hunting and gathering of guys like him. Can you talk about how that makes writing about crime fiction easier? Harder?
Jake Hinkson
Oh god, technology is such a double-edged sword. I mean, I have the world at my fingertips so I can learn so much, can do just on my phone what used to take writers hours, days, weeks to do. So that’s a boon, right? But it has also complicated storytelling in so many ways. The ‘why don’t they just use their phone?’ thing is now something that any story—and especially a crime story—has to contend with. It’s a pain, but unless you set your stories in the past you have to contend with the modern world the best you can.
Lori Rader-Day
I like to smash a phone in a book, first chance I get. It’s very satisfying.
In You Will Never See Me, we get to see quite a bit of Chicago, the neighborhoods, places like The Music Box Theatre, Carol’s Pub, the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. Evanston gets a role, Gary, Indiana, a less flattering one. How do you decide what parts of Chicago to show off and which parts to use for dark alleyways?
Jake Hinkson
I love Chicago. I am such a Chicago partisan, I have to say. One of the reasons I wanted to set the book in Chicago is just because I love it so much. This place is cinematic in a lowkey, unpretentious way. A world-class museum, one of the country’s best movie theaters, a great bar, and miles and miles of dirty alleys. I can’t say that I had some method of choosing places to use, though. Some places just lend themselves to that kind of thing. The novelist is part location scout, so I’ve always got my eyes open for new places to put in books. If bartenders and baristas knew that, I might get more free drinks,
Lori Rader-Day
Let me quote a couple of lines from the book back to you: “Good old Chicago. The buses might not run on time and the politicians might all be liars, but the goddamn tow trucks always do their job.” I laughed out loud, not in small part because I have a line almost exactly like this in my next book. You’re not from Chicago originally. How did you get to the point that you felt you could insult the city like a native? (It took me years.)
Jake Hinkson
I had lived here about four months the first time my car got towed, and I had to take three buses (this was pre-rideshare) to go out to that post-apocalyptic hellscape at the edge of the city where they impound the cars. It’s as big as an airport parking lot, and there’s one filthy trailer that’s run by the cast of the Sopranos. And you sit there next to cowboys smoking weed and pregnant women in bathrobes and you wait to pay the extortion fees to get your car back. Then they cram as many of you poor suckers as they can into a van with no windows, driven by a guy who’s definitely been on a wanted poster or two in his life, and he drops you off one at a time to pick up your cars and get back to civilization as fast as you can.
After that, I felt pretty comfortable saying whatever I wanted to say about the place.
Lori Rader-Day
Once again, you have described my own experience. I think I lived in Chicago three months before I was towed.
You Will Never See Me is about secrets. Tell us a secret about the writing or researching or revising of this book?
Jake Hinkson
The original title of the book was The World Will Have Its Way With You. Still irritates me that we changed it.
Lori Rader-Day
Oh, that’s a good title—and a good secret. It may be news to folks that we don’t get to choose our titles all the time. Well, You Will Never See Me will have its way with readers, too.
FICTION
You Will Never See Me
By Jake Hinkson
Crooked Lane Books
Published October 14, 2025
