We’ve always been fascinated by the blurry boundary between what we call sanity and what we call madness. We think about it in our books and we think about it in our lives. All of us need sadness in our lives. It’s part of what makes us human. In Keats’ great poem on melancholy, it is inseparable from joy ‘whose hand is ever at his lips bidding adieu.’ But when you’re so sad that you can’t get out of bed in the morning, it’s become an illness, something that needs treatment.
We wrote one of our early books, Killing Me Softly, out of a conversation we had about how when we fall in love, we need to go mad. Suddenly we become obsessed with a person, we see qualities in them that nobody else sees, we forget about the rest of the world, about our normal life. You may suddenly abandon your normal life for someone you hardly know. That was what we did. We met, fell in love and within a few weeks we were living together. We knew hardly anything about each other. So far, thirty-five years later, it seems to have turned out all right. But what if it hadn’t? This story of the madness in ordinary life seemed perfect for an intimate psychological thriller.
Ever since, we’ve told stories about how ordinary life is just a few steps, one wrong decision, one piece of bad luck, from chaos. Our everyday emotions of anger, jealousy, love, resentment can all become terrifying with just a slight turn of the dial.
Many thrillers have killers who are mentally ill. One of the few flaws of Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Psycho, is at the climax when the film grinds to a halt so that a psychiatrist can give a lengthy lecture about the multiple personality disorder that Norman Bates has suffered from. This ‘diagnosis’ incidentally shows one of the dangers of using mental illness in fiction. It’s a terrific subject for a thriller, but many psychiatrists now question whether it’s a real condition at all.
Controversially in a different way, the killer in Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs suffers from gender dysphoria, acting it out in a way that I don’t need to describe here.
We’ve been more interested in the psychological vulnerability of our heroines. We’ve long been fascinated by the condition of psychosis, in which people see visions, hear voices. As we talked about it, the idea came to us: what if a woman experiencing a psychotic episode thought she had witnessed a crime?
Nancy North, our protagonist, is recovering from serious psychotic breakdown which saw her confined to a psychiatric hospital. At the beginning of the story, she has moved with her partner to a new house in a new part of London. Walking in the nearby streets she suffers a new psychotic episode and as she reaches home she meets a woman in a state of distress who is later found dead. It’s assessed as a suicide but Nancy suspects she was murdered. But who believes a woman suffering from psychosis? Can she even believe herself?
Nancy is quick, courageous, stubborn and passionate, but people who have been diagnosed with mental illness in our society are surrounded by distrust the way a fish is surrounded by water and we wanted to make that distrust a part of the suspense of this novel. As the plot unfolds, as she moves closer and closer to the dark heart of the novel and puts herself in real danger, Nancy becomes someone who is lonely and alone, naked in the world.
Psychosis is a mysterious illness but it seems to be a disease of urban life. It is particularly common in people who move from a rural to an urban society. All those strangers around you, all those noises, voices. In modern day London, because of the housing crisis, many more people are forced to live in tiny flats surrounded by other people in tiny flats. That’s where Nancy and her partner Felix find themselves. They can hear voices through the thin walls, other residents of the building arguing, making love, laughing. Nancy has a loving partner. Is he protecting her or imprisoning her? Are her neighbours her friends or her enemies? Is the medical treatment she receives helping her or destroying her?
She tries to investigate the murder when those around her think that her belief that a murder has occurred is just another of her symptoms. How do you convince others to believe you have witnessed a crime when you don’t even know if you should believe yourself? How do you persuade others you are sane, when every protestation makes you seem madder?
Here as elsewhere, when we use mental illness, we make great efforts to use it accurately and responsibly. If we are honest, some of the greatest of thrillers and horror films use the mentally ill as if they were a mythical creature like a werewolf or a vampire. It’s a complicated issue. Our main concern is to write a compelling story and we deliberately go into areas that scare us. But when we portray a sensitive subject such as mental illness, it’s imperative that we get it right. And in fact, portraying the failings of psychiatric hospitals accurately, as we do in this story, is as frightening as anything we could make up.
The Last Days of Kira Mullen is a thriller, with the fears of a thriller but also with its comfort. About two thirds through the book, Maud O’Connor, the young detective who we introduced in Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter? appears, and now the two women can stand side by side so that the world doesn’t seem as terrifying anymore.
Real life isn’t always so kind.
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