Walter B. Levis is the author of the new novel The Meaning of the Murder. He also has written the novel Moments of Doubt. A former crime reporter, he lives in New York City.
Q: What inspired you to write The Meaning of the Murder, and how did you create your character Eliana?
A: The inspiration for The Meaning of the Murder stems from one of the most pivotal and haunting moments of my life: 9/11. I was in the Bronx with my 3-year-old daughter, far enough from Ground Zero to be physically safe, yet close enough to feel the weight of what was happening.
The eerie silence, the faint scent of something unnatural in the air, and the fighter jets streaking across the sky, all of it made me realize how vulnerable we really were. Perhaps I was one of the so-called “naïve Americans,” but for the first time in my life, I felt the threat of war.
We are under attack, I thought, and acknowledging this gave me a deep, unsettling helplessness. There was nothing I could do except protect my daughter and shield her from the images on television. Meanwhile, I knew that men and women in uniform—first responders—were rushing toward danger.
That moment made me think of my father. During World War II, he volunteered as a paratrooper—not for the combat pay, but because he wanted to confront evil directly. He didn’t want to sit on the sidelines. On 9/11, I understood that urge. I wanted to take action. But how? That question stayed with me, and over time, it evolved into the driving force behind my novel.
The inspiration for the character of Eliana comes from my experience with many people in the law enforcement and military communities. As a former crime reporter and current Auxiliary Police Officer with the NYPD, I’ve spent a lot of time in that world, but writing this novel gave me an opportunity to go even deeper.
I spoke with detectives, intelligence analysts, military personnel—people who’ve had to make impossible choices under extreme pressure. Their stories didn’t just lead to the creation of the fictional Eliana; they shaped the moral fabric of the book. Those conversations reminded me how complex and human the world of public service really is, and how rarely that complexity gets reflected in fiction.
Q: The writer Jay Neugeboren said of the book that it “probes the relationship between love and violence in a searing, original way. His gorgeously textured novel also makes us understand the ways our private lives are now inextricably linked to lethal worldly forces.” What do you think of that description?
A: Neugeboren’s description captures my intentions for the book. At its core, The Meaning of the Murder is about what happens when ordinary people are thrust into extraordinary circumstances—when a family suddenly finds itself caught in the vast, unrelenting machinery of the global war on terror.
The story delves into the uneasy boundary between criminal acts we recognize—murder, corruption, betrayal—and the far more complex, often invisible forces of political violence.
Though I didn’t write this novel as a direct response to recent events, the questions it wrestles with have only grown more urgent, especially in the wake of October 7, 2023. This is a story about a Jewish family that unknowingly becomes entangled in a battle far larger than themselves, and in many ways, it feels as though every Jew is now involved in that struggle.
And yet, for all its geopolitical backdrop, the novel is ultimately intimate. It’s about love: between a father and a daughter, between sisters bound together by loss, and between a husband and wife trying to hold on to each other in the face of fear and doubt.
These relationships aren’t sentimental—they’re fraught, tested, sometimes fraying. But they’re also resilient. I wanted to explore how love endures, not as a shield against violence, but as a reason to keep going in the midst of it.
In the end, The Meaning of the Murder is about courage, about the struggle to protect what matters most, and about the moral and personal toll of standing at the edge of violence—whether as a cop, a soldier, or an ordinary person caught in the crossfire of history.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The title comes from the epigraph that opens the novel, a passage from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, published the book in 1946. I first read it in college, returned to it after 9/11, and again during the pandemic. Each time, it struck a deeper chord.
The popular takeaway is that meaning can be found even in the face of suffering. But what moves me most is Frankl’s more subtle insight: we shouldn’t ask what the meaning of life is—we should recognize that life is asking us. Meaning isn’t something abstract to be discovered; it’s something we answer for. It’s personal, situational, and inescapably moral. Our lives, Frankl writes, are questions to which we must respond.
The Meaning of the Murder follows a modern Orthodox Jewish family living in New York. When the father discovers his bank is violating OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control] laws and funding terrorists in the Middle East, he alerts the bank’s top brass. They ignore him.
After wrestling with the conflict between his position as a fully assimilated professional and his moral obligations as a man and a Jew, he turns whistle-blower and contacts the DOJ. The night before his deposition, he disappears.
Years later, his three daughters struggle to make sense of what happened. One represses, one is paralyzed, and one becomes obsessed. Each, in her own way, is trying to make meaning. For each, the meaning of the murder is different.
That, for me, is the core of the book: meaning is shaped not only by what happens, but by who we are and how we respond. And for Jews—especially those of us living in the Diaspora—that question has taken on renewed urgency. The relationship between moral responsibility and personal identity is not theoretical. It’s immediate, intimate, and unfolding. We are, once again, in the midst of a reckoning.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: Robert Frost once said, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” Frost’s words resonate with me because my impulse to write almost always begins without any clear form—just a strong feeling, one that has no words at all.
This is important to understand. Not only is there no ending to the story, there is no beginning. There’s a felt sense, a physical experience, as simple and real as Frost’s “lump in the throat.” While earning an MFA at Columbia, I once took a workshop with the great American playwright Romulus Linney, who urged: “Write what makes you cry.”
Then comes the craft, which means writing multiple drafts. Here I feel guided by the English novelist John Fowles, who once wrote in his journal: “I finished the first draft... It is about 140,000 words long, and exactly as I imagined it: perfect, flawless, a lovely novel. But that, alas, is indeed only how I imagine it. When I reread it I see about 140,000 things need to be changed.”
Overstated for comic effect, no doubt—but I take Fowles’ point to heart. Revision involves serious change. For me, it requires getting ego out of the way and listening for what one’s deeper self is trying to say.
That might sound slightly mystical, and I suppose at one level it is. A more grounded analogy is to think of revision as a conversation—the writer “talking” to the work.
The first draft gives you an idea of what you’re trying to say. That’s the beginning of the “conversation.” But in a lively exchange, things take unexpected turns. You follow threads, respond to new cues, revise mid-sentence. If things are going well—it starts to move on its own.
Genuine conversation can be challenging—even disturbing. When that happens, the work gains another dimension. As Fowles put it, “Characters sometimes reject all the possibilities one offers. They say in effect: I would never say or do a thing like that.”
That’s when the story becomes larger than your conscious control. Forcing the plot risks sacrificing content for form. The aim, always, is to unite them. That’s when fiction has the most power—and it’s also what makes writing so difficult.
Still, there’s something deeply valuable in approaching the process this way. Again, I return to the wisdom of the literary masters. Saul Bellow once said, “You are engaged, as a writer should be, in transforming yourself… There’s nothing that counts really except this transforming action of the soul.”
I’m not sure I fully understand what Bellow meant, but I suspect this moment—the conversation that challenges or unsettles you—is part of it. Serious writing cultivates human qualities: openness, sensitivity to life, a capacity to wonder, to dwell in paradox, to be wrong. And that part of the process may matter more than the product itself.
So no, I didn’t know exactly how the novel would end. But crime fiction as a genre has a kind of moral gravity at its core. I knew what I was writing toward: a reckoning. And the path to that reckoning kept evolving, draft after draft, page after page.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m deep into the revision process of a novel called The Story of Leaving Hunts Point. It centers on an interracial relationship between a Jewish American businessman and an African-American woman—and the emotional, cultural, and political challenges they face when a man from her past is released from prison and wants to see her again.
Though not a police procedural, the novel draws heavily on my journalism background, including years spent reporting on crime, incarceration, and the probation system. What interests me most are the layers of identity—how race, class, family, and personal history shape not only how we see the world, but how we see each other.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m new to this format—the blog-written-interview—but I like the idea behind it. Amidst the overwhelming amount of content online covering every possible subject, it’s reassuring to know there are sites like this one dedicated to people who care about new books. I’d like to believe we’re keeping alive the quiet art of reading and writing. I feel lucky to be part of it. Thank you.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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