Why I Wrote All Killers Aboard
After two thrillers and four crime novels, I had accumulated a set of rules. Not written
rules, nothing so deliberate as that. The kind that arrive quietly over years of sitting at a
desk with difficult material. Rules about what my books were, what they asked of the
reader, and what they asked of me. Dark. Serious. Precise about violence and the human
cost of crime. I had built something with those rules, and I was proud of it.
All Killers Aboard broke most of them.
Honestly, that was why I wrote it.
The desire to write this book is not complicated to describe. I wanted freedom. Not from
writing, never from writing, but from the version of writing I had been doing. I wanted to
break my own rules, to step outside the framework I had spent six books constructing,
and see what was on the other side.
What was on the other side, as it turned out, was a luxury cruise ship full of serial killers.
At this stage you might ask what that says about me. And you’d be right to. But that’s a
whole other discussion. I had been thinking about writing a certain kind of book.
Something twisted and funny, in the way that Knives Out is twisted and funny; where the
darkness is real and the comedy is real and neither one undermines the other. A murder
mystery that earns the laugh and earns the dread, sometimes in the same scene. I wanted to write something lighter than my previous books but at the same time, I wanted to bring my existing readers along for the ride.
The locked room mystery is a favourite of mine. The country house, the island, the Orient
Express locked into its route from Istanbul to Calais. Agatha Christie understood this
better than anyone. Containment is not a limitation for the writer. It’s a gift. When there is
nowhere to run, when every suspect is present and accounted for, the story concentrates. The world gets smaller and the stakes get larger and the reader, pinned alongside the characters, has no choice but to pay attention.
On a cruise from Southampton to New York with open ocean in every direction and the
passenger list fixed, I knew the moment I started writing it, I was in the correct sea lane.
Apologies for that terrible pun.
I added the Midnight Chorus Society, a secret annual gathering of serial killers,
wannabees, and their fans, holding their annual meeting on this particular crossing. If you
love Roald Dahl’s books and humour, you’ll find a homage to The Witches with this lot.
So, the golden rule is NO MURDERS DURING CONFERENCE. Unfortunately, that rule
is broken. Is anybody surprised? A body turns up. The ship has no way to call for help.
The murderer is, almost certainly, still onboard. Martha Hammond, my ghost-writer
protagonist, and true crime obsessive, is driven to solve the mystery. Jacqui DuLac, her
client and reluctant sleuthing partner has other things on her mind.
The book that came from all of this is the one I am most proud of. I say that with the full
knowledge that A Violent Heart won the Capital Crime Thriller of the Year in 2025,
which still seems slightly unreal. I am really proud of that book. But All Killers Aboard is
what happens when a writer decides to find out what else they are capable of.
The rules I broke were mine to break. The tradition I turned to is a Christie style locked
room combined with the comedy of catastrophe. Sometimes the most useful thing a writer can do is get out of their own way.
All Killers Aboard publishes July 30th.
