The Stillness That Breaks: The Inspiration Behind The Tax Man
When people ask where The Tax Man came from, I should really be pointing them to an interview with Ang Lee who directed Brokeback Mountain, who talked about the idea of ‘stillness’ being in his movie. The plot twist and the characters did arrive first in my mind, but what joined them was an atmospheric tension. A sort of feeling of a quietness that is not peaceful, but charged. Like a lake, before the corpses of innocent women are found in it, or a silence between two people that should be speaking.
So, before writing The Tax Man, I was in university and we were asked to read Brokeback Mountain. I thought I’d watch the movie too and do some research on it. And out of that atmosphere, the way the film used expansive mountains, quiet skies and the hush between breaths – not so much as background, but as a mirror for the character’s internal lives, the way silence became dialogue, the way space became pressure – a lake, a hillside – all became emotional placeholders.
That was precisely what I wanted to bring into The Tax Man.
Stow Lake: The Mind as Landscape
Very early in The Tax Man, Stow Lake appears as a body of murky, still waters. At that point, the lake is simply a reflection of David’s internal landscape: quiet on the surface, yet full of unresolved faults beneath. Stillness, at first, is his place of calm. But I was more interested in what happens when that silence warps, when those murky, still waters part and reveal blood. When the stillness betrays you.
As the story unfolds, bodies of innocent women begin appearing at the lake, warping its meaning.
Stillness becomes distortion.
Calm becomes horror.
This arc in the story is it’s central principle. The shift from serenity to dread, becomes a recurring motif throughout the novel.
Stillness, Warped
For myself, stillness inside a story only interested me when it was interrupted. I wanted the silence to rip in half, and when it did, the reader would also shatter a little.
There is a moment in the novel where David enters stillness and sinks into a trance-like state, experiencing what feels like mystical communication with the memory of his missing wife. It is one of the rare moments when he catches a glimpse of peace. She tells him to go to Stow Lake, after the murder scene has been cleaned up, hinting that there may be answers there about where she might be found.
But the moment he steps into that stillness—really steps into it—the entire world shifts.
Panic crawls in.
The silence fractures.
He feels the dreadful possibility that he may have harmed her.
He spirals, races home, and in a moment of utter collapse, almost ends his own life with a shotgun. At the last possible second, he stops. He calls Agent Carter—the one figure who has tormented him most—and, paradoxically, Carter becomes his saviour in that moment.
That paradox is deliberate. Stillness and chaos, villain and saviour, reality and delusion—they blur. The quiet moments are never safe in The Tax Man.
The Stillness of Bureaucracy
When I navigated the bureaucratic world as a trainee accountant, this became the inspiration for the character of Agent Carter. Bureaucracy has its own stillness—an emotional flatness, a detachment.
A tax bill doesn’t shout.
A letter from the revenue office doesn’t panic.
The system never raises its voice.
And that is what is most horrifying.
Carter embodies that kind of cold procedural calm—except he weaponises it. His monotone, his smirking patience, his way of repeating “twelve thousand dollars overdue”—all of it is designed to destabilise David while never appearing openly aggressive.
It’s the same principle I admired in Brokeback Mountain: quietness as a dramatic force.
The Tax Man: Writing with Silence
Especially for aspiring authors reading this, I believe one of the most overlooked tools in fiction is silence. We often rush to fill the page with dialogue, movement and action, but tension grows deeper within the gaps. A few things I learned writing The Tax Man:
- Trust the reader to feel the tension.
You don’t need to explain panic when you’ve already created the conditions for it. - Stillness is a character.
Use landscape, rooms, weather, or silence to mirror internal states. A murky lake tells you more about David than any paragraph of exposition. - Write the scene that scares you most.
Along with a few other scenes, the shotgun moment terrified me as I was writing it. Leaning deep into the crevices of fear always leads somewhere, honestly terrifying. - Let quiet moments break.
Stillness is most powerful when it doesn’t last—when the reader senses the rupture coming before the character does.
The Emotional Engine
- Yes, The Tax Man is a thriller, but under no circumstances is the engine procedural. Rather, it is emotional. Yes, it is littered with interrogations, suspicions, twists, and a cat and mouse dynamic, but underneath all that, there is a story about a man trying to find his missing wife amongst a tempest, his sanity and himself inside a world that won’t give him the space to breathe. The stillness of Brokeback Mountain taught me that you don’t need explosions or chases to create tension.
A quiet room can be more dangerous than a battlefield.
A lake can reveal more than an autopsy.
A moment of silence can shatter a life. - And stillness, used wisely, is a very powerful tool for a writer. It is the place where meaning gathers and where tension winds back on itself. It is where characters reveal who they truly are, but not through ways which they say, rather in what they cannot bring themselves to speak
And if I’ve managed to carry even a fraction of that into The Tax Man, then the story has done what it set out to do.
(c) James Fischer
Instagram: @JFischerWrites
About The Tax Man by James Fischer:
Twelve thousand dollars overdue. And the tax man always collects.
San Francisco, 1996. David’s life is coming undone: blackouts he can’t explain, rage he can’t remember—and Sarah, his wife who never came home.
Then, a knock at the door: Agent Carter, the tax man.
He says it’s just about the debt. But it isn’t.
With unsettling charm and icy precision, he tears open David’s past; exposing childhood scars, a failing marriage, and a mind frayed by guilt and fear.
Carter knows things he shouldn’t. He hints at secrets buried in David’s missing hours. And always, always, circles back to Sarah: Where is she?
And what did David do during the blackouts he can’t remember?
Trapped in a waking nightmare, David fights to cling to reality. But Carter has allies in the shadows, a labyrinth of lies, and a plan more sinister than David can imagine. With every answer, new questions emerge, and the boundary between victim and monster begins to blur.
In the end, David is forced to confront the question that terrifies him most: Could he have hurt the woman he loves?
Perfect for fans of Alex Michaelides, Lisa Jewell and Gillian Flynn, The Tax Man offers a hypnotic descent into obsession, paranoia, and conspiracy. An unforgettable debut by James Fischer, this haunting psychological thriller will have you questioning what’s real, what’s imagined, and what secrets we keep, even from ourselves
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