BIRTH OF A BLOCKBUSTER
Ex-publishing exec’s debut novel hailed as psychological thriller genre’s next big thing
Daniel Mallory was in the airport in Los Angeles when his agent called and said: “We’ve been resisting Hollywood because we wanted to close the publishing deal first, but Fox have offered $1 million 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 that has been dubbed the new Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train — is still 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 two million dollars for two books.”
I want to congratulate the former publishing executive, who wrote this year’s biggest literary sensation in 12 months — in secret and under the pseudonym A.J. Finn — but “I hate you” comes out instead. Which is a little unfair, given Mallory’s wit and charm.
The Woman in the Window has already been sold to 38 territories worldwide. You can try to sneer off the psychological thriller as populist or derivative, but the bottom line is that Mallory is a fine writer and plot man. Which is why, no doubt, his HarperCollins debut became an instant New York Times bestseller. 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.
As the Oxford-educated eldest son of a Wall Street banker, this former senior editor at publishing company William Morrow — who has represented Karin Slaughter, Peter Robinson, Val McDermid and Nicci French — makes success look easy.
When he outed himself as A.J. Finn — a 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 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 surefire 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.”
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.” He also developed an obsession with Alfred Hitchcock and film noir, and studied 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, synthesized with my own mental health issues, which were not easy to live with,” Mallory says.
For 15 years before writing the book, Mallory struggled with such severe depression that, like his heroine Dr. Anna Fox, he was often unable to prise himself from the bed for weeks or months at a time. “I wouldn’t talk to anyone except the cashier at the local Mexican take-away 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.”
In summer 2015 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.”
The empathy he feels for his pillpopping, 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 three-dimensional 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.”
With the film, directed by Scott Rudin, on the way, Mallory now needs to finish book two, which 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?”