A conversation between
Karin Slaughter and Mo Hayder
© Karin Slaughter and Mo Hayder. May not be quoted from without permission.
Warning: This interview contains mild spoilers about Indelible and Mo Hayder's Treatment.
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Several months ago, I had the great pleasure of e-mailing back and forth with my pal Mo Hayder, who is just about one of the best crime fiction writers around. Her latest book, Tokyo (which in the United States goes by the title The Devil in Nanking), was so good that it made my teeth hurt. Since Mo and I are both women writing about graphic violence, we often get compared to each other. This is one time I don't mind the association -- talk about keeping great company.
MH: Why did you decide to go back to the past with Indelible, your fourth book?
KS: The moment I finished Blindsighted, I knew that I'd want to go back and explore how Jeffrey and Sara got together and what made their relationship tick. I had pretty much planned out the first four books in my head, and I hid little clues in the first three novels so that readers who paid attention from the beginning would be rewarded when they got to Indelible. I like how we start to see different layers of Sara in the fourth book, because that's what's so great about getting to know someone over a period of time. There are always secrets about characters that only the author knows, and this story was a great way for me to reveal some of them. It's sort of like the way you talk about Grey in the first part of Tokyo. On the surface, she seems like this very weak, changeable being, but underneath, she's a very strong woman. Even if your plots weren't as driven as they are, I think the tension you create with the mystery of character would keep me reading.
Mo: Your planning shows. And you deal with series characters so successfully -- they never seem stale. This is something I was sure I couldn't do because I was afraid I'd find it restricting, so I planned two books for my detective Jack Caffery, then moved on to a stand alone with Tokyo. You clearly don't feel the same restriction?
I wish I could take credit for the planning, but it's one of those times when your brain manages to pull off something really tricky without you really being aware of it happening. I just feel like I really know Lena, Jeffrey and Sara, so it's a very natural thing for me to write about them. That being said, my next book after Faithless is a stand-alone called Triptych, and it's been good for me to have a break out of Grant County. The setting is urban and gritty -- downtown Atlanta -- and I'm having a lot of fun being in a new place with new characters, some of whom will eventually end up in the Grant County series.
I have to say, though, that I think you're selling yourself short with Jack. There's no way that the last chapter of The Treatment ends his story. There are scenes from that book that have stuck with me even after all these years. Don't you get a lot of letters and e-mails from fans asking when you'll go back to him?
Mo: Um -- yes. Alarmingly so. Some people get quite angry that I've left Caffery on what they think is meant to be a cliff-hanger. No Misery scenarios yet, but a lot of readers find it hard to accept that the ending wasn't designed to usher in a sequel. However, I left him exactly where I wanted to leave him -- maybe I'm crazy but I thought it was much a more poignant and telling point in his life. And like you with Triptych (great title BTW), I found moving to a new setting in Tokyo very liberating. I knew I wanted to do something different, so it wasn't just the setting I changed, but the structure: particularly the switch to two first-person narratives, which was a huge challenge. I remember saying to you after reading Indelible that we'd both written novels with very similar structures in that there were two narratives in two time scales, the earlier one not seeming initially to have much to do with the latter, until the two come together in the closing scenes. As I was reading Indelible, it didn't even dawn on me that what was happening to Jeffery and Sara in Sylacauga would have any impact on the hostage situation, so you obviously did the juggling act to perfection. How did you pull it off?
Okay, first, I wouldn't characterize all those letters I wrote to you as "angry." I was just curious about Jack. That kind of talk makes me understand why Kathy Bates' character snapped.
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