Nicci French
Author Interview - Nicci French (Nicci Gerrard and Sean French)
Author of House of Correction.
“Tabitha Hardy has to investigate the murder of a neighbour in the west England village where she lives. Her problem is that she is in prison, charged with that murder. Everyone believes she commited the murder, including her own lawyer. So she fires her lawyer and opts to defend herself. So she is the accused, the detective and the defence lawyer all at the same time.”
Author Interview - Nicci French (Nicci Gerrard and Sean French)
Author I draw inspiration from:
Sean: So many but one example is Ernest Hemingway. He was flawed in so many ways but he invented a new way of writing dialogue, spare, precise, menacing, always suggesting more than was said.
Nicci: I always loved the example of the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote in the middle of domestic chaos, soup on the hob, a child under her chair, baby on her lap. The children have all grown up and left now, though the soup remains - but still that sense of writing happening in the middle of life's messiness is one I hold dear
Author Interview - Nicci French (Nicci Gerrard and Sean French)
Favorite place to read a book:
Sean: In a garden on a summer evening with a glass of wine at my elbow.
Nicci: by the lake in Sweden, where we spend our summers, back against a birch tree
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
Sean: Pippi Longstocking (from Astrid Lindgren's series of books about her). She's funny, she's naughty, she's entirely unflappable and she's also the strongest girl in the world, so she might be able to get me out of that stuck lift.
Nicci: Elizabeth Bennett from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice - she'd be calm and merry
Author Interview - Nicci French (Nicci Gerrard and Sean French)
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
Sean: my parents were both writers, I grew up in a house stuffed with books. Alarmingly, in retrospect, I never really thought that anything else was a possibility.
Nicci: Probably when I was about seven and I would hide under my blankets at night with a small square red torch and write stories and read them to myself and think I was brilliant - oh to have such self-confidence now
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
Sean: They all have their place. Paperbacks for the bath, audiobooks while out running, ebooks for taking on holiday and hardbacks for the books you know you'll want with you for the rest of your life.
Nicci: I think Sean is cheating, and I have to choose paperbacks (though love them all) because then I don't worry about staining them or turning down the pages
The last book I read:
Sean: Spies by Michael Frayn, a beautiful story about two boys in wartime London 'spying' on the adult world and discovering all kinds of secrets beneath the surface of suburban life. It's a beautiful, haunting story but also its own kind of thriller.
Nicci: Elena Ferante's The Lying Life of Adults, because I'd been smitten by her Naples quartet. This most recent novel is a strange, harsh tale of adolescence, flawed but compelling.
Author Interview - Nicci French (Nicci Gerrard and Sean French)
Pen & paper or computer:
Sean: I love the idea of writing by hand but in practice, my hand hurts if I write more than a sentence with a pen and afterwards I can't read what I've written. So sadly it has to be a computer.
Nicci: Oh computer - my left-handed handwriting looks like a spider has been dropped in ink and crawled across the page, and no-one can read it, even me.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
Sean: That's easy. I'd like to be best friends with Mrs Ramsay, one of the central characters in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. She's the best portrait of a friend in all of literature: she looks out for everyone, thinks of everyone, understands everyone; endlessly alert, endlessly caring. Woolf based the character on her own mother.
Nicci: I think I need to chose Jane Eyre (from Charlotte Bronte's novel of that name) , because I feel as if I have been friends with her since I first met her, when I was about thirteen and was blown away by the passion, anger and disobedience of this small plain invisible woman.
Author Interview - Nicci French (Nicci Gerrard and Sean French)
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
Sean: failed journalist.
Nicci: I'd like to be a tree surgeon and spend my days up in the branches
Favorite decade in fashion history:
Sean: Paris in the 1890s, maybe, for the sheer elegance that Marcel Proust spends so many pages describing. But any time really that men had to wear hats.
Nicci: How about the 1920s-30s, when women wore flapper dresses and sequins and mad little cloche hats, and at the same time trousers and androgynous suits so they could ride bikes and feel free
Place I’d most like to travel:
Sean: the place I've been to before: Venice, a place that is nowhere else in the world and incomprehensible if you haven't been there, walked there. The place I've never been to: the far east is a world I've no experience of at all, and yet the culture fascinates me. People say that Seoul is one of the most exciting cities in the world, so that would be a start.
Nicci: take me to a Greek island, clean blue water and clear blue sky, now!
My signature drink:
Sean: a dry martini, very dry and very cold: six parts gin, one part vermouth and a fat slice of lemon peel. A great drink but one to be approached with great care.
Nicci: a glass of good wine - maybe Condrieu, which Sean buys for me on special occasions. Or actually, a large mug of nearly milk-less tea (preferably Lapsang Souchong mixed with Assam).
Favorite artist:
Sean: Giovanni Bellini, specifically his 1505 altarpiece of the madonna in the church of San Zaccaria in Venice, the most beautiful painting in the world: an image of stillness, silence music and the loveliest blue robe.
Nicci: Maybe Matisse, especially his later works which are full of zest and joy
Number one on my bucket list:
Sean: I'd like to see every Vermeer painting in the world. There are only thirty-four (one of which was stolen from a Boston art gallery and never recovered).
Nicci: I want to hear a nightingale sing again.
Anything else you'd like to add: We've been writing together for twenty-five years and it's been a strange, utterly improbable adventure. But we hope that people read our books not as an experiment but as the work of this one particular writer, Nicci French, who has her own imagination and her own strange talent which is different from either of us.
Find more from the author:
Twitter @FrenchNicci
Author Bio:
Sean French: I was born in 1959 and grew up in London. Before collaborating with Nicci and I wrote books on my own, including several novels and biographies of Patrick Hamilton (author of the plays, Gas Light and Rope) and Brigitte Bardot. We have four grown up children and live in London and Suffolk.
Nicci: I was born in 1958 and grew up in rural Worcestershire. For many years, I worked as a journalist on the Observer, and I have written solo novels alongside being one half of Nicci French. Six years, following the death of my father, I founded a campaign for people living with dementia.
