VISITING THE DARK SIDE
British author yields to the ominous with thriller Local Girl Missing
Author uses her past to thrill
Local Girl Missing Claire Douglas HarperCollins
“It’s a dreary afternoon, just after lunch, when I finally find out that you’re dead.”
Claire Douglas admits she thought long and hard about the opening sentence of her new psychological thriller, Local Girl Missing. For sure, it’s designed to hook the reader immediately — and she’s proud of it.
On the other hand, she steers clear of any discussion of the book’s shocking ending.
“I always knew how it would end and what the twist was,” she says carefully. “It was quite hard to bring off because I wanted readers to be able to look back on it and say — yes, I can see that it makes sense. But it also needed to make sense to me at the time I was writing it.”
There’s a pause at the other end of the phone and then Douglas laughs. “Does what I’m saying make any sense at all?”
Actually, it does. The book, published by HarperCollins, arrives in Canada this month accompanied by ecstatic reviews from Britain, where it first appeared last year. The Sun newspaper called it “an addictive read” and Marie Claire magazine compared it with The Girl on the Train.
It’s the second book from a novelist who knew she wanted to write for a living by the time she was seven and voraciously devouring the children’s adventures of author Enid Blyton.
Later she would read every book Agatha Christie ever written and watch countless episodes of Murder She Wrote. But when she turned to fiction herself — first with her bestselling debut novel, The Sisters, and now with Local Girl Missing — she found herself less drawn to Christie escapism than to psychological tension.
“I’ve always enjoyed the darker side — what’s really going on in the lives of normal people,” Douglas says.
In her novels, darkness can manifest itself in many ways. Local Girl Missing tells us just how spooky and atmospheric an English seaside town can be off season when the streets are empty and skies are grey and ominous. Or how creepy a decaying pier can be at any time of the year. Or how even the strongest friendship can wither under jealousy.
Douglas was also drawing on disturbing personal memories. And now, on the phone from her home in England’s southwest, she starts talking about her late teens when there was a rash of murders — with all the victims young women of her own age.
“It was the 1990s and I and my friends were going to a lot of clubs in the Bristol area,” she remembers.
“And there were these 17- and 18-year-old girls who had disappeared from nightclubs and been murdered — all in the space of one year.
“That had a huge impact — it scared us all. We started being careful always to leave clubs with friends — things like that.”
She found herself asking — what would happen if one of her own friends had gone missing and never been found?
“That’s what this novel stemmed from. How would I have felt about it years later? Would I have felt guilty? What if I hadn’t been there to protect her?”
That question haunted Douglas some two decades later when she started work on Local Girl Missing.
And in the novel, it continues to haunt Francesca “Frankie” Howe 18 years after the mysterious disappearance of her best friend, Sophie, from the seaside town of Oldcliffe-on-Sea.
The book begins with a phone call to Frankie from Sophie’s brother, Daniel. Human remains have been found near the old pier where Sophie vanished. Could Frankie return to help in the search for answers?
Frankie does return, in the middle of winter, and within days begins wondering whether the derelict pier is haunted. Can she be seeing her dead friend’s ghost there?
The novel is told in more than one voice. We hear the voice of Frankie — driven, insecure, paranoid, overwhelmed with guilt. And, in flashback, we also hear the voice of the long-missing Sophie.
“Sophie is the nicer one,” Douglas concedes. “Sophie is more like me — I hope!”
Douglas’s fictional town owes much to the real-life Bristol Channel community of Weston-superMare.
“I grew up in Somerset and we used to go there quite a lot when I was younger,” she says. “There’s always something strange about a seaside place out of season. They’re always more atmospheric and more mysterious. I knew this was something I wanted to write about.”
And a derelict pier in Weston was prime fodder for her imagination.
“It really is spooky, and it definitely inspired the pier in my book. When we were teenagers, we used to scare each other with stories about a ghost being seen there.”
Douglas was a successful journalist before she suddenly found herself on the bestseller list with her first novel, The Sisters. And the latter happened for two reasons. First, she and her husband were starting a family, which meant curtailing her freelance work. And second, she heard about a magazine competition that required her to submit the first three chapters of a projected novel.
“I thought I might as well enter it, and after months of not hearing anything I forgot about it. It was a shock when I got a call saying I’d won.”
It was a bigger shock when the completed novel was snapped up for publication and hit the jackpot in bookstores.
“I just hit a wave thanks to Girl on the Train.” That’s Douglas’s laid-back explanation for her unexpected success.
So it doesn’t mean that the book she’s working on currently is a piece of cake. When you’re a bestselling novelist, the bar is automatically raised.
“Because you have two books that have done well, writing this book has become harder,” she says firmly. However, the discipline she acquired as a journalist tells her to forge ahead.
“I’m used to working to a deadline. I need to give myself a target. I work better that way.”
I’m used to working to a deadline. I need to give myself a target. I work better that way.