Author Janice Hallett talks to us about her latest book The Twyford Code and her ancestral connection to Suffolk.
Janice Hallett is a British author, screenwriter and an award-winning journalist. Before her crime debut, Janice worked as a journalist, magazine editor and speech writer for the Cabinet Office and Home Office, as well as writing for the stage and screen. Her first feature film Retreat came out in 2011, and she won the award for Best New Screenplay at the 2014 British Independent Film Festival.
In 2021, Janice published her chart-topping debut thriller The Appeal, which has been a big hit with Suffolk readers. Composed of emails, texts, police transcripts and other documents, this unique interactive murder mystery filled with amateur sleuths and thespians took the crime thriller to new places. Janice's second novel, The Twyford Code, published by Viper in January 2022, revolves around a secret code spotted in a famous children’s author’s work by an English teacher who subsequently disappears, and the former pupil who starts to investigate her fate decades later. You can find Janice's books on our catalogue.
I don’t think I had human ‘heroes’ as such, but in my ‘tweenage’ years I loved horses. Watching them, feeding them, riding them… Only, I lived in an outlying dormitory suburb of London and there were no hoofed animals within a twenty-mile radius. I’d never touched a horse, let alone sat on one, so I read pony books instead. Most were cheerful jolly-hockeysticks tales from the 1950s, but one author stood out: Patricia Leitch. She wrote several standalone pony books, plus a series called Jinny at Finmory. Her stories are shot through with Celtic mythology and have a distinctly 21st Century sensibility to them. Jinny Manders and Shantih the Arab mare became my heroes.
I’ve been writing ever since I learned how to. I read English at UCL because in the days before universities offered degrees in Creative Writing, English was the next best thing. I only went into journalism because it seemed to be one of the few professions where writing was a major part.
Government communications is probably the hardest writing I’ve ever done. Not least because when I started doing it, I’d spent the previous 15 years writing about tweezers and mascara for a trade magazine. By comparison, novels have far more generous deadlines, but they are much, much longer, so it all pans out in the end.
Artistic people are traditionally messy and chaotic, but I find having a fierce routine really helps the creative process. I’m at my desk by 8.30am every day and will write intensively for three to four hours. After lunch I have another three to four hours of re-reading and amending what I wrote in the morning, plus catching up with correspondence and other bits and bobs (like answering these questions).
It was a happy accident that became the aspect of the book I am most proud of. Before deciding to write a novel, I’d had a vague idea for a TV series about a couple who return from volunteering overseas and whose experiences there inform their suspicions about a local fundraising campaign. When I started The Appeal, I thought: why not take the same story, but present it as emails that fly back and forth ‘off-stage’ so to speak, between minor players? That’s why we don’t hear from the three main characters and it’s one of the most effective devices in the whole book. Once in the flow of writing, I kept track of the characters naturally… it helped that they are all very different!
Because it was written back-to-back with The Appeal, I had to make sure I didn’t effectively write the ‘same’ book twice. So I made some rules. As The Appeal had been an ensemble story with female main characters, I vowed the second book would follow a single character’s personal journey, and that character would be male. I started it in August 2019, but the majority was written in covid lockdown. I was totally focused with no distractions and it flew on to the page. I think the fact it’s essentially a first-person narrative really helped with the flow. I loved the main character, Steve, straight away and hope readers do too.
I’m writing my third novel at the moment. It will be published (all being well) in January 2023.
I struggle to read while writing because what I’m reading interrupts my own writing style and rhythm. Having said that, I’m fortunate to be sent advance reader copies of forthcoming books these days. On my stack is Sundial by Catriona Ward, Nasty Little Cuts by Tina Baker and Annie Stanley All At Sea by Sue Teddern (which is already published.)
There really isn’t any ‘worse’ thing at all! It’s been an amazing journey from the start. The best thing is connecting with readers and hearing how the book has spoken to them. One young woman told me it had inspired her to pursue a career in law. How wonderful is that?
I have a family connection to the Suffolk area. My paternal grandmother was from Wangford and Lowestoft. She went into service at Henham Hall circa 1900 and her brothers are commemorated on Wangford War Memorial (the three servicemen by the name of Brown). She couldn’t marry at the usual age because so many men of her generation were killed in the First World War, so in her late 30s she moved alone to London. There she met and married my grandfather, by then a widower of 60, and they had my Dad, who remained very fond of Suffolk throughout his life. I wonder if any distant Suffolk relatives have read The Appeal without realising they are related to the author…?
