Sarah Eick/The Associated Press
Very early on in Paula Hawkins’s new novel, the reader is introduced to an abstract sculpture made from ceramic, wood and – here’s the bit that clues you into the fact you’re reading a psychological thriller – a bit of bone that turns out to be a human rib.
“I knew I wanted to write about this island I had seen in Ireland, and then after a while, I decided the person who would live on this island would be an artist,” says Hawkins, who spoke to The Globe while on a visit to Toronto to promote The Blue Hour, a masterful page-turner that hides a complex discussion of human relationships within a story about a decades-old disappearance. “Putting in the bone in the sculpture got the plot moving. A setting and a character are great, that’s fertile ground, but I needed something to kick everyone into motion.”
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Plots filled with motion – the kind where misdirection and half-truths fall like dominoes to a you-never-saw-that-coming conclusion – are a Hawkins specialty. She is, after all, the author of the 2014 publishing phenomenon The Girl On The Train, which has sold more than 23 million copies, and was made into a 2016 box office hit starring Emily Blunt.
In the decade since that breakout moment, Hawkins says she has seen the crime genre evolve for the better – for example, there are many more diverse voices writing now – and watched trends come and go. “When The Girl On The Train came out, that was the big year of psychological suspense, that domestic noir, those marriage thrillers,” she says. “Now, I don’t know about here but in the U.K., cozy crime is huge. Richard Osman’s enormous success has spawned other people writing in the space.”
Crime fiction is also a fascinating mirror back on the society that reads it.
“What are people interested in? Afraid of? There are quite a lot of eco thrillers out there now,” says Hawkins, pointing to Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood as an example of ecological-based suspense. “I also just finished a book by Attica Locke, an American writer whose novels are set in Texas, around very contemporary issues of race. It feels very current, and very political and urgent.”
Hawkins, for her part, prefers to stick to the “psychological side” of the human experience, “but there is always the backdrop of what people’s concerns and fears are.”
You had the debut author’s fever dream experience – The Girl On The Train sold 23 million copies and became this huge Hollywood movie. What was that like on the inside?
I should point out that it wasn’t the first book I actually ever wrote. I wrote four books under a pseudonym [as Amy Silver.] Those novels didn’t do particularly well, and then I had this extraordinary success. Overwhelmingly, it’s a really positive experience, but it’s also quite daunting to have that level of success and sales and people looking at you and wondering what you’re going to do next.
I was already in my forties when that happened, and I thought that was useful. If you had offered me great success when I was 25 I would have taken it, but in some ways you’re more secure in yourself, and you know who you are, in your forties. Also, having experienced my share of failure first was no bad thing, to have seen both sides of it and know that this is extraordinary, it doesn’t happen to everybody, and it probably won’t happen again so I’d better enjoy the ride while it goes on.
Scary in what way?
Once you become quite public, you know that people have got their eyes on you, and they are going to look at what you do next. Having had success, people would be quite happy to be quite harsh with you, in terms of reviews. They think, ‘Oh, you can take it because you’ve had your success now.’ But, it’s still painful from the individual’s point of view!
It was also freeing in other ways. If you’ve had a success like that, you can kind of do whatever you want next because your publishers are going to say, ‘Fine,’ because they’ve just done really well out of you. You have freedom, and you’re invited to all sorts of book festivals, tour all over the world, judge prizes. It opens all sorts of doors for you.
Paula Hawkins in London, on Feb. 19, 2015. Hawkins wrote four books under a pseudonym before writing The Girl On The Train, which sold 23 million copies, under her own name.Matt Dunham/The Canadian Press
Your first impulse was to write under a pseudonym, so I would imagine that the harsh light of fame might be even a bit stranger for you …
The pseudonymous books came about in a slightly weird way, where the first one I was almost commissioned to do it by a publisher. It was not quite a ghostwriting exercise, but it wasn’t my idea, which is why I wrote under a different name. It was interesting writing like that, because I didn’t have a lot of confidence at that time, so it was nice to have that distance, to hide behind something. It wasn’t my heart and soul on the page. It was quite an interesting introduction to trying fiction that didn’t feel so exposing or raw. It was great training. Actually sitting down and writing a whole novel is a thing, and you have to just push through it. That’s a skill that takes some practice.
Moving to The Blue Hour, did you ever contemplate a twist like, ‘Turns out, the bone is actually from a prehistoric hunter gatherer!’
That would have been very disappointing, but I had to leave open that possibility. I can’t remember where, but I did read that out on the west coast [of Scotland] they did bury bodies on islands so they couldn’t be dug up by wolves, when there were still wolves in Scotland. I loved that idea about there being lots of bones out there, so it could have come from anywhere – but obviously it has to come from someone we’ve actually heard of.
What is it about islands? Particularly when it comes to crime fiction, they have this narrative power and hold over writers.
There’s something that really stirs the imagination about an island. If you get stuck there, you’re trapped, or you can’t get to it. It can also be an enclosed world, which has its own ecosystem. It can be an idyll, but it can also be a trap. There’s a built-in suspense around an island.
This is also a book about triangular relationships. They’re not love triangles, because most of them aren’t actually romantic, but I did notice, ‘There’s a three. There’s a three.’ Was that something you were playing with in exploring dynamics?
I didn’t set out to do it, but I also noticed that I was getting into it. There were lots of love triangles, friendship triangles, obsession triangles. A lot of what happens in this book is about shifts in power dynamics, and that’s even more interesting when there are three people, three points on the triangle, as to who’s got the upper hand, who’s allied with who at different points. I was writing about intense relationships, and how they shift over time, and how people grow out of each other or grow into each other. It wasn’t planned, but once I saw it I leaned into it.
What was the most laboured part of this book?
Endings are always difficult for a crime novel. You start out and you’ve got all these possibilities, and you can go in all these different directions, and you can lay out your red herrings, and introduce the characters who are a distraction, subplots. But at the end, you’ve got to try and pull everything back together in a way that’s surprising and shocking but also not melodramatic or completely out of the blue. It has to feel satisfying and earned.
No spoilers, but the end of this novel is not a happy ending, and it was quite hard to confront that in myself, and pull it all together and make it feel like that was the right way to end it.
Did you play around with different endings?
I did, but I kept coming back to the one I had.
I don’t know that I can think of a crime novel that ends with this particular choice.
And I’m sure not everyone will appreciate it, but it felt like the right way. If you want to be really optimistic, there is a good interpretation of the ending. You could imagine he’s saved.
Until about 30 seconds ago, that was how I left that story.
You can choose that ending. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s not on the page, anything can happen. All possibilities are still open.