Page turner
Meet the man behind the new Gone Girl
Daniel Mallory was in the LAX lounge on his way back from a break in Palm Springs when his agent rang and said: “We’ve been resisting Hollywood because we wanted to close the publishing deal first, but Fox have offered $1million (£700,000) for the book – do you want it?’” For any novelist, let alone a firsttimer, this is the dream question, and the 38 year-old author of The Woman In The Window – a thriller which has been dubbed the new Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train – is still visibly exhilarated by the memory.
“I managed: ‘I want that – yes’, and then desperately wanted to tell someone, but I was travelling alone and the only people nearby were this Japanese couple with a small child who didn’t seem to speak any English.” Mallory turned to the family, smiled and gave them the thumbs-up. “And all three turned back to me and did the same,” he chuckles. “They never call, they never write, but it was a lovely moment. And by the end of that week the book auction had reached £2 million for two books.”
I open my mouth to congratulate the former publishing executive who wrote this year’s biggest literary sensation in 12 months, in secret and under the pseudonym, AJ Finn, but “I hate you” comes out instead. Which is embarrassing and a little unfair, given Mallory’s wit and charm; his John Krasinki meets Ryan Reynolds all-american handsomeness; sitcom star smile and the fact that he made the five-floor trip down to greet me in Shoreditch House’s reception rather than having me “sent up”.
Although, of course, it’s not despite all this but because of all this – and the millions, and the Gillian Flynn comparisons and the 38 territories The
Woman In The Window has already been sold to worldwide (a record for any debut novelist) – that I hate Mallory. And you can try and sneer off the psychological thriller as populist or derivative if it makes you feel any better, but the bottom line is that Mallory is a fine writer and an ingenious plot man. Which is why, no doubt, his debut immediately became an instant New York Times bestseller – a success he is sure to repeat when his novel is published here this week. You’d have to be ingenious to give a 90,000-word story basically set within the same four walls more plot twists than a silly straw. But the tale of an agoraphobic child psychologist who believes she has witnessed a vicious crime in a neighbouring Harlem town house through her kitchen window is that most lucrative and least grammatical of things: unputdownable.
“I honestly do think I hate you,” I repeat. Mallory just shrugs: “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
As the Oxford-educated eldest son of Wall Street banker John and mother Pamela, this former senior editor at US publisher William Morrow – who has represented the likes of Karin Slaughter, Peter Robinson, Val Mcdermid and Nicci French over the years – makes success look easy.
When he outed himself as AJ Finn – a deliberately gender-neutral nom de plume he took on partly “because up until December I was still working and I didn’t want my authors to see their editor’s name
‘I wouldn’t talk to anyone except the cashier at the local Mexican takeaway’
scrawled across a hardback in the bookshop”, and partly “because I’m a private person” – it was the “poacher turned gamekeeper” pieces that annoyed him the most. “Because no book is sure-fire and, far from being easy, this was a labour of love.
“So these journalists intent on suggesting or even asserting that I know the secret ingredients needed to cook up a bestseller are wrong. There is no secret sauce. If there were, I would have written a huge bestseller long ago.”
Thirty years steeped in his own genre at work and at home won’t exactly have been a hindrance, says Mallory. “I grew up devouring Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes and as a teenager I got into psychological suspense, Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell.” Around the same time, he developed an obsession with Hitchcock and film noir and went on to study mystery and suspense fiction at New College, Oxford.
The Woman In The Window is Rear Window reimagined for our times. “A culmination of all those experiences, synthesised with my own mental health issues, which were not easy to live with”, Mallory says.
For 15 years prior to writing the book, Mallory had struggled with such severe depression that, like his heroine Dr Anna Fox, he was often unable to prise himself from the bed, let alone the house, for weeks or months at a time.
“I wouldn’t talk to anyone except the cashier at the local Mexican takeaway for extended periods, and when you feel that low it’s logical to contemplate some sort of release.
“I never attempted suicide but when you find yourself considering
death, or indeed longing for it, you know that there is some sort of serious system glitch within you.”
It wasn’t until summer 2015 that he was diagnosed with bipolar 2 disorder and given the correct medication. It “unlocked” something in his brain, he says. “About a week after starting my new drugs, I started writing.”
Putting himself into the head of a woman “came naturally” to Mallory, who has two sisters and suspects he “often thinks like a woman”. After what he’d been through, it wasn’t hard to imagine the isolation of a depressive agoraphobic either.
The empathy he feels for his pill-popping, merlot-swilling, unreliable narrator gives the book more depth than your average crime thriller. But isn’t it funny – in this era of female empowerment – how much we relish a frumpy mess of an anti-heroine?
“I think it’s a reaction to Disney princesses. Because women are threedimensional and flawed, just like men,” says Mallory. “Yes, Anna is a mess, but she’s not a damsel in distress. We’re still given these damsels in distress, waiting to be saved by men – when most women I know are more than a match for them. So men don’t own strength, and there are slobby females out there.”
Ask Mallory which strong, slobby A-lister he’d like to play Anna in the film – being produced by Oscarwinner Scott Rudin – and he won’t say, but he will be demanding a cameo. “Slightly tricky since she scarcely leaves the house…”
First he needs to finish book two, which was due two weeks ago and is “another psychological thriller, set in San Francisco, with another female protagonist. And she’s pretty well adjusted. Because, well, I don’t want to be that author who only writes about frumps and messes, you know?”
Not really. I for one would take as many frumps and messes as AJ Finn could throw at me.
The Woman in the Window by A J Finn is published by Harpercollins (£12.99). To order your copy for £10.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk