Sophie Hannah Meet the Author

In this week's Meet the Author, Jim Naughtie talks to the crime

writer Sophie Hannah about her book The Narrow Bed.

Sophie Hannah is a crime writer who crashed psychological thrillers that

are brittle contemporary tales, complicated stories of rock lives,

people who are cynics and many unlovable characters -- tough lives.

A detective of the golden age of the -- from the Google flick-mac golden

age of the detective story. Under the gritty dark surface of her

latest book, The Narrow Bed, lies a quite traditional fiend thought --

from the golden age of the detective story. Welcome.

Sophie, this is a contemporary novel, a gritty novel, and a very

compensated story in many ways. You use all kinds of devices as a

storyteller, but hidden in there it strikes me as a good old-fashioned

detective story. Perhaps a bit of police procedural... Argue a Devo T

of the traditional detective story? -- are you a devotee?.

You know, I grew up reading Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers,

Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford books, Colin Dexter's Inspector

Morse books, and I don't think that the traditional detective story

with clues and a super-genius sleuth who works it all out in the end,

I don't think that has to be old-fashioned.

That's kind of my whole point really, is that you can do

all of that and offer all of those satisfactions

It follows that, of course, we're not going to spoil the puzzle

and the solution for anyone, because that

But it's true, it strikes me, that you take great care at the end

of the book to make sure that no-one's going to feel cheated,

that there's something that's just thrown in at the end.

So when the brilliant detective reveals the solution to the mystery,

he or she can't use ingredients that the reader has

So you have to have planted all the relevant information in such

a way as the reader hopefully won't put it all together,

so that when the detective announces this is who did it and why,

ideally, the reader should then think -

oh, yeah, I saw all of those things, but I just didn't put them together

But the mechanism that you use for telling the story is one that

dear old Dorothy Sayers wouldn't have recognised really.

I mean, we've got a central character who has written a book -

'Origami', which comes up again and again in the plot.

There's also a lot of journalism in there.

And in a way, one of the elements of the plot, and I don't think I'm

giving anything away when I say that we're talking about serial murders

or a number of murders where a message is left or handed -

rather like the Black Spot in Treasure Island -

as a signal that death is on its way.

And we're talking really about people who are doing

with the question of whether they can believe

Well, I mean, this is one of the sort of contemporary

The serial killer is killing pairs of best friends,

and so the police have, understandably,

decided that something to do with best friends is motivating him.

It's not a huge stretch to get to that conclusion.

But there's this journalist, Sondra Halliday, who wants

And this is something I've noticed happening a lot with life

as it is today, with all the sort of online social media stuff.

And she intrudes constantly in the story.

She kind of launches a battle against the police to get to define

She says that this serial killer, who the police are calling

'Billy Dead Mates' because he's killing pairs of best mates,

she says that because three out of his four victims so far have been

women, that his motive must be misogyny.

She is a feminist of a strident sort, one could say.

I'm trying to be as measured as I can.

But this is one of the things that I've noticed happening these days.

When a crime is committed and it's on the news,

people immediately start, different groups start lobbying

to get the right to define the meaning of that murder.

So, you know, if somebody crashes a plane into a mountain and it's

suggested that he might have been suffering from depression,

immediately, depressives pop up and say, "I'm depressed and I've

never killed anyone, so it can't be depression".

So I wanted to kind of have that battle for the meaning of these

Meanwhile, the real meaning survives intact in the midst

Now, the real meaning is known at the beginning only

And Billy Dead Mates sort of realises that,

actually, other people are trying to define

And Billy Dead Mates doesn't like that at all because if you go

to the trouble of committing a series of murders,

you want to be able to get to define the narrative of those

And this is where you take yourself into what you could call

Ruth Rendell territory, Val McDermid territory,

that dark world of the psychological puzzle, as well as the physical

What fascinates you about it, the darkness?

I'm not interested in crimes committed by evil monsters,

if there is such a thing as pure evil monsters.

I'm interested in the kind of crimes committed by people

who are subjected to just so much stress or mental anguish or pressure

that they kind of crack and their minds dangerously warp.

So, you know, I'm interested in the psychological because it

helps us understand why terrible things happen.

And, in a sense, it's defining what we mean by evil.

Not something existential that just arrives, but something

that was there bubbling and bringing people to the edge all the time.

And, in fact, my detective, Simon Waterhouse, at the very

Having successfully apprehended Billy Dead Mates, Simon poses

the question, "Has it ever occurred to you that you might be evil?"

And Billy Dead Mates is absolutely shocked and astonished by this

suggestion because, again, there's a totally different

narrative going on in the killer's mind about what this

is all about, and evil has nothing to with it.

And when we get to the end, we realise that both these

narratives, so to speak, have been intertwined in front

of our eyes right through the book.

Well, that's lovely to hear because what I always want...

what I always hope will happen is that when readers get to the end,

they realise that they saw it all, but just didn't...

It was all there before but, suddenly, it takes a different shape

You mentioned Simon - the sleuth, as it were.

And he's an attractive character in many ways.

I had an e-mail this very morning from a reader who loved the book,

but wanted to lodge a complaint about Simon's annoyingness

And I'm afraid I love him to bits, however annoying he may be.

Well, I'm not saying I love him to bits, but he's not as annoying

a human being as some of his colleagues are.

Kim, she is that aforementioned very irritating character,

But I couldn't bear her really.

...but there's possibly a reason for that.

I'm interested in why you didn't like her.

Is it because she's kind of stroppy and abrasive?

The way she dealt with things as they went chapter by chapter

sometimes made my flesh creep, you know?

I like her because she's someone who has taken so much pain and grief

and ill-treatment by others up to a certain point in her life,

and then she reached that point and she started to

And so I am fully on her side in standing up for herself.

And, to be honest, the reason my characters are so kind of stroppy

and stand up for themselves in a possibly over-the-top way

is because in real life, I'm a complete doormat.

I'm incredibly diplomatic and emollient.

I always say to people who say, "Can you make your heroines nicer?",

I always say, "If I become more unpleasant in real life,

then maybe my heroines can get nicer.

But if I want to remain tactful, my heroines have to be stroppy."

Well, I'm sure that's not going to happen.

And the world you paint here is a pretty dark one,

but it's got some vivid colours in it, hasn't it?

I mean, do you think it's possible to say just finally

that there is anything like redemption in this

I think the redemption is in, hopefully, if I've done my job

right, is in the sort of refusal to write off any human

being and in the attempt to understand that if we could just

cause one another less pain, then there would be fewer people out

So, you know, I try to write non-judgemental crime novels.

I try to write crime novels in which I can totally see that

in a different set of circumstances, a less fortunate of circumstances,

I myself might do something terrible.

So I'm not judging the bad guys - or the good guys.

I'm just sort of saying, this is what human beings are like.

And they are light and dark, but the dark is there.

Sophie Hannah, thanks very much for talking about The Narrow Bed.