The most terrifying true crime book I ever read is called Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked by James Lasdun. Yet no one is murdered in its two hundred and twenty-four pages. No one awakes in the dead of night to a noise downstairs, no one disappears without trace, no one is even physically hurt. No one is even stalked, really, because the story concerns two people who live on opposite coasts of the United States and who have only met in person in the past, consensually and pleasantly, before the events of the book begin. What does happen is that someone—Lasdun—is harassed by a self-styled ‘verbal terrorist’ who, over a period of several years, infiltrates every public and private corner of his life in an apparent attempt to set fire to it. Her weapon of choice? Emails.
I read Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me a quarter of a century ago, long before it could’ve been considered age appropriate, and there are details of Ted Bundy’s sorority house spree that have never left me. And yet Lasdun’s ordeal scared me much more. It made me actually afraid. Fearful that, like Lasdun, I could one day be minding my own business when an insidious force intent on my utter destruction would worm its way into my life via my inbox. The chances of the average person crossing paths with a serial killer are astronomically low, but anyone with an email address can send or receive an email. When I sit down at my desk to work on my novels, it’s in this particular corner—the mundane, everyday world of our online lives—that I like to play in.
Tech, for many, is already terrifying. We see an ad for something we just talked to our friend about and become paranoid that our phone has been listening. We worry that online shopping makes us vulnerable to identity theft. We convince ourselves that a face-aging app is not harmless fun but some shadowy Russian group developing facial recognition with our selfies. These are legitimate concerns, but they are also a serial killer coming through your bedroom window: not very likely to happen to you. Here’s what’s already happening though: the apps on our phones, the ones whose icons we play fingertip hopscotch across all day, every day. Twitter. Facebook. WhatsApp. Instagram. Consider the information that can be gleaned from our own posts, even when we’re seemingly careful with our privacy and personal safety, and what someone who wants to hurt us might do with it.
For instance, I follow a woman on Instagram. She’s what you might call an influencer if you can stomach the term, a businesswoman if you can’t. She’s in her mid-thirties, beautiful, married to a handsome husband and the mother to an angelic child. I know their names and the names of her parents. Every day she shares several photo and video updates from her carefully curated, soft-focus, millennial-pink L.A. life and I—almost always greasy-haired and in coffee-stained sweatpants and yesterday’s mascara smears because: writer—look and watch. I watch as she walks alone, wearing headphones, early in the morning on the streets near her home. As she visits the ‘local’ farmers’ market, her ‘favorite’ bakery, her ‘regular’ coffee shop. Sometimes she even posts about the hotel she’s staying in while she’s still staying in that hotel. As a former front desk agent, I know that there’s worryingly few steps between me knowing that and me getting a key to her room. Some days I wish she’d wise up and be more careful, but on the others I think, one day, I’m going to put her in a book.
The smartphone—and its predecessor, the simple cell—did not initially appear to be the crime or thriller writer’s friend. Unless the signal was bad, for example, our characters could now always call for help.The smartphone—and its predecessor, the simple cell—did not initially appear to be the crime or thriller writer’s friend. Unless the signal was bad, for example, our characters could now always call for help. Bor-ing. But these days, I find our exponential connectivity a fertile ground. I wonder about the people we happen to capture in the background of the photos we publish online. What if one of them isn’t supposed to be there and someone who knows this sees our post? The GPS systems in our cars tells people where we go the most often, maybe even where we went last. I think about the information Uber drivers and Deliveroo riders have about me: my home address, the fact that I’m home alone and anything else they might glean from what I think is just idle chitchat. I don’t drive and so order my groceries via an app. Every single time the items are delivered by a man who has to come into my home, all the way into my kitchen, where he can no doubt tell from the décor that I am a woman living alone, if the items on my grocery list haven’t done that already. As a crime writer, my most frequent thought is probably, ‘How much Netflix can I watch and still make my deadline?’ But the second most frequent is, ‘How could a serial killer get to me, if he wanted to?’ (Look for my novel The Grocery Killer, coming September 2022…)
In my last novel, The Liar’s Girl, a villain makes the most of Instagram. He’s sitting at a communal table in a coffee shop, watching a young woman opposite post something to the app. He goes to Instagram’s Search feature on his own phone, selects Places, then Near Current Location after that. The coffee shop is offered as an option. When he clicks on it, he sees her post. Now he has her account—and name, and all the other information her photos and videos might offer him, including which apartment block she lives in based in the view over her shoulder in a selfie. (Spoiler alert: this won’t end well.) In my debut, Distress Signals, a twist hinges on the moment the receipt on a WhatsApp message goes from ‘Delivered’ to ‘Read’. In my new novel, Rewind, a journalist with a laptop quickly gets much closer to finding a missing woman than the authorities do.
Rewind was actually inspired by an Instagram post. A couple of years ago, I happened upon an image PostSecret had shared. PostSecret, if you’re not familiar, is the analogue version of the Whisper app: it asks people to share their deepest, darkest secrets, anonymously with the world. The secret I saw was a picture of bedroom. The text on it read, I trade hidden sex cam footage with other Airbnb hosts. There’s no way to know if these secrets are fact or fiction, but there was something about this one that was frighteningly plausible. In this new world of tiny lenses—I type this with a sticker over my webcam, naturally—a hidden camera set-up is easily established without much investment or expertise. A quick Google search confirmed that this wasn’t just an idle idea, but an actual, real-life threat. ‘Airbnb’s Hidden Camera Problem’ read one headline. ‘4 Ways To Find Hidden Cameras in Your Airbnb’ read the next.
While I was writing Rewind, real life kept throwing up more and more cases of people finding hidden cameras in their vacation rentals. One of these even happened in Cork, Ireland, where I’m from and where Rewind is set. That story had the most wonderful detail, from a crime writer’s point of view: the family, who were visiting from New Zealand, discovered the camera when one of the children went looking for a wifi connection and, having connected, saw live images of himself on screen, captured from above.
Social media and what you might call ‘everyday tech’—smartphones, laptops, health trackers—feature in all three of my novels and I’m always surprised when I’m asked why it does, as if this is a conscious choice or a gimmick. As a reader, I find crime novels scarier the more realistic they are, and just how realistic is a modern life with no smartphone, social media or Google Maps? The characters in my novels are merely living the kind of lives the vast majority of us in Western society live now. You better believe that when I’m reading someone else’s novel and someone disappears, it won’t be long before I start to wonder why no one is looking for the access codes to their banking app or checking how many hours ago they were last active on WhatsApp.
Tech moves fast and both readers and writers might worry that including a digital snapshot will almost immediately begin to date a novel. That may be a real danger. But I think it’s a small price to pay for the wonderful—and by wonderful I of course mean awful, dangerous and nightmarishly dark—possibilities that it can offer the crime writer. One of the appeals of the fire Gone Girl started, the ‘domestic noir’ trend earlier this decade, was that the threat was already there, in your life, at home. There was no serial killer hiding in the bushes outside; the call was coming from inside the house.
Now, it’s coming from your pocket.
