After I left university, I cashed in on my extended time as a student (four years as an undergrad, and three years to obtain a doctorate in theoretical physics) by joining an investment bank, where I worked for almost a decade. In the early years, toiling away as a lowly associate, I found the job involved exactly what you might imagine: high pressure and incredibly long hours in a male-dominated workplace with condescending bosses and viciously competitive peers, in return for a hefty salary and the promise of further riches if one could only stay the course and at least pretend to drink the Kool-Aid. (In the interest of a balanced account, I will say that my bosses became much less condescending and far more appreciative as I became more senior, and, as time went on, the firm increased its efforts to improve the number of women in the workplace—but the other features remained about the same.) This was the mid-2000s: we had survived the collapse of the dot-com bubble and were as yet unaware that the world was steaming headlong into a Global Financial Crisis; business was thriving, our team was expanding. And that could only mean one thing: sooner or later some bright spark would offer to organize a work ski trip.
The work ski trip. God, how I loathed the very idea as soon as it was floated. Don’t get me wrong: I love a freebie trip as much as the next person, but this didn’t strike me as the least bit free (and it quite literally wasn’t: I had to pay, albeit there was a level of subsidy). On top of that, the firm already took up more than enough of my time; I certainly wasn’t keen to intentionally gift them more of it over a weekend. But what really irked me was that it struck me as simply an extended version of Friday evening ad-hoc post-work drinks—of course not officially compulsory, but in practical terms, entirely compulsory—where the men talked incessantly (and increasingly loudly as the evening wore on) about sports or deals, and I tried to join in and be fun and interesting (but not too fun or too interesting, because a girl could get a reputation around the office for that) when all I really wanted to do was go home and sleep, or see some real friends. Still, I had to go on this ski trip, for the same reason that I had to go to post-work drinks if I wasn’t genuinely barricaded in a meeting: I had to look like I was all in, one hundred percent committed. Displaying natural cynicism and/or the yearning for a life beyond the office would have been a career-limiting move.
I hated that ski trip—which is saying something, as I actually really like to ski. It was worse, even, than Friday drinks. At the time I blamed myself: perhaps I wasn’t a good enough networker, I thought, or maybe I needed to try harder to fit in. But in retrospect, I can see that nobody was comfortable, from the newest junior to the biggest boss. We all knew how to operate efficiently within our normal working environment, but out of it, the lines were too blurred: were we supposed to defer to the same hierarchy that was present in the office, or did that no longer apply? Everyone was encouraged to loosen up—and drink copious amounts of après ski alcohol—but it wasn’t clear where the line of “too loose” had been drawn. And there’s always a line. Even if you can’t see it, there’s always a line.
Thankfully I returned from that trip with job and reputation intact, although one or two weren’t quite so lucky; certainly the analyst who threw up on the floor of a more senior executive’s bedroom didn’t easily live that down. I’ve been on work ski trips since, but for kinder organizations with less aggressively ambitious staff, and those were definitely more pleasant experiences, but the same point remains: there’s an inherent risk in taking a functional professional group out of its ordinary working environment. It’s destabilizing and unsettling, and it’s rare that everyone emerges unscathed… which is exactly why it’s a fantastic device for a thriller writer. Ruth Ware used it to good effect in her 2020 thriller One by One, in which a corporate winter retreat goes badly wrong. Similarly, in Jane Harper’s Force of Nature, a woman goes missing during a week of team-building exercises. Lee Child employed the device innovatively in his 2007 novel Bad Luck and Trouble, in which Jack Reacher assembles his old team many years later, meaning that they not only have to cope with a different environment, but also with how the years have changed each of them.
When I began to mull over ideas for my latest novel, I wanted to explore the world of Oxford academia, but I was looking to do something different than the typical campus thriller. As an undergraduate student, I’d barely considered how the university is a very different place for those within it who are at different stages; that thought didn’t occur to me until I became a graduate student and experienced first-hand how my relationship with the university and its community changed. What I really wanted to do with this new project was delve into just that: I wanted to scoop up the various strata of university life—undergraduates, graduates, post-graduates, junior fellows, senior fellows and so forth—and pop them down somewhere else, somewhere unfamiliar and unnerving, somewhere they couldn’t easily escape from. And then I remembered a reading party I had been invited to join during my doctorate: a week-long trip at a rustic chalet in the French Alps, with no running water or electricity but a wonderful view of Mont Blanc. The group consisted of people from all levels of university life, living together and mucking in for the cooking and necessary chores. In truth, I had a wonderful time, and we all navigated the discomfort of the blurred lines much better than on that fateful work ski trip, but…what if we hadn’t? What if certain members of the group had been keeping secrets? What if there had been tensions between them even before they reached the chalet? Bright and Deadly Things is the result of imagining exactly that.
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