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Hello.

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Welcome to another edition of Hertford's literary podcast, I'm Emma Smith,

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I'm the fellow librarian and I teach English, and I'm absolutely delighted to be talking with Claire McGowan.

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Not least because I was up until about one o'clock in the morning reading one of her latest novels,

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The Push, which is a really extraordinary page turner and I was doing it actually for prep, but I couldn't put it down,

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so I'm looking forward to talking to her about that and about the other crime novels and her other literary writing.

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But Claire, thanks so much for being with us. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks for the kind words about the book.

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Well, there's going to be plenty more I can tell you.

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Tell us first about you and  Hertford, and when you know when you're here and what you have done since then.

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So I turned up to Hertford in 2000, about this time of year, I guess, it was into October, I think because of the late terms.

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And the first time I'd ever been to Oxford was a year before that for interviews.

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So I had never been to the university before I applied.

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And I remember arriving for my interview quite late and it was dark and kind of walking around the corner into

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Radcliffe Square and seeing the Radcliffe Camera and just being kind of overwhelmed by it and deciding at that point,

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well, I need to try and come here, but I didn't think I would get in.

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So it was quitem I think you actually interviewed me, didn't you? I did. Yeah.

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So you read English and Modern Languages? Yeah. And what about, we're going to come back to some sort of Hertford memories,

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but what are some of the highlights or even lowlights of what you've done since you left  Hertford?

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So I just had a normal job for a few years. I worked in the charity sector,

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but I was always wanting to write a book and I'd sort of been writing on and off for years and had

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lots of notebooks full of scribbles and kind of convinced myself I wouldn't be able to do it,

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even though I was only 25 at this point. So I don't know what I was thinking.

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I just hadn't really tried or shared my work to anyone. So I, umm,

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When I was about 25, I decided I need to try to finish a book because I worked on that for a couple of years,

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and when I did finally finish it, it was such a wonderful moment.

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I think it was one of the best moments still in my writing life, even though I actually have so far not published that book.

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And then I wrote something else quite quickly, and then I got a publishing deal.

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From that, I was probably twenty nine at that point. So when my book came out, I was 30, which is, I think, still pretty young actually for a writer.

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Yeah, absolutely. And so did you....How did you come to

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crime fiction or psychological thrillers or,

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Well, first I'd like to know how you would, how would you define that aspect of your writing? I would say crime fiction

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as an umbrella term for it. Yeah. And was that always what you were going to write?

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Or did you come to that? Not at all. No, I was very clueless about what I was doing.

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The book I spent years writing was literary fiction. I think most people often go straight to literary fiction when they begin writing.

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And then the second book that I write was sort of accidentally a thriller I didn't actually know it was a thriller is just how it came out.

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So I was quite surprised when they it was acquired by an editor who said, Oh, this is obviously crime, and I was quite taken aback by that.

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But I know now that that's actually a really good thing because there's such a fantastic market for crime fiction.

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And actually, I've always really enjoyed reading it. So it kind of makes sense.

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I suppose I would write it. I've written other things too, but it's probably still my favourite genre.

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What do you think? I mean, this is such a huge question, but it's so fascinating.

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Not least because I guess it's one of the things people have read a lot during lockdown has been crime.

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I've had a lot of people talking about reading a golden age crime fiction and going back to the world of Agatha Christie or something,

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which in some ways is so disrupted and so full of wickedness and awful things happening.

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But it's also so orderly because in narrative terms, it all gets, it all gets sorted out.

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I don't find that your books. I mean, there are things in your books.

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I was thinking about the books you've written about, about Northern Ireland and about the sort of consequences,

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long term consequences of the troubles and that seems to be about, quite well,

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if I might say a very sort of grown up sense of crime fiction that there are some things that can't,

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you know, can't just be discovered and put right under. Yeah, well, there's a lot more grey in the world than sort of black and white.

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Yeah, that's interesting. I often go back to Agatha Christie myself for a comfort read.

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I often read them around Christmas, and I find they actually stand up quite well to be reading because I can never remember what happened.

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It's sort of like an enjoyable but not a memorable experience.

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And I suppose one thing I really enjoy about crime fiction is that you can use it as a way to explore

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some very difficult issues about our current society in the past while still being entertaining.

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So hopefully people will sort of enjoy the story, but there's an important message in there as well as I've been to write my first book,

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the one that didn't get published actually was a lot about, it was also set in Northern Ireland and it was about family and religion and history

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And I think just with crime fiction, just looking at all of those same issues with a new, slightly more gripping format.

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Yes, tell us, tell us about your sort of detective figure in that series of books set in Northern Ireland. Yeah it's a

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forensic psychologist and really the some of the things I have for doing a forensic psychologist wouldn't really do that.

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I took a bit of leeway and I sort of invented a kind of special unit that she was working in, and I'm very interested in missing persons.

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So the books are a lot about missing persons rather than murder.

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And sometimes there is murder, but not always, just sort of quite interested by the endless possibilities when someone is missing,

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but they could still be alive or they could have gone voluntarily. So she sort of it just made it the same age as me.

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So when the books start, she's about 30, which seems quite young to me now.

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Classic kind of good at her job, but extremely chaotic personal life kind of carrying around all over the place, getting into trouble.

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But the books are actually in development for TV.

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So you know, nothing, nothing definite yet, but it is kind of moving along and there is a script being written, so that's really exciting.

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Well, how much input will you have? I mean, obviously a huge impact.

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Do you read the books? But how much input into the TV adaptation will you? So far, nothing, actually.

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I've not even met the company, probably because of COVID, but I would hope that if it got off the ground,

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I would have more inputs than maybe be able to do an episode at some point because I do write scripts as well.

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That will be amazing. I was thinking that she's gone back, she's gone back to Northern Ireland hasn't she.

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That's part of what the deal is with her and her. That's a symptom and partly a kind of cause of the chaos in her life.

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And as well as wondering about how that fits with with you, have you ever thought that you would go back to live there?

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You know, do you spend much time there? I thought about it briefly about maybe about 10 years ago, but I think I'm very settled here,

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and I obviously haven't been able to go back very much over the last year or so. I've only been back twice in the last year and a half, I'd say,

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but my parents still live there, so I think I feel like I've quite a strong connection still.

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And it's been since I left, so I left in 2000, which was just two years after the end of the Troubles.

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So things are really not great still in terms of investment and there was still a fair amount of violence.

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So in the time that I've been away, you know, Northern Ireland has really transformed and it seems to have become quite a cool place almost, like I am always 

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A little bit shocked when people go to Belfast for a mini break because when I was growing up, Belfast had nothing and it was full of soldiers.

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It was terrifying. I find that really strange.

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The Push is set in London and I was just start by saying that you go about talking to Christy because obviously what

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Christy, to me, does brilliantly is and that sort of weirdly is these sort of strange plots and the execution of the crime is often,

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you know, extremely elaborate and has to be picked in these elaborate ways by Poirot or whoever.

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But she's not good at character, whereas I think you are really good at character, and I think The Push is a really good example of that.

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It's a good example of what you also mentioned about, you know, not dealing with, that's the wrong phrase,

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but approaching issues or raising issues, which is about infertility.

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Infertility, treatment and stuff. But in some ways the crime in The Push, which I'm not going into.

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It's a really great page, so I'm not going to spoil it, but it's not.

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That's not really the main focus, almost. It's it's more that it's about a very disparate group of women and their partners who have come together.

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Yeah, because they're all, they're all having babies. Yeah.

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So I'm very interested in the group dynamics. I'm very interested in sort of the dark side of middle class aspirations.

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So I really enjoy kind of poking fun at that side of things.

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And I'm also very interested in the same event seen from different standpoints.

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So the first thriller I did as a stand alone is called What You Did.

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That's actually partly set at Oxford.

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So that is the same kind of thing, it is about something that happens with this sort of group of friends at a university

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reunion and all the different viewpoints of everyone that was there that gradually builds up to what might be the truth.

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Yeah, that's really on display in this novel.

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that I have just read, does that require you to be sort of sympathetic?

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I was interested that you write scripts because I feel as if scripts in in my sort of professional critical well,

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that what I always say about drama is it has to make all these characters equally plausible.

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You can't, you're not seeing it from all from one person's point of view.

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You're trying to animate these different consciousnesses and how they see the world.

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Huge amount of suspense in crime fiction often comes down to point of view.

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Like who's point of view are we hearing from? who knows what? I think like structure really comes into it.

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so that's something I think about quite carefully when I'm writing the book is how how am I going to structure this?

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And every book is different. So I've just written another one that is

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all told by the same character, but in the first person but it's two different timelines,

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so you don't even necessarily know to begin with that that is the same person, you can probably guess, but it is at two very different points in their life.

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That's such an interesting sort of structural device in crime fiction, isn't it?

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The sort of, in part, the job of the reader, the detective work the reader has to do is to understand how all these different

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bits of narration fit together and whether they are the same person or whether...

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Yeah. And hopefully that creates suspense because you're wondering, Well, how how do these connect up?

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Yes. Yeah, that's absolutely true. You know that they must connect.

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Yeah. That's so interesting. Hearing, hearing you talk about how you sort of plot and structure because one one other thing I

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want to ask you about was sort of teaching writing because I know you do a lot of that.

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Mm-Hmm. And I suppose that's one of the old chestnuts, isn't it?

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Can you teach creative writing La la la? You know, Oxford has been very resistant to teaching creative writing as part of English literature teaching,

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which most of the universities now do absolutely routinely.

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Tell me about, you know, your take on on what is you're teaching when you are doing those workshops with less experienced writers?

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Well, one thing I don't know is if you, I've never known whether you can teach people how to have ideas because I've always had loads of ideas,

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like since I was a child, I was, I probably had a new idea for something every couple of weeks, probably.

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And I got great notebooks full of just loads and loads and loads of ideas that never got off the ground.

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And I'm just talking about fiction here obviously. So if you don't have those kind of ideas, I don't know if you can teach that,

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but I think you can definitely teach the techniques, say things like, I've just been talking about things like structure or viewpoint.

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You can certainly improve your prose as well. So a lot of my teaching, I think, was partly those techniques of to think about how to structure a book,

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and sometimes it's just about seeing what other people do,

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which is why I always tried to get my students to read as much as possible, particularly current crime fiction,

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because there's not really a huge amount of point in reading loads of Agatha Christie.

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It'll be very enjoyable, but it won't teach you very much about the current market.

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And that's that striking that it's both the market and the thing, you know,

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the work itself that you're not sort of precious about, in some way, that the kind of, Oh, well, how do I put this?

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Because you are you're a really great writer.

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I think you regret prose stylist, and I want to know how you help people improve their prose because I think let's let's start with that.

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How do you help people improve their prose? I think it's a relentless criticism.

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I have certain things I get really hung up about. So things like the dangling modifiers and punctuation, I have a huge thing about punctuation.

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I think people think it doesn't matter, but I really think it hugely matters, actually, if the way that you even if you're not reading it aloud,

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the way you punctuate it to yourself, the way you pause and stop to breathe, I think can hugely change the feel of a piece, so.

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I think partly it's instinctive. So when I'm editing my own work, I'm just constantly trying to improve the sentence.

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But I don't know if I have any rules for that, but I have things like, for example, I wouldn't.

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I would try not to use the same word too many times in quick succession.

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Yeah, yeah. I'm always alert to that in my prose, too.

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And having a voice, I think, as well as I like trying to encourage people to write with voice rather than just write,

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sort of clear but slightly dull prose. Yeah, because this a lot of your work seems to me not in the first person,

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but nevertheless with aspects of what technically we would call free and direct discourse.

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Yes, I use that. Yeah. And that's another thing I was always trying to get people to figure out was the difference

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between direct thoughts and indirect thoughts and how you can use the characters on their own.

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For example, just thinking about things,

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I would always encourage them to use a little bit of direct thoughts because it's like a dialogue with yourself.

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And what's your take on sort of writing in the present tense? I'm not a huge fan, actually.

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I'm sure I have done it, but I find it a little bit off-putting now when I read a book and can become very sort of static,

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I think, very kind of moment by moment. Yeah, I think I agree there other crime writers, you would you would alert us to?

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Who are the crime writers', crime writers? Oh this is when my mind will go blank.

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So there's a very strong community of crime fiction, which is another great reason to do it.

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Everyone is extremely friendly and everyone knows each other because there's a lot of events and so on.

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I was a big fan of Aaron Kelly, who is a friend of mine, and she is just, I think, really,

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really brilliant, brilliant, brilliant prose writer, but also really brilliant at structure and twists.

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And I particularly she wrote a book called, 'He said,

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She said' a couple of years ago that I just think is a real, modern masterpiece, and I've read it about three or four times,

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even though obviously I know what happens because the characters are amazing and the prose is amazing.

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So that that's my favourite type of book is a sort of gripping thriller that's also well written,

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so people like Susie Steiner, she wrote a kind of short series of detective fiction but beautifully done, Sabine Durrant is

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someone I really like, I think she's published four or five books, and they've all been fantastic,

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same thing, great characters, great writing, extremely gripping and suspenseful.

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And then you've got this like a lot of big, heavy hitters of procedural fiction so people like Val Mcdermid,

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Mark Billingham, I not such a huge fan of procedural fiction myself.

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I do tend to enjoy the thrillers a bit more. That's a great list. Thanks.

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That's really I think anybody who's listening to this, who wants to sense what to read next, will find find something there.

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I wanted to stick with the idea of the of being aware of your readership, being aware of the market.

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How have you developed that awareness? How does that actually work for you in your process?

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I think of you were very, very smart and I know writers that do do this, who are constantly trying to think like, what's the next big idea?

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What's the next big thing? And they will try to come up with an idea that is based on that.

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So people might be like, well, so say, for example, somebody, a writer I know, Clare Mackintosh who just brought out a book called Hostage about a girl sat on a plane

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And it's a brilliant idea. But there have also been like two or three other plane set thrillers have come out weirdly at the same time.

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so there's something in the zeitgeist that I think that people often end up with the same

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thing, I've been saying for years that I thought serial killer fiction was coming back,

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and that does seem to be the case, actually. So things that are a bit darker.

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a bit gorier, perhaps. And so the markets, I really don't think people should chase the market because it's just so random and no one really knows.

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But there are trends. So I suppose it's more like, maybe it's not so much like 

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We're chasing the market, but we're all trying to come up with like, what is the next big thing?

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What is the big concept? What is the big twist?

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And I think, we all push each other as a community, harder and harder to to find what those are. And what's the role of your editor in that?

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A lot of people on this podcast have talked interestingly about the editing process and their relationship with their editor.

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So one thing I realised recently is that people don't understand what editing is outside of the industry.

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So people will say like, Oh, but you're, so if I complain that I'm going to have to do editing.

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People will often say like, Oh yeah, but doesn't your editor do that? No, they do not.

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I wish they did. They just will tell me what needs fixing.

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But I have to figure out how to fix it and do it all myself.

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So if you find a great editor, beware because every published by Amazon now for a while, by their own publishing house and I've worked with,

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they have a sort of freelance development editor which is not the same person as the commissioning editor.

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That's unusual.

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And the development editor that I've just worked there has been really fantastic and really helped me to see how the book could be better.

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But in a way that I always feel, I never feel kind of like I've done a bad job.

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So it was very inspiring, and I always think, Oh yeah, that's the perfect solution.

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Why didn't I think of that? And are there other people who would read for you or who you would always share drafts with?

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My agent is really great, so my agent used to be an editor, so she's very good on that.

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And the amount of notes she'll give me kind of depends on whether the book is

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under contract already or whether it's something new that we're trying to sell.

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But sometimes if it's a new thing, we'll go through sort of five, six seven drafts, just like that.

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Yeah, that's that's really interesting. Yeah, because it's related to that then that I wanted to ask you about writing under under two names.

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So we've talked about the Claire McGowan, some of the Claire McGowan works but

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tell us about the the other bit of your writing persona and writing career.

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I've always enjoyed reading different things. And like I said, it wasn't,

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I didn't have my heart set on writing crime fiction, and I found myself to be about eight years ago now,

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I just got divorced and I was in a kind of a bad place.

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It was kind of quite broke at the time, and I just found myself writing a rom com kind of to cheer myself up,

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and it just really, really enjoyed writing it. So much it is actually still my favourite of all my books, this book, it's called 'The thirty List'

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So just by kind of writing that on spec by myself, I was able to go into a new genre, and it's actually very common for writers to have pseudonyms

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So I noticed two writers that have like four or five pseudonyms for different things that they write and people,

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I think people sometimes get confused as to why you use a different name, but it's just kind of branding thing.

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So people wanted to read one of my books and they were expecting crime,

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and then they get a kind of frothy rom com, that's probably annoying and probably vice versa.

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Does it make a difference to you? Do you feel today I'm Claire McGowan or today?

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Uuum, I've always been very open. I think some writers are encouraged to hide the fact that there they are

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They're their pseudonym, and I've always just been completely open about it and I think I do.

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I do gravitate more naturally to crime.

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So even when I've been writing some of my women's fiction, it always ends up with quite a strong mystery in it.

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Just because having a mystery is, I think such a great way to structure a book and keep it gripping.

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Publishing does like to put you in a box to say, like you write this,

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but I've always read loads of different things and really enjoy a good rom com.

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So it didn't seem that strange to me to write both.

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And I've actually got, I've got a literary novel now that is in submission, so I'm hoping that might get published as well.

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That would be a whole new thing for me. Be much more mainstream. That would be amazing, it's not related to the one that you first.

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That is isn't published. No, it's not actually if it if it took off.

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Perhaps they could publish that one. It's something I've been working on for 10 years, actually.

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I remember starting it 10 years ago and just thinking to myself, I don't, I don't know how to write this book yet.

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I don't have the skills.

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So I just put it aside and look down and was really good, sometimes really good for like looking up and digging up old projects and finishing them for me.

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That's that's quite that's quite inspiring. You write, you publish a lot, don't you?

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That's that must be a lot of discipline and a lot of, you know, good, good work habits and all of that.

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Yeah, I've got four books coming out this year, so I have actually slightly struggling to finish the book and working out at the minute.

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And I think that's why I am a little bit burnt out. And like I was saying earlier about, I used to get I get loads of ideas.

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I actually don't at the minute. I'm not getting that many ideas, so I probably just need like a very long rest.

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Unfortunately, I don't have any time for that because I've got loads of things that need to be done in the next two months.

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And are you more or less your full time writer? Yeah. So I used to teach I used to read one of the MAs at City University,

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which was great and I really enjoyed it, but I gave that up about three years ago.

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Actually, I'm going to do a little bit of teaching this term because, I don't know if you find this Emma,

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but I really enjoy being at a university in the autumn with some kind of lovely energy about it.

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I think, yeah, we're really excited about it. As you said at the beginning, we were recording this at the end of September.

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So yeah, we're just about it's all just about to come. We're a bit nervous about it this year, but very much,

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I mean, my whole life has been about, you know, the year turning in September, much more than ever in January.

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Yeah. And I really enjoy everything.

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There's a great energy this time of year and loads of things get done and things happen and people come back from holidays in August.

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And that's partly why I have so much work now is because everyone's come back. But yeah, I really enjoy it.

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So I think it'll be quite nice to be back.

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And I am going on campus to do hybrid teaching, so I will be in the room and some people will be video conferencing in.

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Yeah, I think we're all sort of preparing, preparing for that, for that mode.

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But yeah, it's great. It's great to hear you remind us about this sort of excitement of the year 

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starting because we can go back then to your memories of Hertford

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because listeners to this literary podcast will know that one of the prompts for connecting with our writing

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community and Hertfordians in print was thinking about bookish Hertford in in the context of the new library project.

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So we're working hard to redevelop the library,

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set this more study space and better accessibility and good storage for the archives

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and rare books and that so they'll be able to be used more as  living part of the collection

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But it's it's been really interesting hearing whether people were sort of,

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you know, library mice or not, whether they worked elsewhere in Oxford.

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What was your working, preferred working environment when you were here?

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I used to work in bed a lot actually, which is a really, really bad habit and I now hear

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new writers talk about it's so great, I write in bad. I'm always like, No, you must not do that, it's so bad for your back!

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I'm glad to hear you say that it's bad for your

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back rather than in some moral sense! No I always banging on about this, there are a few things I always bang on about to new writers,

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one is data storage and backing up your work. And one is looking after  your neck and your wrists.

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So use a laptop with a keypad, with the trackpad rather, and then get a proper desk.

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Get a proper chair. That would be great. After this, I'm just going to speak to our new freshers.

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And in fact, they were just two really good pieces of advice for them! Yeah data storage!

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Date storage and look after your spine. Yeah, OK, I'll steal that! I usually tell them lots of horror stories in the first

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week so that I hopefully scare them a lot into using Dropbox or something. So I used to work in the English library quite a bit.

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But there's something about that building, which is so incredibly soporific. I used to fall asleep quite often there.

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Yeah, and then, yeah, you sort of work in the library in Hertford too but that was this too kind of a fun place.

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I think it was very peaceful but you'd always sort of see people you knew and you could leave each other notes, I don't know if it is still a 24 hour library,

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but it used to be you could just let yourself in at any point. So that was great.

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I always just loved libraries anyway, and I just always loved the atmosphere of going in there and people would be having various essay crises.

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And there were some people that, around finals, never really left the library.

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So you would see them kind of with all their Diet Cokes and everything and their Red Bulls.

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So that was never really me. But I did certainly love going to the library like I would sometimes go to the Radcliffe Camera as well sometimes.

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It's one thing about Hertford is that, actually, we are really well, really well placed.

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And one of the design points about the new library, which I think is really exciting,

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is a reading room which looks over, has these amazing views over Radcliffe Square,

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which will be views actually that no one's seen before, looking down.

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I think, yeah, it will be really, really inspiring.

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And I suppose I got a membership to the British Library, before COVID and I had sort of grand ideas of going there to work,

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but I thought I seem to just need like a constant supply of cups of tea.

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They're very strict in the reading rooms of the BL about what you're allowed to take in, and it is very quiet.

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So I think one of the hazards of modern life is it's quite hard to find a very, very quiet place where no one's on their phone.

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So it is extremely quiet for that. But I sort of seem to need a little bit of life around the place.

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We have allowed Keep Cups in the library rather to the librarian's dismay.

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But your mention of Diet Cokes and Red Bull, I should say these are not actually permitted in the library.

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I think maybe I am misremembering, but I seem to recall people stocking up on...no, no

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Sometimes I see Alice Roques, our wonderful librarian, on a Monday, and she says that they'd ordered pizza again over the weekend!


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This is 20 years ago, I should say as well! No I'm teasing you!

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I think, yeah, obviously people do do that, still in the library. It is very interesting to have a 24 hour library 

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and I think it does get abused, sadly. Yeah, that's that's probably that's probably true.

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But I suppose having been away from college for so, having us been away from college for so many months,

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it's actually really nice thinking about those, those ways in which people just get together.

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Not necessarily, you know, in the rules of what was expected, but just, you know, find ways to

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Yeah, to be together. And we're looking forward to that. Yeah, I just always love being around campus,

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being around the quad and just sort of seeing people walking around and going to lunch and dinner and the hall.

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I think because it's such a small college, it was very nice in that way. You'd always run into people.

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Yeah. Well, I'm really looking forward to getting that sense back over the coming over the coming weeks.

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Claire, it's been fantastic to talk to you for our literary podcast.

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I recommend The Push, as I've been saying. Tell us about, tell us the name of the novel that's coming out next month.

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It's called 'I know you'. Excellent. Excellent. So look out. Look out for that.

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And there's a great back catalogue of Claire McGowan's work if you're interested to follow that up.

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Join us again for the next  Hertford Literary podcast.

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Thanks to our guest, Claire McGowan, and to Hannah Bironzo, who has been producing this podcast on behalf of the Development Office.

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