1. The Mouthless Dead is inspired by the infamous Wallace Murder case. What drew you to this particular unsolved mystery?
One late evening in January a couple of years ago I was emerging onto a London street with a barrister friend, who had just made a glancing reference to a cele-brated case from the 1930s. About a man who was at his chess club when he received a mysterious telephone summons from a stranger named Qualtrough. Wait, I thought, I’d heard this story, but years ago - one my parents had told me as a boy. The accused man had an alibi that he was lost in a place called Menlove Gardens while his wife was being bludgeoned to death four miles away. This felt at once spooky and enlivening, because Menlove Gardens was about five minutes’ walk from the house where I grew up, in Liverpool.
2. How do you build suspense and tension in your writing when dealing with a crime story that’s been the subject of so much speculation over the years?
I think as a novelist you’re always trying to build suspense, whatever the genre, because you want the reader to keep turning the page. With a murder story it’s just at a higher pitch; you’re putting down clues and pointers, like a treasure hunt, hoping your readers will spot this or that without it being too obvious. The Mouthless Dead is the first crime novel I’ve written, so perhaps I was more aware of going round to the reader’s side and trying to imagine what it would be like to confront this story and these characters for the first time. It helped me that the Wallace murder, nearly a hundred years on, has remained unsolved, and still in-vites speculation. I could get right inside the details of the murder story and at the same time invent characters - a detective, a filmmaker, a young woman - who pick over the case while on a transatlantic cruise. The double narrative lent a dif-ferent tension.
3. How do you balance historical accuracy with creative freedom in your novels?
Good question. All of my novels are set in the past, it’s where I live as a writer, and I’ve been a stickler for historical accuracy. You want to get it right just for your own sake, so you keep checking the language, the clothes, the food, whatever, just to maintain as vivid and authentic a picture as possible. I can get quite obsessive about details. The courtroom trial in the book is taken from the actual transcripts of the case: it was an essential part of the story, the scaffolding, and yet I found it something of a chore to set up, because it didn’t involve any creative output from me. I found myself longing to get back to my (invented) detective and his ruminations, the stuff that gives the novel its particular colour and mood. It reminded me how much I cherish the workings of fiction, and how I would struggle with recounting the story as nonfiction.
4. What elements do you think are the key to creating a crime story that holds the reader’s attention until the very last page?
To be honest, I think what makes a good crime novel are the same things that make a good novel: intriguing characters, an atmospheric setting, particularity of detail, and a robust plot. The last is the hardest of all. Creating a brilliant plot is like writing a brilliant melody; if you get it right you can make your fortune. Plot isn’t so crucial in literary fiction, where the pace is more measured and character is often key. When I wrote Curtain Call I began it with a psychopathic killer on the loose in London, 1936, intending it to be a Soho noir. But as I got deeper into the book I realised it was London and 1936 that were more involving to me than the killer. The characters I invented made up the story as it went along, and the murders became a side-of-the-eye horror, something impersonal and insoluble. I dare say some were disappointed that I didn’t make more of “the Tie-Pin Killer” but that’s just the way the book played out. Sometimes the writer has to exit the stage and let his characters take the story where it needs to go. That’s certainly what happened with The Mouthless Dead.
5. What are your top three crime & thriller book recommendations?
It's great that Celia Fremlin (1914-2009) has been rediscovered. She’s an expert in suggesting the home as a place of intimate terror: The Long Shadow (first pub-lished in 1975 and now reissued by Faber), about a woman accused of her hus-band's murder, and set at Christmas time, is particularly creepy. Michael Dibdin is best known for his Zen books, about a Venetian detective. But it’s worth in-vestigating his other novels, clever homages to greats like Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. The Dying of the Light (1994) is a satire on Golden Age drawing room novels, set in an inn called Eventide Lodge, which is not quite what it seems. I once spent a whole summer in my early twenties reading Raymond Chandler and being completely smitten by his stylish prose. I also loved his private detective Philip Marlowe, the original knight in shining raincoat. I always mean to go back and re-read him. Will he have retained his bewitching power? I hope so.
