The Diary of a Debut | 2nd and 3rd January 2011
In which I ponder whether Before I Go to Sleep really is a crime novel
Hopes and Doubts — The Diary of a Debut
My first book, Before I Go to Sleep, first came out in April 2011. Until this morning, I’d completely forgotten that in the January of that year I’d decided to start keeping a journal to chronicle things as they happened.
My entries were sporadic, and some intensely personal. But, on rediscovering them this morning, I was transported back to that time, a time of hope and fear and uncertainty and excitement.
I thought my reader-supporters might enjoy them, so I’m going to share them here, bit by bit.
Sunday January 2nd, 2011
A good day. Took Lola1 to the park. Carol there, with Rosie2. Afterwards we hired a Streetcar and, in three journeys, shifted all the stuff we had in storage to the new flat. It felt good to be moving things over there, another way in which this weird new chapter feels like it’s becoming real.
This evening I watched a remake of Agatha Christie’s ‘The Mirror Crack’d’. I remember reading this at least twice as a child, and being impressed. I particularly liked the twist - the fact that for most of the book the reader is desperately trying to work out who wanted to murder the actress, only to have Christie reveal that the person who died was in fact the intended victim all along. Seeing it again, particularly in the context of my invite to the Harrogate Crime festival later this year (held in the hotel in which Christie reappeared after her 10 day disappearance) did make me think about my place as a ‘crime writer’.
I’m not really sure that Before I Go to Sleep is a crime novel. Or certainly not a conventional one at least. Crime novels typically have a violent act (usually, though not necessarily, murder) in the first few pages, and the rest of the book is concerned with working out the identity of the perpetrator, or else how to stop them doing it again. There’s a detective figure (policeman, investigator, forensic scientist) and often a cast of possible criminals with plausible motives. Christie, in the (admittedly very few) books of hers that I’ve read, certainly seems to play to this formula.
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But Before I Go to Sleep? The crime is discovered only half way through the book, and even then the reader isn’t really certain if it actually ever happened. Hopefully the reader doesn’t suspect that the crime was committed by one of the characters we have met directly, because one (Ben) has no motive, and the other (Nash) is too young. There is no investigator figure (save, arguably, Christine herself - in a sense this is a crime being investigated by its victim) and certainly no moment when the suspects are gathered in the drawing room and the crime explained.
I suppose instead it’s a mystery - who do we trust? - or else a crime novel in which the crime is dishonesty. ‘Which of the characters is lying to Christine?’ is perhaps the central puzzle, and only later do we discover the extent of the deception. Still, I’m honoured to be invited to Harrogate, but I must be careful not to apologise for the unconventional nature of my ‘crime’ novel, and more careful still not to appear as though I believe my book to be better in some way than genre fiction. Which I don’t of course. I’m just not sure how it fits in.
Monday, January 3rd, 2011
Just back from the park with Lola. Carol there. She was telling me about how she’d decided not to go and see her friend every day, as she never comes to see her. ‘It ought to go both ways,’ she said. Her friend’s on crutches, as it turns out, but Carol, who walks with a stick, thinks her friend could make more of an effort. I always agree, though very half heartedly, with these exchanges. I wonder what Carol thinks of me?
She also told me about her other friend, who lives further up Kingsland Road. ‘She asked me over to hers for dinner last night,’ she said, ‘only I said I wanted to stay in. So she cooked the meat and I cooked the vegetables.’ Then, as they were settling in to eat, there was a knock on the door. ‘That’ll be Oscar’s owners, I said, only it wasn’t. It was my neighbour. He asked me what he ought to do - his friend had given him a telly two years ago when he had a new one, only now the new one’s broken and they want it back. “What should I do, Carol?” he said, and I told him I didn’t know but I was eating my tea and didn’t want it to spoil. Normally I’d have given him a cup of tea.’
I felt suddenly very lucky to be in a situation where the return of a borrowed/gifted TV isn’t a problem (and it is luck - yes, I worked hard, but if I’d been born into Carol’s situation I’d never really have stood a chance). On the way back home, after telling me her neighbours laugh at her because she’s stuck glow-in-the-dark stars along the bottom of the front door and around the light switch in her hallway (‘In case of a fire. So I can see my way out.’) we saw a small glass on the floor, filled with foreign coins. A mixture of euros, dollars, and so on. ‘I’ll have that,’ said Carol, having earlier shown me the Blackberry case she’d found that fitted her mobile perfectly. ‘For the charity box.’
She explained that the charities can change the money commission free and I realised that this is a woman who lives from hand to mouth, day to day, yet she intended to gift this free money to a charity. Yet here was I, having just ordered a new, and very expensive, television just because we don’t like the old one and it won’t go in our flat.
I think I’ll set up a regular donation to charity, once I’ve decided which is the recipient I feel most comfortable giving to3.
My dog at the time, sadly no longer with us.
Carol’s dog, an adorable, if rather snappy jack russell.
The first stirrings of a guilt that I grappled with for years. I did set up a charity donation.