Books
Sophie Hannah: It's a mystery
21.12.07 Anna Richardson
Ever since reading Enid Blyton's The Secret Seven, Sophie Hannah has been obsessed with crime fiction, especially mystery and suspense. She's a fan of Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell and Alfred Hitchcock, and these days, mystery is something she does extremely well herself. The third novel in her series of psychological thrillers, The Point of Rescue, is due from Hodder in February; just like its predecessors, Little Face and Hurting Distance (which have sold close to 70,000 and 57,000 copies through Nielsen BookScan respectively), it delves into the harrowing repercussions of an unexpected and distinctly weird event in a heroine's life, and there are many twists in the tale.
"My main interest is in mystery and intrigue," Hannah explains. "Crime itself, I'm less obsessed with. I love that sense that you get at the beginning of any good mystery or suspense novel, where you have no idea what is going on and are so desperate to find out, that you're almost disappointed when the answers start to come in."
Despite police procedure not being Hannah's main obsession, her crime novels feature the same team of police investigators, including main characters Charlie Zailer and Simon Waterhouse. The narrative switches between the first person of the female protagonist and the third-person police investigation.
"I was trying to blend the 'police character' genre with the 'first-person woman in peril'--type genre," Hannah says. "I just loved the versatility you get with blending first person and third person, because the first-person narration is just so much more immediate, gripping and direct. But if you don't have any chapters in the third person, the reader can't know anything that the narrator doesn't."
Another recurring element of her books is a freakishly twisted premise: "I don't see why so many suspense novels should start with a dead body," Hannah says. In Little Face, a woman claims her baby has been exchanged; in Hurting Distance, another believes her lover has disappeared, possibly killed by his wife, who denies he is missing; and in The Point of Rescue, an overworked mother's life turns upside down when a man she has had a fling with turns up on the news in a double-murder case a year later.
Hannah's novels draw on her own emotions: "My fiction is fiction, but the miserable, grief-stricken feelings that my characters have are often either entirely based on or inspired by things I've felt," she says, and they are coupled with themes that are important to her. "Thematically, I'm interested in what happens to people who go through a sudden and very traumatic experience, and in suffering and how people survive it. I think people are very strange. I don't have the view of the world that there's the odd nutter but basically everyone else is normal and well adjusted. I think everyone's got weird things going on beneath the surface." She says she finds the process of writing very cathartic.
Poetry and structure
Considering the success that Hannah has enjoyed with her move to crime, and the enthusiasm she clearly has for the genre, it is a wonder that she didn't deliver her particular take on it sooner. Before Little Face, she was mainly known as a poet. She published her first collection aged 24, and her latest, Pessimism for Beginners, has just been nominated for the T S Eliot Prize.
There is no doubt that her poetry has helped her crime writing. "With both crime novels and poems, it's crucial that everything's in the right place, that the overall shape is right," she says. "If you get the structure right, then it massively improves the end result."
She is clearly a stickler for good writing, and perhaps a bit of a perfectionist. "It's quite rare that you read a book where you're struck by how well written it is," she explains. "So that's very important to me. I spend a lot of time working on individual pages and sentences—not so that they're showy or obtrusive, just to make sure that the flow is as it should be and that the sentences have got a good rhythm."
Another string to her bow is the short story. Her first collection, The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets (Sort Of Books), is due in March. It is something of a fluke, she says. One day (before Hodder signed Little Face) she found herself "in a particular frame of mind. I suddenly started writing these stories; I found myself writing story after story."
However, Hannah is not sure whether she will continue with the form: "At the moment, I feel that it was a one-off phase."
For now, she considers herself very much half poet and half crime writer, and the creative crime juices seem to be flowing. Hannah is currently working on her fourth crime novel, and plans to continue delivering one a year—depending on whether she has the ideas "ready and waiting to go", she adds. "I suppose I might run out of ideas, but I don't think so; at the moment I'm feeling as though there's a lot more where these came from."
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