A Sense of Place Can’t Be Overvalued

By Fraser Massey
British author Sarah Pearse knew she’d found the perfect setting for her “creepy” debut thriller, The Sanatorium (released earlier this year by Pamela Dorman [U.S.] and Bantam Press [UK]), when she couldn’t even bring herself to set foot in such a place for research purposes. “My mind said I’d love to go,” she told the audience watching this week’s First Monday Crime discussion on Facebook, but in the end she was “a bit too scared to do it.”

The Sanatorium is a locked-room mystery yarn about a missing guest at a once-abandoned tuberculosis nursing home in the Swiss Alps, now renovated into a five-star minimalist hotel. Pearse’s success in conjuring up that isolated building’s chilling aura has certainly captured the interest of readers. Her novel has become the runaway crime-publishing success story of this year so far, shooting straight into the top-10 bestseller charts of both The New York Times and London’s Sunday Times.

Pearse had spent time in Switzerland during her 20s, and later happened across a magazine article about vintage sanatoria being converted to other uses. Those ingredients served to inspire her book. And though she talked herself out of on-the-spot research, Pearse did find videos on YouTube that helped her hone the harrowing atmospherics she needed for her story. There are modern explorers, she explained, who “take a kind of video camera into an old abandoned building and kind of film themselves. I have to say, I went down a rabbit hole of these videos and just sort of immersed myself in that environment … Some of the videos … I mean, they do it in a really creepy way so it obviously draws you in. But I really felt I was there.”

Fans of these regular First Monday Crime sessions—based in London and currently being conducted via Zoom, due to the coronavirus pandemic—had to wait an extra week for this latest presentation, as the actual first Monday in April fell on an Easter public holiday in the UK. But the online audience’s patience was rewarded by the strength of the line-up of writers assembled on their behalf. Not just Pearse, but also American best-seller David Baldacci, premiere novelist David Fennell, and suspense master Matt Wesolowski.



The latest entry in Wesolowski’s award-winning “Six Stories” series, featuring enigmatic investigative reporter and podcast host Scott King, is Deity (Orenda). “It’s a story about what we do as fans when our heroes fall from grace,” the author said of his compelling tale, which has a plot with an almost ripped-from-the-headlines feel to it as King searches for the truth about the mysterious death of a pop star rumored to have sexually abused his fans.

Moderator Jacky Collins said she was especially drawn to the folklore elements of Deity, suggesting how hearsay and lore from the past can influence the present. This set Wesolowski off on an extended tribute to the power of human legends. “I think … the best fear is set in folklore, and the best fear is set in reality,” he began. “Folklore has always been a way to teach through fear. As a species, we teach each other things through stories … We teach our children not to go places because there’s a story behind it. … I think I haven’t invented any new folklore, but I’ve drawn upon this idea of death omens. Up in Scotland, in the Highlands, there’s this idea of a death omen in the form of a black dog. This is used in many cultures, the fear of a death omen. But it also can be an extended metaphor in the story—without sounding horribly pretentious—about someone who’s looking back at past evil and almost being followed by a death omen. … [It’s like] someone’s past coming back to bite them, as it were.”

Although Baldacci’s latest novel, A Gambling Man—being released in mid-May on both sides of the Atlantic—focuses primarily on the murky world of political corruption, its storyline too has a showbiz element. A sequel to his 2019 novel One Good Deed, it again stars Baldacci’s straight-talking World War II veteran and wannabe private eye, Aloysius Archer, who this time out hooks up with a budding Hollywood actress named Liberty Callahan.

Like Pearse, Baldacci admitted to viewers that he’d done no location research when developing his plot. He didn’t need to, as his setting—the California resort of Bay Town—is primarily a figment of his imagination. “I almost always in my books, always make the town up,” he explained. “I never write about a real town. … I always go to a state and I’ll check the entire geographic registry to make sure this is not [the name of] an actual town. Because if I write about an actual town someone will write and say, ‘That mailbox is on the other corner [to where you said]. You screwed up. You’re no good. And I’m not going to finish your book.’ So I always come up with a fictional town. But if you want to think about Santa Barbara, a little bit north of L.A., you’re probably right around the right place.”

This First Monday’s final panelist, David Fennell, revealed that—perhaps because, as a fresh-out-of-the-box novelist, he’s yet to experience similarly pernickety readers desperate to catch him out on geographical errors—he actually put in plenty of foot hours while concocting his intriguing police procedural, The Art of Death (Zaffre), slogging his way around potential London murder sites, searching for authentic setting details.

“Every location [in the book] is real,” Fennell said proudly of his nail-biting art-world-set thriller. “My serial killer, he loves decrepit, forsaken buildings. I certainly walked those streets quite a lot to get ideas and to get a feel for the locations.”

This week’s full hour-long discussion can be watched here.

First Monday Crime, an immensely popular feature of the London literary scene ever since 2016, will no doubt return next month, showcasing still one more fresh set of crime-fictionists. Chances are that it will also take place a week late, as May 3—May Day, the first Monday in May—is another British bank holiday.

Making the Most of Diverse Histories

By Fraser Massey
Most authors don’t start out as writers. They serve time in other careers first. But what’s the most useful professional background for a crime novelist? Could it be the law? Two of Britain’s most successful recent debutante crime novelists, both of whom are now making waves in the United States, too—Abigail Dean and Nadine Matheson—are London-based lawyers. They met last week before a virtual audience on Facebook. (You can enjoy the full video here.)



Dean has hit the New York Times bestsellers chart on one side of the Atlantic and the Sunday Times list on the other with her harrowing psychological thriller, Girl A (published by Viking [U.S.] and HarperCollins [UK]), about abuse and survival. But during her appearance as part of First Monday Crime, a regular British forum for fans of fiction with a bloodthirsty edge, she said that having made a substantial mark in one career was no help in giving her the self-confidence to expect she could do as well in another.

“I do remember … having a lot of self-doubt,” Dean confided to viewers during that hour-long Zoom presentation. “I needed a bit of a cheerleader. So I gave the first few chapters to my husband, who loves reading. … His first kind of comment was sort of a bit of like happy disbelief. ‘It’s like a real book that you would buy in a shop.’ I think that was the moment which, although it was a questionable compliment, looking back it was a much-needed boost.”

If the law had not helped Dean believe she could become a fiction writer, it at least gave her useful background when it came to creating Girl A’s central protagonist, New York lawyer Lex Gracie.

Matheson, whose serial-killer police procedural, The Jigsaw Man (published by Hanover Square Press in the States on March 16, and already available in the UK from HQ), has drawn more than its fair share of plaudits, took a different approach to Dean. “I didn’t want to write about a lawyer,” she said. “I do [lawyer stuff] every day.” Instead, she used her professional knowledge to write about crime from a police perspective. “I’m a solicitor. I specialize in crime, so I know how a police investigation works. I know what it’s like to deal with defendants and witnesses. … I have that background, so hopefully I’ve been able to put authenticity into the book.”

Her one regret was having a significant gap in her personal background of working with criminals. “I’ve never, to my knowledge,” she explained, “represented a serial killer, but—and this sounds really sick—I would have liked to. Just to experience it.”

Even so, critics have been impressed with how she’s pieced together her serial killer the Jigsaw Man. American crime-fictionist J.T. Ellison (All the Pretty Girls, Her Dark Lies), a major champion of Matheson’s novel, has described its author as “the heir apparent to Mo Hayder and Thomas Harris.” It’s a view echoed by critic Geoffrey Wansell in his critique of the novel for Britain’s Daily Mail, which described The Jigsaw Man as having “chilling echoes of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs.”

“I’m still stunned by [the comparison],” said Matheson. “That’s like the pinnacle [of praise]. I read Silence of the Lambs when I was 14. I’ve read Mo Hayder. To have this book, that I didn’t think was that great when I wrote it, to have it compared to Harris and Hayder—that’s like the icing on the cake, I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.”

Joining Dean and Matheson on this month’s First Monday Crime panel were two other first-time storytellers: Briton Tim Glister, and Femi Kayode, an exciting new name in Nigerian noir.

Glister’s novel, Red Corona (Point Blank UK), is a Cold War-era espionage thriller. These days he’s an advertising executive, but to make himself think like a writer, Glister drew on his previous participation in the publishing industry. “I worked [as a bookseller] in [the UK bookstore chain] Waterstones and I was a literary agent, briefly,” he recalled. “What that taught me was what readers want, [and] what shoppers want. … I had quite a good practical side of reading [my novel] as an author and a writer, and then thinking of it in a slightly more editorial way … with the mindset that you need to absolutely adore [what you’ve written], but so do other people.”

Kayode trained as a clinical psychologist, a profession shared by the protagonist in his atmospheric mystery, Lightseekers (Mulholland [U.S.], Raven [UK]). That new novel’s story is based on a horrific true-life incidence of mob violence in Nigeria back in 2012, during which residents of a provincial village murdered a group of students by hanging burning tires around their necks. “From the very first time I heard about the original crime …,” Kayode told listeners, “I thought about it as a novel. I always wanted to explore why. Why would people do this?” Kayode was finally able to pen his book in England, while he was studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

Watchers were led to believe, over the course of this First Monday discussion, that these four nascent novelists can look forward to promising futures. Dean’s Girl A is already slated to become a limited TV series in the States, directed and executive produced by Johan Renck, the Swedish, Emmy Award-winning director of 2019’s Chernobyl. Kayode and Matheson both confirmed during the session that their representatives had sold the screen rights to their novels as well, though they supplied no details.

Meanwhile, Glister joked that the name of his book, Red Corona—with its unintended pandemic allusions—might be putting off TV executives from bidding on its adaptation. In reality, of course, the corona of Glister’s title has nothing to do with the deadly coronavirus that has killed so many people worldwide over the last year; instead, it refers to a fictitious surveillance satellite project. “A year and a half ago [when I wrote the book],” he said, with a sigh, “[corona] was my new exciting word which no one knew. And then things changed.”

First Monday Crime, a monthly discussion series founded in April 2016 and originally held in London before a live audience, has been broadcast via Facebook ever since Great Britain went into pandemic lockdown early last year. It’s scheduled to return on April 12. That’s actually the second Monday of next month, as this year April 5 will be a public holiday—Easter Monday—in the UK.

Writing Through the Pandemic

(Editor’s note: The following article comes from Fraser Massey, a freelance journalist living in East London​, England, who has contributed work in the past to British periodicals such as The Radio Times, Now, and The Times of London. His unpublished first novel, Whitechapel Messiah, was shortlisted last year in the “New Voices” category at London’s Capital Crime Festival. He’s currently preparing to submit that manuscript to publishers.)

Scottish thriller writer Susi Holliday launched a spirited defense of crime fiction this week in the face of doomsayers, who’ve predicted that all of the real-life suffering and tragedies experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic will put people off wanting to read about made-up deaths. “Just because it’s all dark and miserable out in the world,” she told an audience of British crime lovers gathered via Facebook, “I’m not going to suddenly just say I’m going to read romance all the time … What you like to read, I think, is what you like to read. And if you like to read crime, you’ll always read crime.”

Holliday, whose latest novel, The Last Resort (Thomas & Mercer), was published only at the start of this month and already tops Amazon U.S.’s technothrillers best-sellers chart, was speaking as part of an all-female panel hosted by First Monday Crime, the popular, monthly, London-based discussion series celebrating all things murder and mayhem.

“Maybe you might chop and change a little bit about what you read for a little while,” she conceded, “But I think you’ll always go back to crime.”

The Last Resort is Holliday’s seventh novel, but only the second to be released under the byline Susi Holliday. She had published previously as S.J.I. Holliday (The Damselfly, Violet, etc.).

Her optimistic views on the loyalty of crime-fiction readers were echoed by the rest of this last Monday’s panelists: Sam Carrington, Deborah Masson, and A.K. “Alison” Turner.

Carrington, whose new psychological thriller, The Open House (Avon), is scheduled for publication today, December 10, contended that “As long as you’re not writing about COVID deaths, we might be alright—that’s a little close to home. … There’s still a fascination for all of these dark things, and [crime fiction is] all about the dark secrets and things that you’re going to unearth, and puzzles as well … I couldn’t write romance anyway; [my characters] would end up dying.”

Turner’s thriller Body Language (Zaffre UK)—a spin-off from two short stories she wrote for BBC Radio 4—was published on November 26. She told First Monday viewers that the realities of this year’s fast-spreading coronavirus crisis were brought home to her while she was researching details surrounding the work of Cassie Raven, her Goth-girl mortuary-technician protagonist. “I started getting worried,” said Turner, “when the mortuary technicians that I use massively for research just were too busy to speak to me from about March [on], because they were on double shifts [at work].”

Body Language is the first novel this author has produced as A.K. Turner, after concocting a succession of Brit Noir thrillers under the pen name Anya Lipska (A Devil Under the Skin). She admitted to having struggled to write during Britain’s lockdown conditions. “I found it really, really hard not to be out and about with people,” she explained, “because … that’s the writer’s raw material is how they talk, their little quirks. So to be stuck with just a laptop and desperately trying to dream it up out of nowhere was tough. Thank God for [the videotelephony software] Zoom, because all those mortuary technicians and pathologists I needed to talk to, I was Zooming them very often in their natural habitat, wearing their scrubs, which was kind of weird, but quite interesting.”

Masson, who participated in this panel discussion from her home in Aberdeen, Scotland, admitted it wasn’t just her writing that suffered during lockdown. “My kind of reading and writing mojo [both] went right out of the window … because I was home-schooling. I’ve got a 6-year old and a soon-to-be 11-year-old, so it was a real change to things. I’m lucky enough that I’m at home full-time, so I usually write in pretty much silence when they’re at school. I just find it really hard to write around them.” Fortunately, she added, “I’m reading again and writing again. But I think it’s quite a common thing, from looking on Twitter. … There were many people that say they weren’t reading to the volume they normally were, they were finding writing really difficult. I think [the lockdown] sucked the creativity out of a lot of people.”

Out for Blood (Corgi UK), the sophomore installment in Masson’s Aberdeen-set Detective Inspector Eve Hunter series, is due in bookshops this week. Her previous novel, Hold Your Tongue (2019), won the Glencairn Star Trophy for Scottish Crime Debut of the Year at the Bloody Scotland festival in September.

If you’d like to watch this week’s full, half-hour-long First Monday discussion, simply click here.

First Monday Crime has been a feature of the London literary scene ever since April 2016, with a quartet of different authors appearing each month to talk about crime novels. Until the UK’s COVID-19 restrictions kicked in earlier this year, the events were held primarily at City, University of London, in front of a live audience. But these discussions have has since moved online, with panelists appearing via Zoom and the proceedings being broadcast live on the First Monday Facebook page. The series will be taking a short winter break, but its organizers promise that it will return in February 2021.