Interview: Gilly Macmillan

Bristol-based thriller writer Gilly MacMillan’s first two novels have appeared in bestseller charts in several countries including the US and Germany as well as the UK. Julie Fuster finds out more about Macmillan’s new thriller, Odd Child Out, and what makes Bristol a great setting for a novel.

Odd Child Out is your third novel, does the writing process get easier?

I thought it would become easier but it hasn’t! It’s because each new story requires a new world to be created, and that presents a whole new set of challenges, even if you are bringing back a regular character and using a familiar setting. It’s always hard and meticulous work to breathe life into that world for the characters; your goal as writer is to create believable interactions and situations for them, to give the story its own internal logic and to provide enough tension running through the plot to keep readers gripped. Basically, you need to make sure that all the moving parts of the novel work well enough together to give the reader a seamless experience of the story and keep them turning pages.

There are a few aspects of the novel writing process of that I have got better at with experience, pacing being one example, and I probably make fewer basic mistakes now than I did when I wrote my first novel, What She Knew, which helps to make the editing process less painful.

What is it about Bristol that inspires you to use it as a setting for the novels? 

I first lived here when I was a student at Bristol University and moved back here permanently about ten years ago with my family. It’s a brilliant place to live. I absolutely love it. Bristol is a city that has a little bit of everything: a fantastic mix of people, exceptional architecture, a long and fascinating history (even if it is not always pleasant), a brilliant creative vibe and, arguably, the best coffee in the UK.

Bristol’s size, its distinct character, and the variety of people and places within it – from the gritty to the genteel – make it a perfect setting for a thriller. I try to vary the locations I use, too. Odd Child Out starts with a scene by the Feeder Canal; The Perfect Girl is set in an area very like Sneyd Park and Ben Finch, the little boy who disappears in What She Knew, is last seen walking his dog in Leigh Woods.

Missing children is a strong theme in your work – what made you return to it for this novel?

A child who is missing – physically missing or absent in other ways – is a theme that cuts to the core. Motherhood itself, and our relationships with our own mothers, is a huge part of all our lives and I like my books to tackle themes that sit close to our hearts and minds and have a universal relevance. Thrillers are a good place to explore themes like this because they allow us experience a level of peril that we hope we never have to go through in our ordinary lives.

A story about a missing children taps into many of our worst nightmares. That is certainly true for me, and a reason I chose it as the central plot of What She Knew and tackled it in a slightly different way in Odd Child Out. In What She Knew I wanted to explore what it might actually feel like for a mother to go through the experience of her child disappearing, especially when she might be under suspicion by the police herself.

Odd Child Out is written from multiple points of view, what do you think are the strengths of that style of writing?

I love to read books that have multiple points of view because it allows the reader to experience the action from the perspective of different characters, all of whom are players in some way. I guess that means I write the kind of books I’d like to buy for myself. I think it’s an exciting technique because it helps to layer up the plot and create tension. It’s a technique that lets the writer give information to the reader before some of the characters are aware of it. It’s also a way of showing that a character might be unreliable: their view of themselves might be very different from somebody else’s view of them. All this is very useful when you are writing a thriller or a whodunit.

Your books have appeared in New York Times, Globe & Mail, Der Spiegel and other bestseller lists around the world. What do you think makes a successful thriller?

Characters you can relate to, plotting that twists and turns in unpredictable yet believable ways and action that moves at a swift pace. At the end of each day, I look at what I’ve written and ask myself: Will this keep a reader turning pages? If the answer is ‘no’ it gets deleted or heavily revised. If it’s ‘yes’ I’m allowed to keep going. I always prioritise the reader’s experience.

What is your next project?

I just finished my fourth novel, another thriller set in Bristol. The title is I Know You Know. It’s about a fictional double murder that happened in the 1990s. A man was convicted of the crimes at the time, but the case gets new publicity when the best friend of the young victims returns to Bristol to investigate what happened for a true crime podcast. Not everybody is pleased that he’s back and digging into the past, including the detective who worked the case originally, and also the mother of one of the victims, and events quickly escalate.

Odd Child Out is out now. For more information visit: www.littlebrown.co.uk/books/detail.page?isbn=9780349412924

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