Nicci French is the pseudonym of English wife-and-husband team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, and so we chat with the duo about their new release The Last Days of Kira Mullan, which is a chilling new psychological thriller about a woman determined to get justice for a murder no one else believes happened.
Hi there! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourselves?
Nicci: to my astonishment, I’m 66 years old, small, impatient and optimistic. I studied English at University (Sean was there too, but we didn’t meet), then after a bit of meandering I worked as a journalist for many years, writing features, doing interviews, covering court cases, before becoming a full-time writer. As well as writing with Sean, and writing on my own, I co-founded a campaign that fights for the rights of those living with dementia. I am trained as a humanist celebrant; love to swim in lakes, rivers and seas; love to cook and bake; am an insomniac;. I believe the two best inventions ever are the book and the bike.
Sean: I’m half-Swedish (through my mother) but I grew up in London. My father was a film critic and I’ve spent much of my life watching movies of all kinds. In my twenties I worked as a journalist (film, theatre) and then wrote various books, biographies of Patrick Hamilton and Brigitte Bardot; a study of The Terminator. Last year I took five weeks off writing because I was on a jury in a murder trial at the Old Bailey. It was the most fascinating holiday I’ve ever taken.
Nicci and Sean: we met in 1990, married in 1990, had our first child (though Nicci already had a tiny son and daughter) in 1991, our second in 1993. Our first Nicci French thriller, The Memory Game, came out in 1995. We have written 28 books together; it is our way of exploring the world, exploring our fears and doubts, finding a shape for the wonderful, scary mess of life.
When did you both first discover your love for writing and stories?
Nicci: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t read to by parents, or when I didn’t read myself. Reading is the flipside of writing. I also from an early age wrote bad poems, excruciating diaries, incoherent stories. Everyone has their own way of trying to understand the work and the self – reading and writing are mine.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading:
Nicci: Mrs. Pepperpot (about a cross little woman the size of a pepperpot)
Sean: The Cat in the Hat. Still, perhaps, my favourite character in literature: a lord of misrule. - The one that made you want to become an author
Nicci: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte at 13; the wild voice was utterly exhilarating
Sean: The Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne. I was so disappointed that they didn’t reach the actual centre of the earth that, aged ten, I tried to write a sequel. - The one that you can’t stop thinking about:
Nicci: The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich, in which accounts of Russian women who fought in the Second World War are woven into a tragic, poignant, wondrous collage of memories. The greatest anti-war book ever.
Sean: Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. A 1922 novel about a middle aged woman who becomes a witch. It’s a book about the madness beneath the surface of any life and one of those stories that leaves you thinking: where did that come from?
Your latest novel, The Last Days of Kira Mullan, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Terrifying, intimate, humane, compelling, unexpected
What can readers expect?
It’s domestic noir: a young woman, Nancy North, who struggles with her mental health and has difficulty in distinguishing truth from fiction, becomes the perfect unreliable narrator when she witnesses a crime that nobody else believes happened. It’s a story of stubborn courage and paranoid dread.
Where did the inspiration for The Last Days of Kira Mullan come from?
We have often felt that mental health is dealt with in a harsh and cruel way, and that arbitrary notions of ‘normality’ stigmatise people who are different. Out of this came our idea of writing a novel in which a woman who sometimes hears voices finds herself trying to prove an invisible crime. How do you trust someone who doesn’t even trust herself?
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Half way through the novel we wrote before this one (Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter?), we introduced a young detective called Maud O’Connor, who arrives at a scene of chaos and grief and lays a healing hand on it. She is resilient, calm, stern, a problem solver – and we liked her so much, enjoyed writing her, that she’s back again in The Last Days of Kira Mullan. She comes to the protagonist at her darkest hour and the two women stand together. We loved that moment of sisterhood and recognition.
We also loved writing Nancy North – who is febrile, stubborn and very lonely. We wanted so badly to rescue her, and yet we persecuted her for hundreds of pages!
Also, at the heart of this novel, there is a section that takes place in a mental health ward of a hospital. Researching and then writing that was like going into the underworld.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
Well, yes! There are always challenges and if there aren’t, then something is wrong. But in this particular book, the issue of mental health and of psychotic episodes needed particularly careful handling. We had to be very sure we were getting it right, but at the same time that we were writing a properly gripping thriller.
Can you tell us a bit about your process when it comes to co-authoring your books?
We wrote our first thriller, The Memory Game, thirty years ago, and the method that we cobbled together then, when Nicci French still didn’t really exist, remains pretty much the same today. We take weeks and months to plan each book, starting in September when we always go on a walking holiday and as we slog up hills or stand by rivers, we work out the basic plot. It takes weeks and months more to be ready to write – we have to know who the characters are, what the location is, what the spine of the thriller is. We do all the research together, never mind who will end up writing a particular scene, go to all the locations together, and it’s only when we feel we have the same book i each other’s heads that we go our separate ways: Sean to his shed in the garden, Nicci to her study in the attic (as far away from each other as possible). We never write together, and we never writer simultaneously; it’s not a time-saving method. One of us will write a section or chapter and email it to the other, who is then free to edit, prune, add, even erase. They will then write the next section or chapter. So we pass the book between each other, responding to what the other has written, following the journey we plotted but always open to change (you know a book is working when it refuses to do what you tell it; you know characters are alive when they become unruly). When we reach the end, we each do a thorough edit before sending it to our agent. The crucial underlying principle is one of trust: letting someone change or even delete your writing is painful and vulnerable, and we have to know that we are doing so in the service of this mysterious third person who lives with us. There is no power struggle, no winning or losing. Outside of our writing life, we argue and bicker as much as any other married couple, but we know we have to be careful and respectful of each other, and mostly we are. It’s been like a shared adventure, a way of exploring the world. if we started doing so as writers, that would be the end of Nicci French.
What’s next for you?
Next is the book we have already written, Tyler Green Will Never Be Released. After that is the book we are half way through. And we are already thinking about where to go in September, when we will walk and talk about the book that comes next. As long as we have ideas, and as long as we feel excited and challenged by writing together, then that is what we intend to do.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
Nicci: top of the pile is Three Days in June, by Anne Tyler. And I’ve been reading terrific reviews of Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett, a writer who I am not familiar with but am excited to read.
