How I brought Britain’s SEXIEST PSYCHOPATH to book
As the Mail gives readers the novel that inspired hit TV series Killing Eve, its author reveals ...
Six years ago, i self-published a story on Amazon, a short, sharp thriller about a young Russian hitwoman named Villanelle. At the time, it went almost unnoticed. Little did i imagine that it would go on to become a best-selling novel and hit TV series Killing Eve — the most talked about and multi-award winning show on both sides of the Atlantic.
i’ve always loved thrillers and spy stories. i grew up with ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, but felt the genre had got stale. Too many cardboard, macho heroes. Too many high-tech gadgets.
Villanelle is an action heroine with a difference: a cunning and charismatic female assassin, taking out her targets without a flicker of guilt. Slowly, her character took shape in my head. There she was, living her best life, with a to-die-for apartment in Paris, fabulous designer clothes and a fridge that was stocked with pink champagne.
That these luxuries are her reward for murder was not an issue, because Villanelle is a homicidal psychopath. Killing people is all in a day’s work for her. She enjoys her work, and she is very, very good at it.
For this 21st-century heroine, i decided, high fashion and murder would go hand in hand. i researched the clothes as carefully as the kills.
in the first story, Villanelle assassinates a Mafia boss by stabbing him in the eye with a stiletto disguised as a hairclip.
The action takes place in a Sicilian opera house, and Villanelle is wearing a blood-red silk Valentino dress. That dress is from a real collection, as is Villanelle’s Balenciaga biker jacket and all her other glamorous outfits.
Self-publishing is tough. Every year, hundreds of thousands of new titles appear online but publicising them is next to impossible. Facebook, Twitter and other social media are saturated with would-be novelists trying to flog their downloadable thrillers and romances.
They’re inspired, perhaps, by the author E.L. James, whose 2011 novel Fifty Shades Of Grey started as a self-published erotic romance, and went on to dominate bestseller lists worldwide.
Fifty Shades was the million-toone chance that paid off, but for most writers the reality is bleak — most titles sink without trace.
Putting my thriller about Villanelle online was a long shot, but i believed in her.
in the months that followed, i added three further stories to the first, detailing the cat-and-mouse duel between Villanelle and Eve Polastri, the Mi5 agent tasked with hunting her down.
And then one of the stories was read by Sally Woodward Gentle, a London-based TV producer.
She contacted me, and we met in the offices of Sid Gentle Productions (her company is named after her dog, Sid).
Sally loved everything about Villanelle. Her character, the inventiveness of her kills, the mutual obsession between her and Eve. ‘We’re definitely going to make this happen,’ she told me.
She handed me a list of screenwriters she thought might be right to lead the project. Halfway down was Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
PHOEBE’S one-woman stage show, Fleabag, had run successfully at the Edinburgh Festival and was then at the Soho Theatre in London. i went to see it, and immediately knew that we had our screenwriter — her pitchblack humour is perfect for the world we wanted to create.
Phoebe and i talked for hours, and the next day, having read the first story, she emailed me: ‘it’s suspenseful, dark, cruel, sexy, glamorous, dirty, clinical, epic and immediate all at the same time.’
Phoebe understood that if the series was going to fly, it had to have the wit and pace of a romantic comedy, rather than the
grittiness of a crime procedural. it had to be as sly, elegant, and amoral as Villanelle herself.
Sally, Phoebe and i spent months discussing the two central characters and their weird, toxic relationship. Sally decided that we should rework the story with more emphasis on Eve. We needed a working title to reflect this change, and i came up with Killing Eve.
None of us knew exactly what it meant, but it sounded right.
By June 2016, Sid Gentle Productions were in talks with BBC America about Killing Eve. The proposal was for an initial series of eight hour-long episodes, and we began working out the storylines.
This is usually the point at which the author is shown the door and the screenwriting team takes over. Happily, Sally thought Phoebe and i were ‘a great combo’ and kept me on.
i was grateful, because this is where things can get tricky. A novel and a screenplay are two very different things. What works on the page doesn’t always work onscreen, and vice-versa.
Authors don’t always accept this, and there have been epic fallings-out.
Stephen King famously loathes Stanley Kubrick’s film of his novel The Shining, while Fifty Shades Of Grey director Sam TaylorJohnson compared working with author E. L. James to ‘wading uphill through sticky tar’.
No one had to wade uphill on Killing Eve, and work on the storylines was intense but fun.
Other writers joined us, among them the brilliant Vicky Jones, who had worked with Phoebe on Fleabag, and would write the episode where Villanelle gasses a Chinese businessman in a brothel and stabs Bill, Eve’s Mi5 associate.
Meanwhile, all of us were juggling other projects.
Sally was producing The Durrells for iTV. Phoebe was writing the first Fleabag series for BBC3 and preparing to play a droid in the new Star Wars film. i was writing No Tomorrow, the second Killing Eve novel, and working as a journalist for The Observer.
i had lived with Villanelle and Eve for almost three years by then, so i had plenty to bring to the
writers’ room. As Phoebe dreamed up increasingly fantastical scenarios, i tried to keep the action believable. We knew we had to be outrageously entertaining, but we also knew the plot had to make sense. Most of the time it does.
There are bonkers moments in Killing Eve, and there are murders Villanelle would never have got away with in real life.
if you want to kill a Mafia boss, as Villanelle does, you need a better plan than climbing over the walls of his country residence, changing into his wife’s dress, and mixing with his family and guests before stabbing him.
But as Phoebe always knew, realism was never the point of Killing Eve. The point is the wit, the style and the amazing clothes. And, at the heart of it all, the electric tension between Villanelle and Eve.
is their mutual fascination sexual, people ask me. is it, in some twisted way, romantic?
The answer is that it’s these things and more. Villanelle’s catand-mouse game is a pursuit, but it’s also a courtship.
in one episode, Villanelle walks out of the toilet in a hospital washroom disguised as a nurse. Seeing Eve, she is so enthralled she forgets to wash her hands.
in the final episode, after several highly charged encounters between the two, Eve confesses that she thinks about Villanelle ‘all the time’. To which Villanelle responds that she also fantasises about Eve.
in the books, it’s a slower burn, but there’s no question about the nature of their feelings.
in one scene, Eve is lost in an erotic fantasy about Villanelle. She’s in bed with her husband at the time and thinks he’s asleep, but he’s awake and watching her.
it’s an awkward moment, but it clearly resonates with readers. i’ve lost count of the times when, at book signings, women have glanced at their husbands before leaning forward and whispering to me: ‘i’m just like Eve!’
in October 2016, Killing Eve was greenlit by BBC America. Phoebe emailed me: ‘i’m so happy we finally got it across the line. What fun we will have.’
BBC America’s sole requirement was that Eve should be American. The murderous, psychopathic Villanelle, naturally, could be a Brit.
Sandra Oh’s name came up early for Eve, even though she is Canadian-Korean, and everyone agreed she was perfect.
Several actors were in the frame for Villanelle, but none was right. Then, in May 2017, Phoebe texted me: ‘There is a girl called Jodie Comer ... Super smart, dangerous, seductive and stroppy.’
i watched Jodie’s screen-test. She was exactly as i’d imagined Villanelle to be.
Suddenly it wasn’t just six of us in a room, it was 100, and the cast were giving their first readthrough of Episode 1.
Every novelist dreams of seeing their characters on the screen. i’d had half a dozen novels published, and in each case i’d cast the lead roles for the movie or TV series in my mind.
When it actually happens, though, it’s unreal.
There, large as life, were actors i’d admired for years, such as Kim Bodnia (Konstantin, Villanelle’s handler), Fiona Shaw (spymaster Carolyn Martens) and David Haig (Bill Pargrave, Eve’s Mi5 colleague).
After the read-through, Sandra drily thanked me for Eve’s dowdy costumes, and pointed out that
Jodie had a new designer outfit in every scene.
By then, my four original Villanelle stories had been collected into a single novel, Codename Villanelle, which was flying off bookshop shelves.
People ask if the way I write about Eve and Villanelle has changed since seeing Jodie and Sandra. Are my creations still as I first imagined them?
The answer is ‘yes’, because both actors so perfectly embody the spirit of my two heroines.
I’m thrilled the TV series has brought the Killing Eve books to a readership who might not otherwise have found them. I hear from readers of all ages from all over the world who are inspired by Villanelle’s uninhibited sexuality and kickass attitude.
Not everyone loves Villanelle and Eve, though. Piers Morgan recently posted on Twitter that ‘Killing Eve is unwatchable’, but I can live with that.
The second series is currently on BBC1. A third series is being written and will launch next spring, and the final book of the trilogy will be published. It’s fair to say that Villanelle is killing it.