Fiona Barton Interview - Talking to Strangers ~ JeanBookNerd

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Fiona Barton, the New York Times bestselling author of The Widow and The Child, trains and works with journalists all over the world. Previously, she was a senior writer at the Daily Mail, news editor at the Daily Telegraph, and chief reporter at the Mail on Sunday, where she won Reporter of the Year at the British Press Awards.

Greatest thing you learned at school.
How to read. My wonderful teachers opened a portal to a million different worlds and characters that still charm and absorb me today. I had the great good fortune to have my form room in the school library, where Sister Ursula IBVM pressed new books into our eager hands. I am now doing the same with my five grandchildren.

Beyond your own work (of course), what is your all-time favorite book and why? And what is your favorite book outside of your genre?
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier awakened a hunger for psychological thrillers in me when I was a teenager. I’d been a slave to Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie for years, hunting the red herrings and guessing the murderers. But Rebecca did something else. I was in the head of the second Mrs de Winter from those iconic first lines; chilled and intrigued by the menacing undertow of the terrible secret that lurks in every room of Manderley, the family mansion. At times Rebecca is a psychological thriller, a tragic love story, at others, a Gothic horror, but it is as tense, unsettling and compelling today as it was when Daphne du Maurier wrote it in 1938. It is a masterpiece with an unsolved murder at its heart and the scariest housekeeper ever created. What’s not to like?

My favourite out my genre? So, so hard to choose – it’s like picking a favourite child… but I am going to go with Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel for the brilliance and vividness of her story-telling. She broke so many rules – and was criticized by some – but I was in her world from page one. It is a compelling portrait of the doomed marriage of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Their partnership is one of the best known and examined in history but Mantel makes their relationship and the adulterous and political secrets that destroy it as accessible and immediate as an episode of Succession. Of course, no one actually loses their head in Succession.

Has reading a book ever changed your life? Which one and why, if yes?
I read Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News? in 2008 and it blew me away. It showed me the power and possibilities of a story told by many and gave me the confidence to try for myself. The opening is stunning – a jewel of a short story in its own right – and I turn to it when writer’s doubt weighs me down. It re-ignites something in me as a reader and an author and I owe Kate Atkinson a huge debt of gratitude.

Can you tell us when you started TALKING TO STRANGERS, how that came about?
The idea for Talking to Strangers started with a chance conversation over a dinner table a few years ago. A friend of a friend – a woman in her fifties – told me she was loving dating online and had a date the next day with a stranger on Salisbury Plain – a vast, remote area near Stonehenge. ‘He’s sent me the map co-ordinates,’ she said, all lit up with the excitement of it
I told her her date was clearly an axe murderer with a shovel in the boot of his car. But she went anyway (survived but no second date). Meeting ‘The One’ was clearly worth the risk - and it is the norm now for many of my friends. Some have fallen in love and had fairytale weddings. But not all. As a writer, I loved the uncertainty, the room for deception, the danger people may put themselves in to find their happy ending.

What were your feelings when your first novel was accepted/when you first saw the cover of the finished product?
It was completely surreal. I was working abroad – training journalists in Myanmar in a completely different time zone – when my agent sent out my manuscript to publishers. It all happened so quickly that I felt as if I was watching it happen to someone else in front of me. I fell in love with the cover of The Widow immediately. Those dying lilies entwined in the title were perfect.

Meet the Characters
DI ELISE KING is a successful and ambitious Major Crime Team detective, her job is at the centre of everything. At 44, she has it all under control: her career path and a partner she believes wants the same things. But, the sudden break-up of their relationship, a move to a small seaside town and a diagnosis of breast cancer turn her life and sense of self upside down. Now she is struggling with the brain fog left over from her chemotherapy and fearful she is no longer up to her job.

KIKI NUNN was once a top reporter in mainstream media but gave it up to bring up her daughter, alone. She now writes dross for a news website to pay the mortgage and dreams of finding a way back to her once shining career. Kiki is impulsive and determined – a tricky combo when she finds herself hunting down a killer.

ANNIE CURTIS’s son was murdered when he was eight and she wasn’t paying attention. She has lived a double life ever since – smiley Annie, wife and mum of two, popular doctor’s receptionist on automatic pilot but ‘in her head, she was a mad woman. Shrieking like a banshee – like she had that day – as images and memories uncoiled and vomited their poison.’

KAREN SIMMONS is dead. Killed on Valentine’s night as she searched for love. She’s a bubbly hairdresser who runs a singles group in her home town and takes her hunt for The One totally seriously, dreaming of marriage and researching fertility for women in their forties.

What is the first job you have had?
Washing people’s hair at a local hairdresser on a Saturday when I was 14.

What was your favorite subject when you were in school and why?
English Literature because I has two inspirational teachers (chapeau Sisters Ursula and Domenica) and reading was all I wanted to do in school or out.

Name one thing you miss about being a kid.
French skipping with an elastic rope. Hours of mindless fun.

What is the first thing you think of when you wake up in the morning?
My next chapter. I write first thing in the morning before the day can get away from me.

Which would you choose, true love with a guarantee of a heart break or have never loved before?
True love and heartbreak. Too tragic never to have loved. You haven’t lived if you haven’t loved.

When you looked in the mirror first thing this morning, what was the first thing you thought?
Unrepeatable…

What do you usually think about right before falling asleep?
Is the front door locked?

First Love?
George Harrison. My best friend Carol and I were married to members of the Beatles when we were kids. She chose John Lennon. I cried when George married someone else…

First Heartbreak
George Harrison (see above!)

What is your most memorable travel experience?
The Grand Canyon. We took the kids on a USA road trip and I can still remember driving through the park gates and catching a glimpse of the canyon through the trees. We stopped the car and ran through the woods to stand on the edge. It was the most dramatic landscape I had ever seen. And it still gives me goosebumps.

Detective Elise King’s investigation into a woman’s murder is getting derailed by a reporter who insists on doing her own investigation in this nail-biting mystery from the author of Local Gone Missing.

When Karen Simmons is murdered on Valentine’s Day, Detective Elise King wonders if she was killed by a man she met online. Karen was all over the dating apps, leading some townspeople to blame her for her own death, while others band together to protest society’s violence against women. Into the divide comes Kiki Nunn, whose aggressive newsgathering once again antagonizes Elise.

A single mother of a young daughter, Kiki is struggling to make a living in the diminished news landscape. Getting a scoop in the Simmons murder would do a lot for her career, and she’s willing to go up against not just Elise but the killer himself to do it.

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