R.O. Thorp, author of Marked for Death, suggests writers ‘go, in times of absolute consternation, to what you love . . . the love resounds’.
It was late 2022, when the world was thoroughly exhausted by COVID and nobody had yet heard the portmanteau Barbenheimer, and I was facing a mental brick wall. My first book, Learwife, had come out the previous year, and in a fit of optimistic energy I’d attempted to write an entire sophomore novel in twelve months. It was over 150,000 words, and was, I now know from several years’ distance, about 10% good work and 90% hysteria.
My agent, a woman of extreme fairness and impeccable judgement, had taken me to lunch to gently explain to me that the novel-like Thing I had given her was not a Saleable Thing, or an Artistically Coherent Thing, or indeed a Thing she could read without going cross-eyed. We would later dub it the Concrete Trifle, because it suffocated under its many layers. I went back to the drawing board, which is to say I went to the pearlescent bathroom of the very nice restaurant in which she was telling me these things and cried.
My agent, who is nothing if not familiar with the horrors of sophomore drafts, told me sternly to put the Concrete Trifle away for several months, ignore it, and do something – anything – else.
I needed alternatives
The issue with this advice, which is profoundly sensible, is that I have the sort of brain that abhors a vacuum, in that it will immediately attempt to fill it, bite it, wiggle away at its edges, and generally commit violence. I blame a Protestant work ethic so powerful it managed to find its way into my family despite nobody actually being a practising Protestant. Sitting on my hands was not going to work. I was going to end up doing ultra-marathons, a pastime for people who can only quiet their own psyches through legally permissible forms of self-flagellation. This was not sustainable, and I have bad knees, so I needed alternatives.
My best friend in England was going through her own corresponding difficulties. In her case they came in the form of two small bundles of personhood, who had lately arrived in the world and expressed their dismay at this state of affairs often and loudly. Her newborn twins were both adorable and adored, but they were also mostly shouty potatoes. She was being driven mad by the lack of intellectual stimulation in new motherhood.
Write me a murder mystery
It was her idea to do something about this. Write me a murder mystery, she said. Send me a chapter a day. You get something to write, I get something to read, we both win.
I had never written a murder mystery before, but all devotees know that the Golden Age mysteries are patterns. They follow and subvert certain tropes and expectations, and if you know the ropes sufficiently, you can produce one of your own. She and I had grown up reading Christie and Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L Sayers, and could quote long passages at one another at will. We’d also recently read a spread in a luxury magazine about Arctic cruises in which rich passengers rubbed shoulders with scientists using the vessel for their research. That sounds like a good scenario for murder to be done, we said, and so off I went.
Writing out of love and fun
I am a swift writer but generally a laborious one.Learwife took five years. But it turns out that being freed from the expectation of Fancy Follow-Up Literary Novel, where I’d been weighing each word like a gold nugget on a scale, set me off in the mode of a firework. I wrote for her and nobody else, 27 chapters in 27 days, making it all up as I went along. I was making a book out of love and fun, not out of a quest to impress a literary establishment or solidify a reputation. I didn’t even know whodunnit myself until about halfway through.
Every day I’d type a new chapter into a Google Doc, email her the finished product, and she and her husband would send long evening voice notes in response, yelling at me about surprising plot developments and musing on what would happen next. (The voice notes were necessary because the beautiful twin goblins frequently occupied their typing fingers.)
Lightness, love, silliness
Writers, I’ve noticed, often look for the magic key to productivity, artistic routine or a good racket. They find famous authors’ schedules and try to replicate them; I know at least one man who took to writing on a lectern because he read somewhere that Hemingway did it. So I must note that this chapter-a-day malarkey isn’t necessarily a viable strategy for anybody except myself. What I will say is that this book, peopled by characters who look and talk like my friends, filled with mystery twists I’ve always loved, ended up earning a two-book deal with Faber (after my agent got over her shock).
My adoration for the genre and my frank lack of a damn came through as lightness, love, silliness. So when it came time to write the sequel, Marked For Death, out this May, I wrote it in exactly the same way: a chapter a day, sent to my friend, who was by this point knee-deep in toddlers with many thoughts about dinosaurs. I did, however, pre-plan the actual mystery this time.
The Concrete Trifle
And if you’re worried about the Concrete Trifle: in 2025 it was resurrected, the nonsensical 90% sliced away, and a new carapace erected around the bones. As ever, my agent was right: I needed to go away and do literally anything else. That book, now titled The Translator, will be published by Chatto & Windus in 2027.
My first bit of advice for other writers is: never take advice from other writers. If pressed, though, I’d offer this: go, in times of absolute consternation, to what you love. Even if it’s for nobody, for one person, for your cat, for two potatoes who find the concept of sleep anathema, the love will work. The love resounds.
(c) R.O. Thorp
About Marked for Death:
Scientist Finn Blanchard is trying not to think about murder. The university administrator Nina Hussar may have fallen to her death down stairs she’d used for years, but the only mystery Finn wants to investigate is whether there’s a shark in the local lake.
But when a professor’s sudden death unearths cryptic clues to a missing Shakespeare play, Finn is forced to admit his research isn’t the fishiest part of university life. After all, as his detective ex-boyfriend says, there’s nothing more suspicious than a fall down some stairs.
Order your copy online here.
And read more Meet the Author articles of crime fiction on Writing.ie here.
