The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Thriller writer Ruth Ware
The thriller writer on curious travels, plug patriotism and Val Mcdermid’s Monroe impression
THIS WAS SUPPOSED to be the year of less travel for me. My New Year’s resolution was to take on fewer overseas trips, and do more actual writing, partly because of looming deadlines, and partly to mitigate my climate-change guilt. It has sort of worked out, and most of my flights in 2019 have been shorthaul – most recently to Germany, where I talked about books to an exceedingly polite audience in an arts venue sponsored by a local manufacturing company, which made construction tools, electrical components and screws.
Evidently screws are a lucrative business, because the hall where I spoke was beautifully constructed and filled with modern art. As a parting gift, I was presented with a sponsor’s goodie bag which included a solar light, a promotional tape measure, and some custommade Haribo-type sweets. ‘I must tell you,’ my guide said seriously, as I peered at the odd shape of the sweets, ‘that the jelly implements are meant to be electric drills. Some of our guests are taken aback because of the resemblance to guns but this is not intentional.’
A FEW WEEKS LATER, I was caught up in another appliance-related controversy when my writer friend Rae Earl tweeted that British plugs are the best in the world. I retweeted this and added, ‘The British plug is possibly our finest gift to the world and it’s baffling to me why other countries continue with their frankly weedy systems. We have a LOT of faults as a country, but our approach to wiring is not one of them.’
Within an hour my notifications were on fire. Responses varied from the furious (proponents of other countries’ wiring systems) to the informative (explaining to me how a British plug works, which, being British, I did already know) and appreciative (did you know that the British postbox is similarly magnificently overdesigned and, iceberg-like, it goes down almost as far below ground as it sticks up above? I did not know this. Now I do. Such is the magic of Twitter). Inevitably, the thread devolved into a debate on Brexit and whether appreciating the design features of a plug was jingoistic or not, at which point I muted notifications. But I do have a new respect for postboxes.
RECENTLY I SPENT the weekend in Harrogate, at the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, where I was due to open an escape room themed around my new book, The Turn of the Key. Escape rooms are a game where you are locked in a room and have to solve a set of linked puzzles in order to escape. I did get out, which was fortunate or I would have missed one of my most anticipated events of the festival – the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers’ gig. This band of crime writers by day, amateur musicians by night, grew out of an impromptu jam session between Mark Billingham, Doug Johnstone and Stuart Neville at the World Mystery Convention in New Orleans, but since then they’ve expanded the lineup and played everywhere from the Edinburgh International Book Festival to Glastonbury, all under the tagline, ‘Murdering songs for fun’.
One of the best things about the festival is its unpredictability – everyone rubs alongside everyone else in the bar, readers and writers alike. Even so, I don’t think I would have guessed that one of the highlights would be Val Mcdermid’s very creditable Marilyn Monroe impression as she put on her best seductive coo to sing ‘Happy Birthday, First Minister’ to Nicola Sturgeon. The ballroom at the Old Swan Hotel probably has a lot of tales to tell. Now it has one more.
The Turn of the Key, by Ruth Ware, is out now (Harvill Secker, £12.99)
She put on her best seductive coo to sing ‘Happy Birthday, First Minister’ to Nicola Sturgeon