Bron Sibree interviews Kristen Perrin about her anything-but-ordinary smash-hit crime novel

How to Solve Your Own Murder ★★★★★
Kristen Perrin
Quercus

It’s far from a common occurrence for a debut novelist to land a slew of two-book deals across three continents on the strength of a single manuscript, let alone to have the film rights to it snapped up as well. But then Kristen Perrin’s first-ever adult novel, How to Solve Your Own Murder, is far from a commonplace crime novel. And while Perrin herself is quick to slot this elegantly plotted mystery into the “cosy crime” corner of the genre and speak of her love of the classic Agatha Christie-type murder mystery, she also admits to wanting to make her novel “a different sort of story from every single other one we’ve seen”.

Indeed, How to Solve Your Own Murder is as unusual and as compelling as it gets. Narrated in two timelines, it opens in 1965, when 16-year-old Frances Adams and her two best friends, Emily and Rose, attend a country fair in Castle Knoll, Dorset. Here a tacky fortune teller utters a cryptic prophecy to Frances — prefaced with the words “your future contains dry bones” — that predicts her murder. Her friends laugh, but these words lodge themselves deep inside Frances’s teenage mind. She spends the rest of her life trying to prevent her own murder, compiling files on everyone who crosses her path for almost 60 years.

The contemporary story unfolds in the voice of her great-niece Annie Adams, who is summoned from Chelsea by Frances’s solicitor to meet her still-alive great aunt in Dorset to discuss her will — despite the fact they have never met. However, upon arriving at Frances’s home on her grand estate, they discover she is, in fact, dead. But has she actually been murdered?

Annie soon suspects foul play, but Frances was a step ahead. For, to prove the fact of the crime to all those who disbelieved her, Frances has stipulated that, of those in line to inherit her vast wealth, the only person to do so will be the who solves her murder — and they have just one week to achieve this feat. If this fails, her vast estate will be handed to developers, and the town will be ruined. It is thus, in the novel’s first two chapters, that Perrin introduces us to both the characters and the outline of a complex puzzle that will soon revolve around not one murder but two, as well as a toxic circle of friends in the 1960s. This friendship group is characterised by secrecy and lies, jealousy and obsession, and these shadowy, unexpected elements stretch across generations and into the contemporary narrative, imperilling Annie.

All in all, it’s difficult to think of a more intricately plotted novel. It is rather a radical shift, too, for the US-born, Britain-based Perrin, who conceived of the idea for the novel during the pandemic, after her long-held hopes of becoming a children’s book author hit a dead end. Before moving to the UK to complete a PhD in international relations, she had spent several years running the children’s book department for one of Barnes & Noble’s Seattle stores, where she came to know and love children’s literature. She had just secured an agent for her middle-grade fantasy series Attie and the World Breakers when the pandemic began, and she soon found that English-language publishers “were not buying anything new in that time of uncertainty”.

However, her series did get published in German, Dutch and Polish, she explains, because those were the three countries where the pandemic didn’t have quite the same debilitating effect on the book trade. She says, “I was able to make a quiet living in translation, but during the time we were locked down I was home-schooling my two young children. I just needed to do something for myself that was fun and different.” She decided she’d have the most fun writing “a classic Agatha Christie-type murder mystery, because I love the format of small town, lots of secrets”. She adds, “That’s what I grew up on, or at least the children’s version of it. I thought, ‘Well, if I’m going to have a village busybody, because that’s the trope in these mysteries, I need it to be really different.’”

It was only after a grim conversation with her husband about what to do if either of them died during the pandemic that she conceived of the novel’s premise. “The best way I could think of to explain why someone would be obsessed with finding out everybody else’s secrets was if they were doing it as an act of self-preservation. Then the idea of a fortune-teller came to me. The only way to get someone to be convinced they’re going to be murdered, but not know when or how, is if they are told this by a fortune teller, and they really, really believe them.”

Not that all the elements of her novel’s exquisitely fine-tuned plot came so readily to Perrin. While she conceived of many of the larger plot pieces early in the writing process, the smaller ones emerged only later. She says, “The most important thing to me when I was putting the large plot pieces into place was that Frances’s murder had to be in some way circular. But in terms of the connections with the 1960s timeline, I had to think of a lot of individual layers and build them up over time to cement the smaller details that came through. It certainly wasn’t an easy, all-at-once experience. It was definitely a book I had to draft and redraft large sections of.”

She also had to labour over the “voice” of her characters, deliberately offsetting the darker, more serious tone of the 1960s story that emerges from Frances’s diary with that of the upbeat, at times rather gung-ho, 25-year-old Annie, who has been made redundant from her office job and wants to become a crime novelist. But the setting is as real as it gets, as it’s based on her husband’s home village of Corfe Castle in Dorset. Perrin decided to give the town the fictional title of Castle Knoll. “I didn’t want the locals to get mad at me and say, ‘What does this American think she’s doing?’”

Already at work on a second novel in what is now planned as a series, and one in which Annie develops her crime-solving skills in each instalment, Perrin says she plans to keep writing for “however long I can create mysteries and books for”. As well as probing issues of class, she is also conscious that the idea of women not being believed is not just a potent theme in her own narrative, but one that plays itself out in different ways in crime fiction in general, particularly that written by women. “But I’m trying to do this in a way where it’s a gentler interrogation of what we believe, and why. Sometimes that matters only to us,” she adds, “but it can affect our actions and change everything around us.”

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith is one of my favourite novels, and I read it almost every year. It’s a coming-of-age story about a girl in the 1930s who lives in an old castle in the English countryside. The novel has a wonderful vintage British countryside feel to it. The main character has all these emotional ups and downs, especially with regard to her friendship with her sister. Smith paints a wonderful picture of the mind of a teenage girl at that time.

The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood gave me inspiration for this book. It has multiple points of view, and I love how well she moves between a group of characters in the present and when they were at university. It’s about a group of three women who’ve all had their lives ruined by the same person. They think she’s dead, but one day, when they’re a lot older, they're in a cafe together and this woman walks back into their lives. The novel has a lot of intrigue and insightful commentary about female friendships. It also features an unhealthy character — you never know who she really is, or whether you can trust her, but she’s magnetic, and everyone wants to spend time with her.

Crooked House by Agatha Christie was also inspiration for my novel. It is the original gold standard of a mystery set in a large, wealthy home. The oldest member of this family dies, and there are suspicions about who might have killed him. His will is contested, and there are questions about what is going to happen to all the money. Lots of twists and turns.

Malice by Keigo Higashino is a murder mystery where a writer is the victim, and the novel is about writers. It plays with the idea that writers can have a different narrative and try to misrepresent what really happened. The story is told in several different ways, so you are constantly wondering what the truth is. It’s one of those books that, for a murder-mystery writer and plotter, is a masterclass. It’s tightly written and different from anything I’ve ever read.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë is one of those novels I devoured when I first discovered it. It has so much drama within its pages. I also loved the fact there is a mystery in the book. And as for Rochester — well, he is not exactly the greatest guy, but I have some threads of him in a character in my book.