NICCI FRENCH
Journalist couple Nicci Gerrard and Sean French write thrillers together under a pseudonym
How difficult is it to write novels as a team? Nicci:
It is hard enough to write a novel on your own; writing together is doubly hard. We do it because we’ve found that in some way that is still mysterious to us, we can become Nicci French and create a new voice.
Do you take on different roles?
Absolutely not, and in a way that is the point: we are not writing as Sean and Nicci, but as Nicci French. We plan the book together, do the research together, pass the chapters between each other, editing and rewriting as we go. It takes longer and requires tact and above all trust.
What’s the best book you’ve read?
That’s so hard to answer. But I’m going to say Middlemarch by George Eliot, a magnificent, complex, humane Victorian novel featuring a group of people in a small English town, and their impact on each other.
A book that had a pivotal impact on your life?
Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree is an account of the challenge of being a parent, especially when the child is out of the ordinary. It is a profound and redemptive study of empathy.
The book you couldn’t finish?
I usually finish books I start, but was unable to get beyond the first chapter of Ian Mcewan’s The Child in Time because it is about a young girl being snatched from a supermarket. I tried to read it when our children were very little and just could not get beyond the panic it induced in me.
A book you wish you had read but haven’t got to?
We have just embarked together on the book both of us wish we had read – Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce. We both thought we should read it before we die – but it’s going to be a close run thing because each paragraph that we read aloud over a glass of wine, attempt to unravel, and then listen to on a talking book spoken by an Irish actor, is taking about an hour and it is more than 600 pages long.
The book you are most proud to have written?
Perhaps it’s our very first Nicci French thriller, The Memory Game. We wrote it in secret and didn’t know that from then on we would become Nicci French. It changed our life in ways that we never planned or anticipated.
What book do you re-read? Tove Jansson’s Moominland Midwinter.
What books are on your bedside table? A book of poems by Sharon Oldz called Ballads, Louise Kennedy’s fabulous novel Trespasses, and a little pamphlet about bees that my father wrote.