R.O. Thorp, author of the delightful murder mystery Death on Ice, on how writing what you love, out of love, can lead on to great things . . .
I once had a quote pinned above my desk, as a teenager in Australia. Writing is easy, it said; you just stare at a piece of paper until your forehead bleeds. Yes, I was extremely fun at parties. The point of the paper, however – that writing must be difficult, that it must put you through agonies to produce anything worthwhile – stayed with me long after I left other relics of that period (patchwork Converse, knotted chokers) behind. Like most writing rules, of course, it turned out to be a complete fiction in and of itself, though I wasn’t to know exactly how wrong I was.
2022: after my first novel, Learwife, had an impressive critical reception and convinced people I was a Writer To Watch, I was attempting to write a sophomore novel. The problem with being a Writer To Watch, though, is that you suddenly feel as if People Are Watching You, which is rarely good for anybody’s art, health or general digestion. I panic-wrote an astonishingly turgid 100,000-word thing that my agent kindly termed the Concrete Trifle, because its layers were so impenetrable as to be inedible. I thought I was doing the right thing. I was bleeding from the forehead. I was artistically suffering. What other way of working could there be?
Now, my agent reasoned with me gently, was the point at which I had to separate myself, surgically if necessary, from this behemoth I’d created. Put the book in a drawer, she said. Go do something, anything else, please. Come back in a few months. I reacted to this like an admiral who’d been told he had to abandon his long-planned offensive: what happened to no retreat, no surrender? (As a lifelong pacifist, it’s slightly disturbing that I was declaring war on myself and art in general, but fear of failure will wreak havoc on your metaphors.)
Meanwhile, as I was being put on the equivalent of artistic bedrest, something else was happening. My best friend Bex, over the Irish Sea in England, was on maternity leave caring for her beautiful twins. They’re spectacular little beings, but at this early point in their lives they resembled nothing so much as angry potatoes. Very sweet angry potatoes, but root vegetables nonetheless, with a notable dearth of conversation. Bex, who is the opposite of Winnie-The-Pooh in that she’s a being of considerable brain, was lacking some intellectual stimulation. As a far-away friend, I was entertaining her as best I could: by discussing murder mysteries, which we both love, and sending her pictures of my favourite luxury magazine, Gourmet Traveller Australia.
Gourmet Traveller is one of those beasts you pick up in airports to let you know what the 1% are eating, drinking, buying, and hiding in tax shelters. It’s the type of beautiful glossy publication that puts spatchcocked quail in its ‘everyday recipe’ section and has extensive features on the rise of $AUD1,000-a-seat omakase restaurants. My late grandmother, the kind of woman to wear turbans and smoke cigarillos in Pucci, subscribed, and I’ve kept a subscription myself ever since I left Australia at 19. It’s nostalgia and haute cuisine rolled into a delirious excess that is untouchable, unapologetic, and occasionally hilariously out-of-touch. And its jewel, for Bex and I, is its once-a-year cruise section.
In late 2022, Australian summer, as the Concrete Trifle sat in its drawer, I sent her snippets of the latest edition. Among the Tuscan guided tours and Fijian holidays was a new line of Ponant cruises, which advertised (for several thousand Australian dollars) a fresh possibility: travel the Arctic or Antarctic on a luxury boat that also operated as a scientific research vessel. Hobnob with scientists doing actual research, while holding cocktails! That, we agreed among ourselves, was a setting where murder was not only possible but probable.
What happened next was Bex’s idea. Write this murder mystery just for me, she said. Just send it to me and keep me entertained.
So I did. Bex received a chapter a day for 27 days; I did no pre-planning of any kind, and made it all up as I went. I received long late-night messages from her and her husband (who’d demanded to get in on this longform nonsense), alternately yelling about plot points, helping me research various Arctic facts, or discussing the mystery, while in the background the twins grumbled their potato-ish grumbles. Bex’s brain was fed, and I learned a great deal about Greenland sharks and submersibles.
It turns out that, as in most things, my teenage self was wrong. Writing does not require bleeding from anything to be joyous, or entertaining, or good. Death On Ice, as the book became, was picked up by Faber in a two-book deal, after my agent recovered from her astonishment when I sent it shyly to her inbox. (This took months, as Bex sent it to an ever-widening circle of family and friends who, surprisingly, loved it. I am still not quite sure how this happened.)
Painstaking word-by-word creation can live alongside, well, flying blind – writing what you love, out of love, and not giving a damn what happens afterwards. It is, of course, very necessary to have sensible editors who will go through your seat-of-the-pants draft to make sure characters’ cats have the same name throughout, and that people who were dead in one scene remain dead in the next. Now I’m working on Book 2 of the Blanchard Twins series, itself also written in the same free-for-all fashion (though with a bit more premeditated whodunnit), and also reworking the Concrete Trifle into something lighter and tastier, something even the editors of Gourmet Traveller Australia might look at with appetite. Nothing is bleeding. Nothing is made of depressingly solid building material. Seventeen year old Jennifer would be horrified. I myself am deeply relieved.
(c) R.O. Thorp
About Death on Ice by R.O. Thorp:
A scientist nobody liked has been murdered on the Arctic ice.
Meet the Blanchard twins:
Rose is practical, sharp, and protective. Specialty: manta rays.
Finn is too sweet and kind for his own good. Specialty: sharks.
Rose and Finn are looking for sharks on the sea bed. When they return to their ship, the Dauphin, they make a terrible discovery: their colleague has been murdered on the ice – with a harpoon that should never have been there. Everyone else on the luxury cruise ship – the wealthy passengers, the researchers hard at work, the tight-knit crew and their strangely calm Captain – were all aboard at the time, so they are all under suspicion. Rose and Finn were the only two at sea, and they’re miles from anywhere, so it’s up to them to investigate.
On scientific problems, they are a brilliant team – but can the Blanchard twins solve a murder?
‘A brilliant modern cosy.’ Ian Moore, author of Death and Croissants
‘Fun ahoy!’ Orlando Murrin, author of Knife Skills for Beginners
‘How can something so damn cold be so damn cosy?’ Oskar Jensen, author of Helle and Death
‘Clever, quirky and irresistibly fun.’ Jessica Bull, author of Jane Austen Investigates
Order your copy of Death on Ice by R.O. Thorp online here.
