This is not a love story! Author Gemma Amor on the inspiration behind her gripping crime thriller, First Date . . .
I remember the first time I read Birdman by Mo Hayder, some time in the early noughties. It was a unique experience: I felt like a voyeur, reading something illicit and grimy and thoroughly unpleasant, in an oddly procedural way. All the main detective novel ingredients were there: a deadbeat, traumatised detective with a tragic past, an uptight girlfriend, a slovenly loyal partner in crime, a serial killer, a city on the edge of the Millenium, red herrings, distinct twists and acts…but it also had something a little extra, something raw and unfiltered and unexpected, which I am not entirely sure would make it past many editors’ desks today, to be honest, without lots of back and forth over ‘unmarketibility’ and ‘being too much for our readers,’ which I have always thought infantilising to the extreme as an assumption, and wholly contrary to my own experience.
Anyway, I am glad the meat of Birdman escaped the editorial paring knife because that soft little mass-market paperback did extraordinary things to my head: namely, I didn’t realise women were allowed to be so nasty in mainstream fiction, and finding out they could do so and excel at it thrilled me. Hayder was a huge inspiration as a woman who, herself, has always been drawn to grim themes, settings and occurrences, and I kept her in the back of my mind as my own writing career began to flourish, almost twenty years later. She joined the likes of duMaurier, who wrote about the darkness, albeit in a much less bludgeon-over-the-head style than Hayder, and Carter, and Shelly, and McDermid, and Christie and Atwood and Mosfegh and Auel, Rhys and Butler and…the list could go on. Women know pain, they know bodies, they know blood, they know darkness, fear, threat, and they can write about it very, very well indeed.
An Extraordinary Privilege
I knew, when I began seeing my own books on shelves (what a remarkable and extraordinary privilege that remains) that I wanted to write something that made people feel the way I did when I started Birdman. Like they had stumbled into a room in which something awful had happened, like they needed to back out of that room slowly. And the sensation of being a voyeur as a reader could, perhaps, be intensified if I wrote about an actual voyeur as an antagonist.
So, that is what I did. I leveraged some unpleasant encounters I have experienced in my own personal life and came up with this scenario: what if two problematic people out on their first date encountered a murderous psychopath hell-bent on ruining their lives? A killer who targeted seemingly happy couples? Could two strangers work together to escape such a madman? And if so, what would happen to them afterwards, as they are eternally bonded by the terrible things they survived? And so Amandine, Connor and the Lone Diner were born. And gosh, didn’t I put them through the wringer.
Toxic Relationships
I also wanted to examine other, rather noxious themes while writing this book, things that have been keeping me awake at night over the years: toxic relationships, what ‘love’ actually means, co-dependency, swipe culture, the illusion of familiarity and access when it comes to parasocial relationships, the ugliness and rot creeping into our brains through our computer screens and phones, which I privately have named ‘oblong doom devices’, mental health and neurodiversity and how those things affect romance, and much more.
I knew I wanted to set a novel in my home county, Norfolk, where I am from (technically I was born in Cambridgeshire, but I lived in a tiny village over the county border for a number of years before creeping inland by a mile or two), which was an experience destined to birth a horror writer: I grew up surrounded by endless skies, muddy fields, ditches, and land, flat, predictable, remarkably featureless, for as far as the eye could see. Further to the coast: less mud, more reeds. Water, still, black, rich with birdlife. Beyond that, the sea. Beaches, some beautiful and windswept and laid out with golden sands, others, muddy, monochrome, wholly alien in nature. I wanted to leverage all these things into a novel that felt isolated, hopeless and unsettling, a stage upon which violence could be enacted in private with no interference or witness.
That is what First Date ended up being. Not a procedural crime thriller, like Birdman, but not entirely a slasher novel either, or a traditional kidnap thriller or even a love story. I like to think of this book as a nasty canker upon a dying rose stem, something that pricks sharp and draws blood and hurts for a while after. I hope I have achieved that, and I hope that, had she lived longer, Hayder may have picked my book up, and, had she read it, approved.
(c) Gemma Amor
About First Date by Gemma Amor:
Deciding to end years of loneliness, Amandine takes a leap of faith and enters the dating pool. After seemingly endless disappointments, it seems her luck has changed when she meets Connor, another lonely heart.
What starts as a dinner date ends in a night that will change their lives forever. For neither of them knows that they are being watched by a killer whose primary target is happy couples.
Soon, Amandine and Connor will find themselves fighting for their lives. Their only chance of survival lies in each other, but can they work as a team to escape before their time runs out? And even if they do, will they ever be able to escape each other?
Order your copy of First Date online here.
And read more Meet the Authors of Crime Fiction on Writing.ie here.
