Q&A with Nicci Gerrard and Sean French,
AKA Nicci French, author of
BLUE MONDAY
(On sale 3/5/12 from Pamela Dorman Books/Viking;
978-0-670-02336-3/0-670-02336-1)
BLUE MONDAY is your thirteenth book and the first book in a new series
of psychological thrillers, introducing Frieda a psychotherapist. It’s also the
first series you’ve ever written. What was the inspiration for this new series?
Frieda came along before the idea
of writing a series did. We had always said we wrote stand-alone thrillers, but
then we thought about a central character who is a therapist, someone who
believes you can’t solve the mess in the world but you can try to address the
mess in your own head, the pain and fear and anxiety inside of you. We thought
of her as a different kind of detective, a detective of the mind, who is
unwillingly dragged by the events that unfurl in the novel out into the real
world.
Once we had imagined Frieda—solitary,
insomniac, prickly, difficult, honorable, trustworthy, fiercely private—we knew
she needed more than one book. She has to be discovered over time. And from
that the octet gradually emerged. The books will cover a decade in Frieda’s
life and the lives of the cast that she assembles around her; we want to see
how time marks them, how they are changed by the experiences they live through
together.
Also, we became excited by the
idea of writing eight books that could stand as gripping thrillers in their own
right, but which are also connected by one over-arching story. In BLUE MONDAY a fuse is lit that then
will burn its way through the remaining seven books, coming to a climax in the
final novel.
Where did the title BLUE MONDAY come from?
This is the first book of a
planned series of dark thrillers that will be named after the days of the week.
The title BLUE MONDAY seemed perfect
to us because it is both about beginnings but also about the difficulty of
beginning, its pains and regrets and fears. It also happens to be the title of
not just one but two (very different) great songs – by Fats Domino and New
Order.
Set against a backdrop of a dark, tangled London London
As regards London, our writing
process is to do what we have always done, which is to spend a lot of our time
walking, cycling—and sometimes running—around the city, exploring its hidden
alleys, squares, canals. We have both spent many years living in the city and
every time we go out we see something completely new. Much of BLUE MONDAY came out of those walks.
A few things you need to know about
London:
It’s big; really big. Greater
London is about thirty-five miles across.
It’s really old. It’s been a
continuously functioning (and dis-functioning) city since the Romans and it has
been built on, burnt down, bombed, demolished, built on, over and over again.
London is really a collection of
villages that used to be separated by fields and meadows and woodlands and
orchards that gradually got filled up but they still hang on to their identity.
In good ways and bad, London is a jangling mess. North Londoners don’t like
South London, East Enders feel persecuted by everybody, West Kensington isn’t
really in Kensington, and wherever you’re from anywhere in the world, you’ll
find a community somewhere in London.
London is a landscape as much as
a city, one of the oldest and most complicated landscapes in England.
And still, there’s so much that
we don’t understand about London
What are some things about you that might be a surprise to those of us
in the US
Sean: My mother is Swedish and we spend every New Year in central Sweden
Nicci and I studied the same subject (English literature) at the
same university (Oxford
In 2005, we ran the London
Marathon together. Literally—we crossed the line at the same time.
Nicci: I broke my back a few years ago (and have sworn never to get
on a horse again).
I am trained as a celebrant—I can
bury people!
One of my passions is growing
chillies—very, very hot chillies. Another is eating them (if you eat burningly
hot chillies when they are frozen, you can taste their real flavour and only
later do they explode in your chest like a small bomb).
Frieda is a psychotherapist. What kind of research did you do to make
her so real?
Sean: Frieda emerged from our fascination with the whole subject of
doctors whose job it is to make sense of our lives just by the way we talk
about them. We have friends who are therapists, we have a certain experience of
therapy, we’ve talked to people who have undergone therapy and we’ve read an
awful lot about it.
Nicci: And also, in a way, therapy is a bit like writing itself:
you take chaos and put order onto it, a road out of the dark woods.
What are you working on now?
Sean: We’ve just finished the second Frieda Klein and we’re
standing nervously by the edge plucking up the nerve to dive into the third
one.
You are known as the internationally bestselling author Nicci French,
yet really there are two of you: Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, writing
partners and husband and wife and you live in England
Sean: In the first years we
were married, we talked about the idea. We knew that people could collaborate
in different ways but we were interested in whether two people could write a
novel that had one voice, where you were really creating a new person.
Nicci: It was like an experiment. But looking back at it, all these
years and fourteen books later, it seems so odd, such a strange thing to do
when we were both working flat out anyway, with four tiny children racing
around the house. We didn’t do it because we thought we would write a book, get
it published, become Nicci French. We did it to see if we could do it, because
it seemed like a shared adventure—and it has been a shared adventure, a way of
exploring the world together.
How do you manage co-authorship? Do you sit down and write together or
do you take it in shifts?
Nicci: When we talk about
how we write together we tend to make it sound much neater and better managed
than it actually is, it’s a rather chaotic and messy business. The one thing we
never do is actually sit down and write together, and the thought of one of us
dictating to the other is a kind of madness, it just wouldn’t work. We spend a
long time talking about the shape of the novel, the story, the way the plot
goes, the development of the characters and above all the voice of the narrator
into whom we both have to write, and once we’re satisfied with that then we’ll
start to write. The writing will quite often take us away from the plan, but
that’s what we do. One of us will write, say, the first chapter and then hand it
over to the other who is absolutely free to change it, edit it, erase it, add
other words to it, and then they will write the next chapter and pass it back.
It’s a question of moving between the two of us. We never decide in advance who’s
going to write what chapter, there’s no division.
Sean: We felt that in order
for it to work we both have to be responsible for everything, whether we
(individually) have written it or not. If there’s any research that needs doing
for a book then we both have to do it, we both have to have all of it in our
heads.
Nicci: If Sean writes
something and I change absolutely nothing about that whole section, but I read
it and approve it, then it becomes mine as well. It becomes a kind of Nicci
French thing so we both own each word of it.
Why did you choose to write crime novels?
Nicci: I’m interested in
crime in the sense that I’m interested in the strange path that people’s lives
can go down. I’m not so much interested in the criminal; I’m much more
interested in the victim, the effects of the crime and what lies beneath the
settled surface. Most people, when you meet them, present themselves as ordered
and controlled; they have a self-possessed image. Underneath that everybody is
a welter of doubt, grief, loss, nostalgia, love and hate; that’s what I’m
interested in. The thrillers that we write are not about fiendishly clever
serial killers outwitting the police, they’re about ordinary people who have
extraordinary things happening in the middle of their lives, and the way that
they change and have to resolve things. I think that attracts us to the
thriller genre.
You chose to use a female pseudonym, and almost all your novels so far
have been written from a female viewpoint. Is there a reason for this?
Sean: The first idea we had
was about recovered memory, and 99% of people recovering memory in therapy are
women, so it obviously had to be a woman. Once it was a woman as the main
character then it just seemed obvious that if we were going to choose a name,
that it should be a female name. Women have achieved a kind of independence and
equality, a nominal independence, and yet so many things haven’t changed. There
are so many kinds of unexpected pressures that have come along with that, and
that seemed an interesting road to go down.
Nicci: It is that sense of
there being a cross-current between what modern women are like now; assertive,
independent, strong, ambitious, and yet still very physically vulnerable, but
also vulnerable to all the things that attack us from the past, all the things
we’re conditioned to feel. There’s a kind of emotional vulnerability and
intelligence, a particular kind of female intelligence that seems to be a good
way of looking at the world.
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I am happy to be able to offer one lucky reader a copy of this book. I was so tempted to get a copy for myself but know things are going to be crazy for me and I don't want to commit to too much.
The galley copy is available to anybody with a US or Canadian mailing address. You have until midnight (central time) on February 19th to enter. To enter, just fill out the form below. That's it! Good luck everyone.
