Because my dad was a journalist, I basically grew up in a newsroom . ... I was excited by the fact that he knew what would be in the papers the next day. I just wanted to do it, too.
Becoming a novelist was a natural progression for longtime journalist
The Suspect Fiona Barton Penguin Random House
TORONTO She was born 62 years ago in the English university town of Cambridge. Her father was a journalist — and this has been a defining factor in Fiona Barton’s multifaceted life.
So when you ask her about her current success as a bestselling writer of psychological thrillers — a success touched off by the 2016 publication of her explosive debut novel, The Widow — she quickly puts matters in perspective.
“I’m now into my third career,” she says firmly. And she’s extremely proud of what came before.
Long before the advent of The Widow, a shocker about the abduction of a two-year-old child, she spent more than three decades as an award-winning reporter and editor with such leading British newspapers as The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Then came career No. 2. Barton and her husband were well into their middle years when they turned to volunteerism. Through the agency, Voluntary Services Abroad, Barton found herself in some of the world’s most dangerous places, working with young journalists. And it was in Sri Lanka that she began trying her hand at fiction in her spare time.
The Widow was the eventual result. Further success came a year later with The Child. But even now, with her latest thriller The Suspect now climbing the charts, she still sounds a note of caution.
“I’m a newbie,” she says with a smile. “It’s been a big learning experience, horrific at times, and you have to cut me some slack. I’m very late-flowering.”
Meanwhile, the journalist in Barton remains alive and well. It’s no accident that a key character in all three novels is a seasoned reporter named Kate Waters. Her presence testifies to the continuing vitality of that endangered species, print journalism. It’s a subject Barton feels passionate about.
“Because my dad was a journalist, I basically grew up in a newsroom,” she remembers. “I’d be eating supper and he’d be on the phone filing copy. I was excited by the fact that he knew what would be in the papers the next day. I just wanted to do it too.”
So after university, she became a fledgling reporter on the East Grinstead Observer in southern England. It would be the first step in what would become a major newspaper career. Ironically, the journalist in her balked when she herself became the focus of media attention after the splashy success of The Widow.
“I wasn’t being hounded or anything, but it was very strange,” she says with a laugh. The first time she was on the receiving end of an interview — “I’d never been interviewed before” — she kept wanting to tell the reporter — “a very young journalist” — that she wasn’t asking the right questions.
Having now arrived to a wintry Toronto to do a round of publicity on behalf of her new novel, The Suspect, a relaxed Barton has no qualms about being interviewed. Indeed, she sounds a bit mischievous when she talks about subjecting her journalist heroine to unwanted media attention in her new thriller.
The Suspect will scare the daylights out of parents whose late-adolescent children become enamoured with the idea of travelling to exotic but dangerous places. Here, it is Thailand. Two 18-yearold girls go missing there, triggering a nightmare back home.
“I’ve been there,” Barton says bluntly. “It’s a scary place. I’m a mother and it was chilling to see these kids. I wanted to say to them: Go home — don’t sit around drinking Red Bull and vodka.”
In the novel, Kate Waters finds the horror story of the missing teens landing on her own doorstep. Is there a connection between their disappearance and that of her own son Jake, who she hasn’t seen for two years? To Kate’s dismay, she now finds herself the target of a media frenzy.
“I’d been waiting to turn the tables on Kate, so that she would be looking at the media from the other side of the fence,” Barton says. “I wanted her to become the story — and I needed it to really matter to her and not be a work thing but a family thing.”
Children in jeopardy are a recurring theme of all three novels: an abducted toddler in The Widow, the discovery of a youngster’s skeleton in The Child, the two missing teens in The Suspect.
“Missing children are at the core of our vulnerability,” says Barton, herself a grandmother. “Even if you’re not a parent, it can hit home very forcefully. It matters.”
The dark side of social media also looms over her fiction. Barton says it makes her “very uneasy.”
It’s not just sinister chat rooms and the proliferation of “fake news” on these sites, she says. “It’s the way we portray ourselves — where everything is apparently out there, whereas in fact we’re not really the people on Facebook. They ’re avatars. They ’re creations. They ’re the smarter, more beautiful, more successful versions of us that we put out there.”
For all her devotion to journalism as a noble profession, Barton can be hard-nosed about its failings. She sheds no tears for the demise of the News of the World, the British newspaper disgraced for hacking into the private lives of citizens. And although she’s proud of her years with The Daily Mail, she has no time for its online presence. “It’s horrible. It’s so misogynist. I hate it. I can’t read it.”
The fictionalized Kate Waters is no rosy-eyed idealization of the journalistic profession, although Barton believes her integrity remains intact, despite the lengths she’ll go to get a story. Still, she was nervous about introducing Kate as a character.
“I thought everyone will hate her because she’s a journalist, that we’re all criminals and weasels and not to be trusted,” Barton says. But she was tired of hearing people she’s known for years telling her that journalists “all make it up.” Dinner guests in her own house once made that allegation. “I said ‘hang on a minute, I’m a journalist, and I’ve never made anything up.’”
So for her, Kate has been a necessary presence.
Barton believes that responsible journalism can do enormous good, which perhaps explains why her conversation keeps turning back to the years when she was travelling everywhere, training young journalists in troubled Third World countries. And Sri Lanka looms particularly large in her mind because that’s where The Widow was born.
Her husband was there to teach carpentry to Sri Lankans with learning disabilities.
“I was working with journalists who were being kidnapped and murdered with impunity at the time. It was a tricky decision to go, but I’m glad we did.”
Attempting fiction for the first time was almost a respite. “I had this idea in my head about this woman who had a marriage with secrets. So I sat down one afternoon and started writing.”
After writing the first nine chapters and the final one, she took a break.
Later she would finish the book that became The Widow.
“I didn’t have any self-belief in it at the time,” she says. “I simply thought it was an interesting exercise.”
But when she finally finished The Widow and found an agent, it was promptly sold to 37 countries. “That was absolutely surreal. It was weird — but wonderful.”