The noir sensibility that thrums through James Naremore’s second novel, American Still Life, was born of Naremore’s childhood fascination with hard-boiled crime writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

In what Kirkus Reviews praises as “a gripping tale of a troubled artist,” photojournalist Skade Felsdottir, pushing a deadline for her photo essay book about roadside memorials, is reluctantly compelled to return to Carleton, her hometown, to photograph two ceremonial totem poles. Skade’s is a decidedly reluctant homecoming; she has few fond memories of Carleton. One tragic, unspoken incident is an indelible stain that no amount of vodka can wipe clean:

She’d lived there twelve years ago, for most of high school. She knew the ins and outs of the area like any bored adventurous high school kid would. She knew how to get there. She knew how to get away too. She carefully re-folded her map, making a hard, sharp crease just south of Carleton. The world ended on the southern edge of town. Her life ended there. She hadn’t thought about the accident for a while. Now it was back in technicolor. The shock. The sickening sounds. The blood. All of it.

Back home, she reunites with a “poor, sad, intensely possessive, asshole pain-in-the-ass” former boyfriend who may be interested in rekindling a relationship that ended without any finality (“She was there and then she wasn’t”). She also befriends Kit, a kindred outsider spirit who, like Skade, uses her art—puppetry—to cope with her own grief and trauma.

Naremore’s parents were professors at Indiana University. His mother was chair of the School of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences; his father was an English professor who taught comparative literature. He was also a film professor and was instrumental in starting the Film Studies program at the university.

“I grew up surrounded by books,” Naremore says. “I was read to all the time. I remember Wind in the Willows, particularly.” But come middle school and high school, he was introduced by his father to Raymond Chandler. “I always joke that everything I need to know about writing I learned from Chandler and William Shakespeare,” he says with a laugh. He also immersed himself in pulp fiction by Robert E. Howard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.P. Lovecraft.

American Still Life, like the best noir, crafts a vivid sense of mood and place. Carleton was the setting of Naremore’s debut novel, The Arts of Legerdemain as Taught by Ghosts, as well as some of his short fiction. It is his equivalent of Castle Rock, which is at the center of the Stephen King literary universe.

“Chandler had this feel for Los Angeles, and like him, I wanted to grab the vibe of my setting, but I did not want to be pinned down to a particular place that would leave me open to readers who would say Such and such isn’t there or That wouldn’t happen there. I wanted the freedom to create my own small Midwestern, post-industrial city and express a milieu and zeitgeist.”

Naremore grew up, lived, and worked in the Midwest for decades. In addition to growing up in Indiana, he worked in Chicago for a series of nonprofits as a writer and fundraiser. He also lived in Wisconsin. While he and his wife of 33 years now live on the East Coast, he still feels the presence of the Midwest. Aspects of the region, such as a certain vein of desperation, are well suited to a noirish sensibility, he says. “There was a story in the New York Times. Someone created a map of American cultural zones. I noticed that the only place on that map where there was a collision of cultural zones—the Corn Belt, the Rust Belt, and Dixie—was in the Midwest. That allows an artistic freedom.”

Naremore says there wasn’t a single lightning strike that inspired him to become a writer. He credits his parents and teachers for recognizing and encouraging his ability to communicate effectively through the written word. “I always enjoyed doing it,” he says. “When I was in school, teachers would call on me to read my work aloud. I had a facility for it because of reading, and I just enjoy creation.”

Descansos inspired the creation of American Still Life, as Skade explains in the novel:

“It’s a Spanish word that literally means ‘resting place.’ A religious concept morphed into the practice of putting up memorials for people where they died. Mostly car accidents. You see those markers all over the country now. In cities, you also get markers and street memorials for people who died from gunshots and that kind of thing. There are elements of folk art in it. I’ve got some images of some incredible markers. And it’s an interesting way of looking at how people deal with death and grief in a real, personal, individual way. Kind of a folk spirituality.”

“My process,” Naremore shares, “is I write down lots of little fragmentary ideas. I remember driving by these roadside memorials and wondering what their stories were and that someone should do a photo essay about them. That’s what I wrote in my notebooks. I throw these snippets into a bag, shake it up, and pour it out to see how many of these ideas and character sketches I can link together to come up with the beginnings of a cogent storyline.”

Skade’s character was shaped by advice a prospective agent gave to Naremore when he was trying to sell his first novel. “She wanted me to put a little more blood on the page,” he explains. “By that, she meant I should insinuate more of my personal experience into the storytelling. I had decades of alcoholism and substance abuse. I’ve been sober for over 10 years. As my story evolved, I was able to deal with alcoholism and substance abuse as a way of moving Skade’s story forward, and I was able to write about it honestly in a more realistic way.

But Skade had some ideas of her own on how to tell her story. “A lot of writers say that you aren’t really involved in the story until your characters start talking back to you,” Naremore says. “Skade was an interesting character to sit with. She did what she wanted to do and would not be controlled. Her connection to water (she was a lifeguard in her youth and earned the nickname Wonder Woman after saving a child) was originally not a thing in the book. I was writing the end of a scene and was setting up the next when she popped up and said, ‘I’m going swimming.’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, you’re going swimming,’ and as the story evolved, this gave me a new piece to explain her and flesh out her character.”

As with King and Castle Rock, Naremore plans to populate his Carleton-based stories with recurring characters. Camille Longday, a fortune teller who has a cameo appearance in American Still Life, had a more prominent role in his first book. An embryonic version of Skade has appeared in his short fiction. But Naremore is happy to leave Skade in a more hopeful place. “I feel I have told her story,” he says. “But I might drop a mention of her in books down the line.”

Naremore and his wife split their time between Hudson, New York, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Their two sons—Alex, in Chicago, and Patrick, in Brooklyn—work in the film industry behind the camera. He and his wife run an antiques business. “But I like to think I am a full-time writer,” he says. “If you ask me what I do, that is what I would say I do.”

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer published on VanityFair.com, in the Washington Post, and other outlets.