The husband and wife writing duo that are Nicci French have found a novel way to devise their killer psychological thrillers – they go walking far from their Suffolk home.
Their latest offering, House Of Correction, had its beginnings in the Italian region of Tuscany. Ideas for the next book are the fruit of an autumn trek on Scotland’s West Highland Way.
Sean French and Nicci Gerard – authors of the Frieda Klein series who have been writing under their pen name for 25 years, with 15 million books sold globally – reckon walking “gets the blood flowing” and is more inspiring than “staring at each other across a table”.
Nicci tells PS: “We love Scotland but we once got hopelessly lost in a remote area in the far north-west. We had a beautiful walk planned but the skies opened and all the paths turned to rivers.” Sean chips in: “It was quite scary.”
The only scares during the writing of the new standalone are in the text. “We wrote this in a different way,” Sean says. “We suddenly had this idea that we didn’t have to be sitting in London writing, so we went to Italy. We had a lovely few months, walking and talking, but I am not sure the atmosphere comes into the book.”
Nicci explains: “We were there at the end of 2018 and wrote it through the spring of 2019. It is a book full of darkness, but it also has a zest about it. Tabitha, the central character, is a loose cannon. It begins with her in a prison cell, depressed and at rock bottom. She has to try to work out how she ended up there.
“This is our attempt to write a locked-room mystery… she is both in a locked room in a prison but the locked-room mystery happens in a strange little village in Devon.
“We are never going to write a Covid novel, but this is, kind of strangely, the Covid novel before Covid happened, because she is locked down.”
Stubborn young misfit Tabitha is, according to the couple, the kind of girl who would have been branded a witch a few hundred years ago. She has no strategies for life but has “a strong sense of who she is”. She “doesn’t shave her legs, or wear make-up,” and she wears odd clothes and eats weird food.
When a neighbour’s body is found in her garden shed, she is charged with murder. She knows she didn’t do it, but can see why everyone thinks she did. Her lawyer doesn’t believe her, so she fires her and goes it alone in court. As she builds a case from her prison cell, she discovers there are more than a few people with grudges against the victim.
Her creators – who have been married for 30 years and have four children between them – shine a piercing light on loneliness, prejudice and the human capacity for resilience in this compelling novel.
Nicci says: “We have met people like Tabitha, people who do not fit in. When we started, what was important about her was that she was both like a witch and a misfit, and also that she was clinically depressed. During the writing, she came alive. We had great fun trying to lead her out of the darkness into the light.”
Sean added: “The ideas for books are usually quite simple. This one started from someone having to solve a crime from within a prison cell, where they can’t do any of the normal things like visiting the murder scene or calling on people. They have to do it their own head. We were intrigued by that idea. We hope the readers will be intrigued, too.”
Nicci French House Of Correction, Simon & Schuster, £14.99
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