“HE LIED ABOUT HIS JOB AS A DOCTOR, UNTIL ONE DAY IN 1993 WHEN, BELIEVING HE WAS ABOUT TO BE EXPOSED, HE MURDERED HIS WIFE”

We all lie. I lie out of laziness and habit, to make stories interesting or more amusing. I lie because I’d rather stay at home and read a book than venture across town on a damp evening to make conversation with people I don’t know. I lie because, yes, your haircut does look awful, but there’s nothing to be done until it grows back. These are the small lies; the kind lies.

Some of us tell bigger lies because we’ve lost our jobs, or we’re in debt, we no longer love you, or we’re having affairs, and we’re too sad or too scared or too ashamed to tell the truth. Crime novels are built on these lies. The biggest lie of all is at the core (I didn’t kill her), but this is concealed among the other lies (I came straight home; I was asleep; we never argued). The job of the crime writer is to mete out the truth in spoonfuls, sprinkled among the untruths and red herrings, and make the reader work to understand who is lying, and why.

I write stories about murder, and so I write about lies and the people who tell them, and the people who are hurt by them. My novel Little Deaths began with a lie. I first read about the real Ruth Malone [the novel’s protagonist] when I was 16, and the details stayed with

me for 20 years. I remembered the photographs of her two smiling children who vanished from their New York apartment one hot July night, and were later found dead. I remembered the photographs of their mother: perfectly dressed and made-up, tiny amid groups of men in suits and police in uniform. And I remembered the discrepancy between what she told the police she’d fed the children for their last meal, and what was discovered at the autopsy – and wondered why, of all the lies she could have told to cover up what happened, she would lie about that detail.

I became fascinated with lies and what they can lead to when I read about Jean-claude Romand, who lied to his family and friends for 18 years. He lied about his job as a doctor, about what he did every day, until one day in 1993 when, believing he was about to be exposed, he murdered his wife and children, his parents and their dogs. I find it hard to tell lies: I blush, I stammer, I worry the lie will unravel and become worse than the truth. I can’t imagine the kind of mind that would be able to maintain a lie of Romand’s magnitude for so long, and it intrigues me it exists. We all think we’re good at spotting lies and liars, yet this man fooled dozens of people for almost 20 years.

In fiction, good writing is built on magic, not on concepts of truth and untruth – yet truth is central to its success. Good writing makes the ordinary extraordinary. Think of a group of people on a station platform waiting for a train, then think of Ezra Pound’s poem In A Station Of The Metro, viewing them as “petals on a wet, black bough”. Or think of plants in water and the shapes they make, then read Ernest Hemingway’s description of a “great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket” in his novel The Old Man And The Sea. Good writing turns something we’ve seen or tasted or smelled a hundred times before into something we experience with fresh senses – and yet we have to hold a true memory of a row of pale faces, or the sight of waving seaweed in the ocean, for either of these examples to work. Equally, good writing turns the extraordinary – terror, grief, ecstasy – into something so ordinary, so relatable, that it can be experienced by the reader as true feeling rather than as rational thought. Is that alchemy a lie? A trick? Do you read a piece of writing you love and feel deceived? Or do you feel transported?

Fiction makes us see the truth of the world and the people in it more clearly. Imagine a world where we could only recount exactly what has happened. Stories would not exist without the concept of lies; imagination would be stifled without the realisation that we do not have to deal only in facts. Once that’s accepted, our imagination is limitless.

“GOOD WRITING TURNS THE EXTRAORDINARY INTO SOMETHING SO RELATABLE, IT CAN BE EXPERIENCED BY THE READER AS TRUE FEELING”