Star interview: Clare Mackintosh
Her instinct for observation and investigation inform former police officer Clare Mackintosh’s bestselling psychological thrillers, she tells Tina Jackson
Psychological thriller author Clare Mackintosh bears out the creative writing student’s maxim that you should write what you know. Clare is the author of grip-lit blockbuster I Let You Go and now its compelling follow-up I See You. Until recently, she was a regular WM columnist whose Excuse Me Officer column drew, like her fiction, on the knowledge gleaned during her former career as a police inspector. Clare’s thrillers offer a standout sense of authenticity that has reaped dividends: I Let You Go has sold more than half a million copies, been translated into almost thirty languages, been a Sunday Times bestseller, and was the fastest-selling title by a new crime writer in 2015.
Clare’s twelve-year police career included time on CID and as a public order commander. ‘I did always want to be a writer, but I don’t think I considered it was something I could do as an actual job,’ she says. ‘When I was in the police, I was one of the few police officers who enjoyed paperwork – I actually enjoyed taking victim and witness statements. Doing that, I felt as if we were storytellers – getting the accounts from victims and putting them into a file was a way of uncovering the truth. I didn’t realise it at the time, but victim statements and witness statements were a way into storytelling. Later, I saw that was what I was doing.’
A traumatic case from her early days in the police force provided the creative spark for I Let You Go, which begins with a hit-and-run that leaves a young boy dead and sparks an investigation after the driver fails to come forward. ‘I’d never really let go of a hit-and-run in Oxford, soon after I joined the police force. A child was killed. It had plagued me, this question of how can you walk away? To this day there’s someone who knows what they did and haven’t come forward.’
There is, though, another much more personal, and tragic, reason why Clare’s domestic noir carries a deep sense of conviction. Clare gave birth to twin boys, Josh and Alex, in 2006. Five weeks later, Alex died of meningitis. Both I Let You Go and I See You are woven though with themes of grief and loss. ‘Writing about grief and love and fear has happened since losing my son. You can’t quantify grief but there are few things harder than burying a child. Nothing matters after that – it was easy to share and explore grief and darkness because I’d been to hell and survived it.’