Sophie Hannah
It’s not often you’re having a cup of tea with somebody and they suddenly admit to having a lot in common with murderers.
Happily I don’t choke on my Earl Grey. The confessor isn’t a wild-eyed weirdo, it’s Sophie Hannah - she of the twisty-turny psychological thrillers – and the killers in question are the troubled souls who lurk in the pages of her bestselling books.
You see there really isn’t anything weird (or wild-eyed) about the Cambridge mum-of-two. In fact, for an author whose work revolves around crime and corpses, she does a fine line in deadpan comedy, making me out loud at things that, to be honest, we really shouldn’t find funny.
So it seems fitting that the central character of her 13th and latest book, The Narrow Bed - which tells the chilling tale of a murderer who’s slaughtering pairs of best friends – is a stand-up comedian with a deliciously sarcastic streak.
“There’s a lot of me in a lot of my characters,” says the 44-year-old, between nibbles of a sticky Danish. “My female protagonists, Kim in this case, are always fairly heavily based on me. Many of my killers are too,” she shrugs. “Even though I would never kill anyone, the weird, emotional obsessions that often lead my characters to commit murder are ones that I empathise with.
“Most of my murderers are not psychopaths, they’re people who feel something very deeply. Obviously they haven’t reacted in the ideal way,” she adds with a laugh. “But I try to show in every book how the killer is someone who, in a different set of circumstances, would have been lovely and harmless. But something happened to them and they couldn’t take it, so they just warped in this very dangerous way.”
With an author for a mother (the prolific Adele Geras) and an academic for a father (the political theorist Norman Geras), writing was in Sophie’s blood and, growing up in Manchester, she put pen to paper at an early age.
“I wrote a poem about snowflakes, which was very good, actually, for an 8-year-old,” she recalls. “It was so good that my form teacher sent me around every class in the school to read it out, and everyone made such a fuss about it that I thought ‘Ha! Maybe this is the thing I could do really well’.”
With the seed sown, young Sophie started writing not only poetry but mystery stories. A devotee of Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven series, she discovered Agatha Christie aged 12, and within two years had read her entire oeuvre.
“It’s the mystery about crime fiction that obsesses me,” she explains. “I’ve just got to find out what’s going on. I often feel like that in real life, but you don’t find out! But in a book, you have that desperate frustration and need to know, and you know that it’ll all be explained. It’s very satisfying.”
After university, Sophie decided to get a stress-free secretarial job “where I could go home at five, forget about work, and have lots of mental energy left over for doing my writing.” It clearly worked: her first poetry collection, The Hero and the Girl Next Door, was published when she was just 24.
More collections followed, “but I only became a full-time writer when it became clear that everywhere I tried to have a proper job, they quickly grew to hate me, because I I’d say ‘I’ve got to be at the Cheltenham Book Festival tomorrow, and then I hope it’s OK, but I’ve got a book signing in Waterstones…’ and they’d be like ‘Yeah, you’re a crap employee’.
“Luckily, just at the point where I was fed up of turning one boss after another against me, I got my first crime novel accepted.”
The novel was Little Face, a harrowing tale of a woman who believes her baby has been swapped for another. Launched in August 2006, sales were predictably slow for a debut, but as word of mouth spread, it began to fly off the shelves.
“On Christmas Day I’d been given some books as presents that I not only didn’t want to read, but also made me despair about whether anybody in my family actually knew who I was at all,” she deadpans. “So I thought right, I’m going to treat myself, I’m going to order some books that I actually want to read. So I logged onto Amazon, and I thought ‘I’ll just see what the Crime and Thriller chart is’…”
To Sophie’s astonishment, Little Face was at number one. “My first thought was that this was impossible, and my husband must have rigged the computer as a joke in some way. So I badgered him for ages, going ‘Come on, what have you done?’ And he was like ‘Don’t be insane! Perhaps you don’t understand how the internet works…?”
Little Face went on to top not only the crime chart, but Amazon’s entire fiction chart for a month. An international bestseller, more than a million copies have now been sold worldwide. “It was unbelievable - a really brilliant way to become a crime writer. And it’s no longer my bestselling book: I’ve had at least three that have sold better, so I was very lucky that it took off in the way that it did.”
Sophie went on to write a book a year, picking up both fans and awards along the way. But it was being chosen by Agatha Christie’s estate to write the first Hercule Poirot novel since Christie’s death that flung her firmly into the limelight.
“It happened in a really weird and totally coincidental way,” she says. “My agent was having lunch with an editor at Harper Collins, and they were talking about a completely different author and book that they shared. But he knew that they were Christie’s publishers, and he said: ‘You should get my author Sophie Hannah to write a new Poirot novel, because she is a huge Christie fan’. And the editor said: ‘Huh, we’d love to get almost anyone to write a new Christie novel, but the family would never hear of it’.”
By coincidence, the editor was meeting with the Christie estate, chaired by Agatha’s grandson, Matthew, the following day: “and completely out of the blue, Matthew said: ‘Now, we’ve decided the time might be right to think about a new continuation novel’…”
A meeting was arranged, “and I said ‘Look, I feel really cheeky even being here; feel free to tell me to bog off. And even if you do want a new Christie book written, surely you’d rather have PD James write it than little old me?’ I was really backing off-ish.
“But Matthew said ‘You are clearly a passionate Christie fan, and that’s what we care about most. My grandmother was a great believer in destiny, and so am I. I feel that you’ve been sent to us for a reason, and we’d like you to do it’.”
Did she feel under terrible pressure? “It was a nice pressure,” she shrugs. “I knew I could do it because it’s in my DNA to know what Poirot might say or do.
“And although my books are very different in tone and atmosphere, I’ve inherited a lot of Agatha Christie’s storytelling priorities: my tendency to start with a really weird mystery, rather than just a simple dead body, is straight from Agatha Christie. She always liked to start with something just very odd.”
Published in 2014, Monogram Murders was a huge hit, and is now sold in 51 countries. A new Poirot novel, Closed Casket, is released in September: “Poirot is invited to the country mansion of a famous children’s writer, and pretty soon after he gets there a murder happens...
“I’m really very fond of Closed Casket because Agatha Christie is famous for her high-concept solutions that can be summed up in four words. I thought of a genius four-word high-concept solution - I just thought ‘Oh my god, that is so brilliant!’. I doubt I will ever have a plot idea that good again.”
Sophie has a hectic life. In addition to her yearly crime novel, she’s written children’s books, more poetry, short stories, even a horror novella. And life at her Cambridge home is anything but quiet. She lives with her artist husband, their daughter and son, aged 13 and 11, who are happily settled at Sancton Wood school, and Welsh terrier Brewster – and rarely has a day devoted to peaceful writing, busy as she is with daily interviews, talks and events, “plus the dog brings a toy and throws it into my lap to say ‘Play with me!’
“I work better outside the house; I’m a fellow commoner at Lucy Cavendish College, so I often go there to work, because then I can close the door and get on with it.”
And for her devoted readers, her new books can’t come soon enough.
“The puzzle, the mystery, the fact that you will not guess what is going on until it’s revealed – that’s what I like in a crime novel, and a lot of my fans say that’s what they love about my books: you can never guess the solution, and it’s always a satisfying surprise.”
Is she ever worried about running out of ideas? “I haven’t yet,” she muses. “No, I don’t think I’ll run out of ideas. I may suddenly have an idea that’s very odd and different, but I’d be surprised if I ever wanted to stop writing mystery stories, because not knowing things is one of my main obsessions in life. I am a mystery addict.”
The Narrow Bed by Sophie Hannah is published in hardback by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £14.99.
February 2016 (c) Cambridge News