“It’s all about promises,” Ben H. Winters, author of The Last Policeman trilogy, tells Paste. “That’s what holds civilization together: a web of promises. A marriage vow, a mortgage, the government promising to protect us in exchange for taxes and obedience to the law.”
It’s the theme of promises made and broken that haunts his award-winning series, which follows a rookie detective solving crimes as an asteroid careens toward Earth. Protagonist Hank Palace won’t betray his commitment to justice, even as everyone around him spirals into extremism and insanity.
“The thing I like most about Palace,” Winters says, “is that where everyone else is reordering their lives to deal with and in reaction to this coming threat, his whole thing is: ‘Why react to it at all? If we all just kept on doing what we we’re doing and pretended this wasn’t going to happen, we’d actually be able to enjoy life a lot more and preserve civilization now.’”
Take Countdown City, the second book in the trilogy, where Palace attempts to track down a woman’s husband after the man vanishes in light of the impending apocalypse. For Winters, the mystery isn’t why Palace cares about locating the man in spite of the world ending but why so many people wouldn’t bother.
“One of the ideas that emerged for me as I was writing this series was: If these things don’t matter at the end of the world, then we can’t fairly say they ever mattered,” he says. “If you make a wedding vow, for better or for worse, then that’s true forever—you’re supposed to hold on to that forever no matter what’s going on. So yeah, okay, the world’s ending, but you still made a promise. Maybe you’d say it’s almost a fundamentalist belief in the truth of these big ideas, but that’s just the way he deals.”
Though his moral compass is admirable, Palace’s flaws are what set him apart from the Holmesian superhumans littering the mystery genre. He regularly stumbles in his investigations, second-guessing his actions and theories.