Jacket Notes
In my novel, which takes place in a small seaside town, Joanna, a young mother, hears a rumour that someone who killed a child when she was 10 years old is living locally under a new identity. Although Joanna never intends to pass the rumour on, one casual comment leads to another and sets off a catastrophic chain of events. I started writing in August 2017, but the original idea came to me a few years before when someone I was working with passed on a rumour to me. I won’t say who the rumour was about, or where I was living at the time, because then I’d be guilty of doing what Joanna does and things don’t go so well for her. But it concerned a notorious figure who had once committed a terrible crime and who was now, allegedly, living as a protected person in a safe house in my neighbourhood.
For a few days after hearing this rumour, I kept thinking about it and wondering if it was true. It got me thinking about how I would feel if I knew for sure that the rumour was true, and the difference between what’s in the public interest versus plain old curiosity. I wanted to explore how fast rumours spread and the damage they can inflict on individuals.
The subject of The Rumour is called Sally McGowan — her name as a child when she killed a little boy — and as I started to think about the nature of her crime and her release back into society as an adult, it made me want to explore deeper, more fundamental issues, such as how far children can be held responsible for their crimes and whether true redemption is ever possible.
I also started thinking about the vitriol levelled at perpetrators of such crimes that sometimes spills over into revenge fantasies and vigilantism, and how the press often fuels this by printing sensationalist stories. Our sense of disgust and outrage when it’s a murder committed by a child seems to be far worse than when it’s committed by an adult.
Perhaps it’s because we think of childhood as a time of innocence and purity, so when a child carries out a violent crime, it shakes us to the core and makes us fearful.
I like to think that Joanna represents the side of us that doesn’t like the idea of rumours and gossip and understands how dangerous such things can be but can’t resist listening in.
The trouble is, once you know something you shouldn’t, it’s hard not to share it. It bubbles up inside and demands to be released. And so it spreads, faster and further than wildfire. As Joanna soon finds out, a casual comment is all it takes to change a life — forever.
The Rumour by Lesley Kara is published by Penguin Random House, R290