The Scoop on author J.P. Smith
My Favorite Unreliable Narrators
The unreliable narrator has, I think, always been a staple of the thriller genre (as well as literary fiction—Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier is famous for it). Having a narrator who seems perfectly innocent and relatable while engaging in planning, say, a homicide, is both a great challenge and, if you can carry it off, great fun to write. I think of Dorothy Hughes’s classic noir In a Lonely Place, much darker than the movie starring Humphrey Bogart. And there are Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels. It’s all about co-opting the reader into becoming comfortable with this character before the more sinister side is revealed. And the notion that Ripley is so matter-of-fact in how he carries out his crimes (including, of course, murder) makes it even more chilling.
My Secrets for Building Suspense
I really learned how to write thrillers by writing screenplays in that genre. Scripts are highly-structured things, and it’s always vital when writing them that you always wonder what the audience is thinking from one scene to the next, so you’re constantly playing upon their expectations, throwing plot reversals at them and ratcheting up the beats and plot points until, one hopes, the audience holds its breath until the final moments of the last act. It’s about subverting their expectations, because all readers and viewers come in believing that they know how the book or the movie will roll out .
On the surface, If She Were Dead seems first and foremost a novel about obsession and betrayal, but it’s also a book about revenge, about how a novelist, in this case Amelie Ferrar, can allow her imagination to carry her into a far crazier territory than she could have ever anticipated. And yet she’s a best-selling writer, featured in Vogue, drawing huge crowds to her signings and readings.
Writing an “unhinged” character
I wrote a female protagonist before, in my fifth novel, Breathless, though that’s a very different kind of book. Unlike Jill Bowman in the earlier novel, Amelie has a public face that she feels she must maintain at all times, presenting a person of poise and composure, flush with the success that comes with being a bestselling author. While inside she’s breaking down, losing the thread, moving into a dangerous zone. As with Catherine Deneuve’s character in the film Repulsion, her world begins to shatter into pieces.
My End Process
I had the ending before I wrote the book. Yes, the tail wagged the dog. It came to me one day: how to reset history and to get revenge upon someone who is suddenly beyond your reach, forever denied to you.
For the reader, Amelie becomes the world of the book. You play by her rules, you follow her path, you watch how her future takes shape, and you let her manipulate you.
My most influential authors
I came to the genre from certain French writers. While living in England in the late 70s, and I was teaching myself French, I fell upon the works of Patrick Modiano, who back then was neither very well known in America and a long way from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
His works, although they don’t conform in a formal way to the thriller and mystery genre, are really mysteries. The narrator, who stands in for Modiano, is like a detective, looking for clues into his own past, his own enigma, or searching for a missing person. I also discovered René Belletto, not at all known here in America, whose works mixes genres—literary, crime, thriller, and even at brief times science fiction. But it’s his thriller writing that comes at the genre from a particularly wry angle—never resorting to the usual tropes of the genre—that intrigued me.
I came to admire the great Jean-Patrick Manchette, whose thrillers are now much better known here thanks to the translations that have been published. Whether writing about a political kidnapping that goes horrible wrong, or a hit man on the verge of retirement who is brought in from the cold to take on one last job, his books are always worth reading and rereading
The Writing Life
For forty years I’ve written every day. I don’t outline as I would a screenplay. Writing a script is like making a puzzle and then scattering the pieces in a particular way so the audience watches it being constructed on the screen before them. You really do have to know how it’s going to end before you start on the first page.
A novel is more of a journey. We follow one path, come to a crossroads, follow another path and maybe even find that the story we began writing has taken a new direction. I generally have an idea how it’s going to end, though sometimes I even surprise myself by the detours I take.
As for If She Were Dead, I began it some twenty years ago, completed a draft and set it aside. It was missing something. I had a character I very much liked, but I needed to take her to into a darker realm. I returned to it often, revising and rewriting, until I realized that this was, in fact, a sometimes darkly-comic thriller about obsession and madness and revenge.
JULIA: What are some of your favorite stories of obsession, madness and revenge, dear readers? Do you like an unreliable
narrator? And what exactly are the differences between screenplays and novels?
You can find out more about J.P. Smith, his novels, and his other writing at his web site. You can friend him on Facebook, talk books with him on Goodreads, and follow him on Twitter as @JPSmith8. If She Were Dead will be published by Poisoned Pen Press/ Sourcebooks on January 7, 2020.
