CRIME PAYS

Forget poetry, children's books and chick lit, Sophie Hannah has turned to a life of crime

Story by Nicky Pellegrino writing in the Herald on Snday, 5 April

Sophie Hannah (left)

Sophie Hannah is a poet. No she’s not, she’s a children’s author. Or maybe she writes darkly funny chick-lit? Or short stories? Or psychological thrillers?

In fact, UK author Hannah has done all of those things. The book she’s been in Auckland to promote is her latest thriller The Other Half Lives (Hodder) but Hannah is one of those multi-talented types whose work ranges across diverse genres.

She showed early promise as a writer. At school she produced a poem for a competition that was so good her teacher accused her of cheating and refused to enter it. Fortunately that didn’t put Hannah off. Leaving school determined to be a writer, she deliberately found a job as a secretary so she’d have access to a computer.
“I got my work finished in the morning and in the afternoon I did my own writing,” she recalls. “The only trouble was by then I was in demand for poetry festivals and my boss got really fed up because people kept phoning our workplace and she started feeling as though she was my secretary!”

Motherhood ended Hannah’s interest in writing for children. “As soon as I had my first child I felt panicked and trapped,” she explains. “I didn’t want to do anything that would identify me more with children. Most probably I had mild post-natal depression.”

Manchester-born Hannah had some success writing chick lit and then, against the advice of her agent, began writing crime thrillers. “I’d written the first 100 pages of a book and when I showed it to my agent she advised me to abandon it and do something else,” she says.
Instead Hannah dumped her agent and that book, Little Face, went on to hit number one on the Amazon Top Ten thriller list. “I thought my husband was playing a trick on me and had done something to my computer when I first saw that,” laughs Hannah. “It was weird because number two was Hannibal by Thomas Harris, Ian Rankin was at number three and John Grisham at four…all those guys are multi-millionaires!”

Little Face is the story of a woman who’s convinced another child has been substituted for her baby daughter. It was a massive bestseller and got rave reviews. Since then Hannah’s established a reputation for creepy thrillers strewn with secrets and confused identities.

Her latest and fourth psychological crime novel, The Other Half Lives, has such a spectacularly twisty plot it’s nigh on impossible to work out who the baddie is until the very end. Featuring Hannah’s regular detecting duo Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer. it’s the story of Ruth Bussey a woman with a deeply troubled past who has finally found love. Her happiness is threatened when her boyfriend Aiden Seed confesses that years ago he killed a woman called Mary Trelease. But confusingly, as Ruth confides to the police, she knows for a fact that Mary Trelease, an artist, is still very much alive.

The characters in The Other Half Lives are generously endowed with secrets and obsessions and 36-year-old Hannah admits staying on top of the complex plot nearly killed her. “But it’s a story about people keeping back traumatic things so I couldn’t have told it in a straightforward linear way,” she explains.

Part of the reason Hannah is such a success as a writer of crime thrillers is that it’s the genre she most enjoys reading. “I like to be really intrigued by a story that unfolds in a satisfying way,” she explains. “My sister is always trying to get me to read literary novels. She came on holiday with me last year and had an Anne Tyler book that she read me the first paragraph of. It was about the disintegration of a marriage. I held up my book and told her it started with someone tied to a chair. If that’s how a book begins then you know something interesting is going to happen.”
Books are very much a family business. Hannah’s sister is an editor and their mother is the well-known author Adele Geras (Made in Heaven). “Mum and I have such different styles,” says Hannah. “It’s great because we talk about our writing and read each other’s stuff but I see the world in a darker, more complicated way than her.”
She admits she’s been accused of writing books that don’t have any normal people in them.
“But I don’t sit down and think I’m going to write a story populated by weirdos,” she says. “To me most people have got weird things going on in their heads, they’ve got past traumas and their present behaviour is influenced by them.
“The stories I like to write are about people who might be law-abiding and perfectly decent and then something pushes them over the edge. I think that’s very common.”

Nicky Pellegrino

Footnote:

Nicky Pellegrino is the books editor at the Herald on Sunday as well as being a novelist. Her latest title, The Italian Wedding,(Orion), was published last week . The above stroy is published here with permisson of the Herald on Sunday.