Two of crime fiction’s bestsellers, Louise Candlish and Lisa Jewell, will be chatting in Waterstones with Stu Cummins about their latest psychological thrillers ‘Don’t Let Him In’ and ‘A Neighbour’s Guide To Murder.’
I caught up with author Louise Candlish in her first interview ahead of her new novel, ‘A Neighbour’s Guide To Murder’, the latest of her 17 world best selling books.
KK
Is today a big call day for you? Have you got a whole load of these in a row!
LC
No, because the book is not out till the 17th of July, I’m kind of just, you know, softly moving into publicity mode. So I have , you know, one thing a day for a while and then when the campaign starts, yeah, it all starts to be hectic then. So you have got me fresh as a daisy!
KK
Your latest novel, A Neighbour’s Guide to Murder, is out on the 17th of July. Tell us, obviously without any spoilers, what’s it about?
LC
Well, A Neighbour’s Guide to Murder is set in a swanky mansion block of apartments in South London, though frankly could be in any fairly affluent area, a mixed area actually. And our narrator is Gwen, who is an older lady. She’s retired and she’s had quite a chequered past.
And we only ever get her point of view in this book. So bear that in mind, future readers. But she strikes up a friendship, a sort of quite unlikely friendship, age gap friendship with a young lodger who has rented a room from Gwen’s neighbour Alec across the hallway.
And as this friendship deepens and Pixie, the young lady, sort of starts to get embroiled in the sort of, you know, the day to day business of the building, Gwen starts to have these suspicions about what’s going on behind closed doors with Alec. And she’s the kind of person who will put two and two together and, you know, make a hundred. And before we know it, the building is completely erupted into scandal, leading to, as the title suggests, a murder.
KK
I do love a good murder.
LC
It is a murder mystery, yes. You sort of discover it’s one of those structures where you discover in the very first scene that someone’s been murdered, but you don’t know who and you’re not quite sure, you know, but I hope at least half the book, you know, you’re not suspecting at all even why.
So it was really fun to devise, you know, thinking from the reader experience. But mostly I just, you know, had such a passionate story to tell about, you know, how difficult it is just to have a roof over your head when you’re a young person.
And, you know, I’ve got a daughter in her early 20s. She’s a recent graduate. And I can just see, you know, it’s almost an impossible dream to rent. You know, the way young people talk about renting is the way we used to talk about owning. You know, it feels out of reach. So someone like Pixie has got herself embroiled in, you know, an unsavoury relationship.
and, her arrangements are not what we would wish for our daughters, let’s put it that way. And, you know, I’ve tried to contrast that with other young people and the choices they have made. Gwen, for instance, has a grown-up son called Daniel, who early readers are really picking out as the character they love to hate, and he has boomeranged back home.
We’ve also got a Nepo baby in the mix. So I wanted to just have a look at all of these compromises and survival tactics that have arisen since I was young, just in order to get a roof over your head. It’s frightening and fascinating.
I mean, it’s just it’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? Because it’s not it’s not the status of ownership. It’s the security. You just don’t want to be at risk of that notice to vacate, especially with children. But for everyone, I think we all deserve that security. It’s not to do with making money as an investment on a property. It’s just to do with knowing that you can make a plan and you can feel secure that you’ll be living in the same place in a year’s time and I think it makes for a great theme for propelling a thriller along.
KK
What I found particularly delightful is the friendship between Gwen and Pixie despite their 50 year age gap. Was there an inspiration for that – maybe a similar relationship that you know of?
LC
No it sort of happened accidentally. I think first of all, I knew I was going to write about younger people in this book because, you know, those who’ve read Our House and Our Holiday and some of my other books will know that I tend to have, you know, middle-aged, middle-class, affluent people at the heart of the story. And, you know, it’s all about the crises that afflict them and the people who challenge them. And this time I wanted to really think from a different perspective.
But as I was planning it, I thought, actually, it is more interesting to have a narrator with some experience. You know, they can have that droll, older sense of humour. You know, they’ve got a whole life’s worth of experience to bring to bear on a situation, for better or worse.
And but I’d also recently been thinking how I’d like to write about the invisibility of women as we age. And I sort of just went with that and I’m in my 50s and Gwen is about 70. So I’ve taken her, you know, to be a little bit older than me. But there’s a lot of me in her just in terms of the way she is now treated around the neighbourhood, particularly by men.
She has this sense that she’s no longer relevant, you know, as a sexual being or, you know, even a kind of social being. I wanted to have a nice counterpoint with a much more open-hearted friendship that she has with Pixie.
Which is not without its difficulties, but they have this, kind of, instant kindred spirit feeling. As you do in age gap relationships, when you’re the older person, you know, you can’t help feeling maternal towards that person. And that’s exactly what happens with Gwen towards Pixie, particularly because her relationship with her children is so fraught for various reasons and her relationship with her children’s father.
So yeah, lots of different feelings of my own as well as observations. I mean, I’m always reading the news. I’m very up to date on politics and current affairs and housing is my big interest. But a lot of my inspiration will just come from walking around my neighbourhood and thinking, oh my God, that guy who just shouldered past me, I don’t think he even knew there was a bodily presence there. I think he thought I was a ghost!
So I really wanted to draw on that and try and see the funny side of it as well as the tragic because no one wants to feel irrelevant do they?
KK
Definitely not. You were talking about the mansion block being such a great setting and it really is. However I have a really great WhatsApp group in the street that we’re in. It’s like a big family, it really is. What made you include that as almost like a character of its own, in the book? Did you think, oh, this could be a good insight?
LC
Absolutely. WhatsApp messages in a novel are, you know, a shorthand for getting a bit of information and conveying character and community without needing to go behind every closed door and, you know, get inside the head of each resident so I wanted to do it for that reason. I wanted it to portray the sense of community and the fact that, you know, it’s quite hard to keep a secret and the moment this, you know, suspected arrangement happens,
It is sort of passed from one ear to the next. They all know and they’re all discussing it on WhatsApp. It’s the kind of book where you probably could have done the whole thing in WhatsApp messages, actually. I mean, that would have been a challenge. I like them for comic relief as well, because, you know, I also have a street WhatsApp and, you know, I’m more of a lurker than a sort of active contributor.
But I just love seeing the different voices and the fact that some people are quite self-important, others are quite humble and fearful. And I just love that mix of personalities. All we’ve got in common is our postcode. And when you’re in a mansion block, particularly a sort of posh one like Columbia Mansions in the novel, there’s a lot of rules. You’re your own mini state.
And, you know, if someone steps out of line, then, you know, it’s a matter for the board and it needs to be discussed and punishment needs to be meted out. It just created such a sort of formal framework, I thought, for the story that I wanted to tell and when you’ve got something like that, you do need some light relief.
I also, throughout all my books, often used newspaper articles and social media posts and comments. I just find it a really effective way of conveying a mood and character, but also just breaking up some of the more suspenseful action.
KK
Well, well done on it, because I think that was a brilliant thing to do. I just thought absolutely fabulous.
LC
Thank you so much. And we can all relate to it, can’t we?
KK
Yes, definitely. You’ve had 17 books published, which are worldwide bestsellers and award winners. Well done you! But also, do you do you have any advice for budding writers?
LC
I do, yes. Well, first of all, there are two types of budding writer. One is someone who just, you know, has to write because they can’t not write and they’re not too worried about whether they’d ever be published. They just want to, you know, it’s almost a therapy and then there’s people who want to have a professional career as a writer and so let’s focus on the people who want to be published, like me, and have hopefully a long career with several books and
And by the way, you made it sound like that, you know, it’s been an unmitigated triumph, but I’ve had many ups and downs. So my first advice is prepare yourself for ups and downs. You will not be, you know, an overnight sensation. Very few people are. But my advice and, you know, much in a more granular way is when you’re starting a project, really think carefully about what the hook is because the industry talks all the time about hooks. That’s how you’ll get an agent. That’s how your agent will sell the book into an editor. That’s how the editor will then sell the book to the sales team. That’s how the sales team will sell to the booksellers and that’s how the booksellers will sell to the consumers. They need to be able to say what it is. So with a book like A Neighbour’s Guide to Murder I can say it’s about the rental crisis, it’s Notes On A Scandal meets Indecent Proposal and you immediately know what the theme is, what the tone’s going to be, where it sits in the market. It’s quite hard to do when you’re a beginner and you haven’t been on the journey yet because it probably sounds quite cynical. But I just think it’s a really good idea to sit down and imagine that you’re a blurb writer.
If you just want to tell a story and you’re almost journaling, that’s completely different and that’s wonderful and I can’t think of any better way of reflecting on life’s experience than writing it down. So that’s wonderful. But if you want to sell it, you need a hook.
KK
You’re about to go out on the road in July plugging the book. Do you enjoy doing those events?
LC
Oh I really do yes. I mean that’s actually almost like a reward at the end of what’s been a solitary process for the most part but also a lot of business meetings and a lot of strategy meetings and then when you’re on the road that’s when you meet readers and normally doing an event with another author which is always lovely because all authors get on, or most of us do anyway. So, you know, that’s when it all comes to life. And what I particularly like is when members of the audience have already read the book and I can already start to get a sense of their interpretation of it because I’m the kind of author who, once the book’s out there, I almost kind of concede ownership of it because I know as a reader I’ve got my own picture of the action I’m reading and it’s probably very different from what the author had in his or her mind when they were writing it. So I love hearing what it’s become in the reader’s imagination because that’s the whole point of the exercise as far as I’m concerned. It’s sharing a story and then it’s seeing how someone else takes it in their imagination.
KK
You’re coming to Brighton?
LC
Yes, I am. That’s my first gig. That’s going to be a great one. That’s going to be me and Lisa Jewell, who’s obviously a superstar, and we’ve got a great interviewer in Stu Cummins, who’s one of the biggest crime fiction nerds and, you know, sort of champions in the whole of the UK.
KK
Thank you for talking to me. It’s been an utter delight.
LC
Oh, it’s been lovely.
Tickets :£5 / £4 plus cardholder
https://www.waterstones.com/events/crimewave-lisa-jewell-and-louise-candlish/brighton
