Bestselling author Alex Michaelides is back with a brand new thriller, The Fury (Penguin), his third after his breakout hit, The Silent Patient (2019), and The Maidens (2021). This time we are taken to a remote Greek island, complete with a cast of characters and of course, a murder. It’s nearly impossible not to think about Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None when there’s a murder on an island. This is true for Michaelides himself. In this interview with The Hindu, the author discusses Christie’s influence on his books, and the ways in which he wants to make the format of a psychological thriller his own.
Extracts from an interview:
Would it be correct to say that the location is very important to your books and plots? The Grove and its secure ward in The Silent Patient, Cambridge University in The Maidens, and now, a Greek island — all of these are so central to the story. Sometimes, do they kick it off too?
Yes, you’re quite right. You know, for me, I think it always goes back to the beginnings of my writing, which was reading, and it was reading detective stories. The writer who made me into a reader was Agatha Christie. And she has an iconic enclosed location for every single one of her books. And its important I think for a closed circle mystery with a limited number of suspects that they are in a contained space which they can’t just walk out of and leave.
The reason I wrote The Silent Patient was because I was working in a psychiatric unit and I was walking along the corridor one day and I suddenly through to myself, oh, Christina Bassett set a murder mystery inside a psychiatric unit, and how it’s perfect as a location. And that’s what set the whole ball rolling. And so now in my head I always start with two things. I start with the location, first of all. And then I think about the idea of a twist. I think with the location, particularly with The Fury, Christie didn’t write a Greek island mystery, but she did set two novels on islands — Evil Under The Sun, and And Then There Were None. So what I wanted to do with that was to bring my own personal experience of growing up in the Mediterranean, in Greece, and spending time in the Greek islands, and see if I could make it feel kind of authentic and real as as a place.
And another recurring aspect of your novels have been allusions and references, sometimes direct and sometimes indirect, to Greek myths and stories.
Yeah, it’s very much who I am. I grew up in Cyprus and Greek mythology and Greek tragedy specifically, is very much part of the culture there. So it’s not just that there are ancient ruins all over the place, and they perform the tragedies all the time in the outdoor theatres in the summer. But at school they teach you Greek tragedy. Instead of Shakespeare, we were learning Euripides and Homer. So it’s very much part of my imagination. The story of Alcestic by Euripides is about a woman who dies to save her husband and then when she’s brought back to life, she won’t speak to him again. And the refusal to speak is not explained in the play. I was taught that play when I was about 13, and obviously I was too young to understand it at the time., but I did think, ‘why doesn’t she talk?’ And it bugged me for years. Then I kind of went back to it at about the same time as I was wrestling with the idea of trying to write a novel and working in the psychiatric unit and thinking, “oh, I could set a novel here.” I thought, “what about if I took the Alcestis and I updated it to the modern day and it and put her inside a psychiatric unit?” And then the whole thing collided in my head and I was like, “oh, that’s a good idea!” It’s that kind of process where I think things that preoccupied me come back and forth in my imagination.
So you’ve got the location, the memory of a story that keeps coming back to you, and the genre that you want to write in. What is it like to fit them together, especially in The Fury?
Well, the first thing for me was that I knew I was was responding on some level to Christie’s And Then There Were None. There’ve been so many copies and iterations of that book for decades, pretty much almost a 100 years. And I knew that if I were to try and write that, I had to try and do something slightly different. I didn’t want to just copy that book. Then the next thing that occurred to me, which was the most fun thing for me, was realising that readers today are so sophisticated and they’ve all read this kind of story before, so they’re all bringing a certain kind of expectation to it. I thought it would be really fun to play with their expectations, and to come up with the twists and turns and try to change it. I also had fun with the narrator making him into a very self aware narrator who’s aware of the genre he’s writing — he’s as aware as the reader is. And so he’s able to discuss the concept of what we expect in that kind of genre or what tragedy means in your free will and fate. All of those things were really fun for me to explore.
Elliot is definitely a character that defies expectations — he’s playful, he talks directly to the reader, but he is also complex, with so many layers to him. Could you talk about creating him?
The word playful, I’m so glad you said that because it was the most fun I’ve had writing a book so far. I wrote it in a different way than how I wrote my first two books. My first two books, I plotted them for about a year, a year and a half, and then I began to write. This time I wanted to try and free myself up and write something more organic and spontaneous. I just started with the characters and the location. I didn’t even know who was going to be murdered or why they would be murdered or who the killer was. I just started to write and it led me in all kinds of difficulties in the end. But there was a sense of play which was fun, and when I got to the end of the first draft, it was written in the third person and it felt lifeless. I seemed to have a block with the third person. I struggled with the maidens, and if I could rewrite The Maidens now I would make it first person. There’s something about first person which gives you an immediacy and a connection. And so I was left with this kind of draft that I didn’t like, and I was walking along the beach and I just asked myself for the first time, who is talking and I thought, “oh, what about if it’s Elliot?” And Elliot at that point was a very minor character, just comic relief, really. He was very silly.
Then I thought maybe he’s telling the story and then I wrote the whole thing from the beginning again with his voice, and he changed the whole story. It sounds pretentious, but it was the most creative experience I’ve ever had, because things revealed themselves to me, like his relationship with this writer Barbara West and his childhood. . Everything just appeared as I was writing and he was telling me the story. So in a way, I think the person that he’s talking to is me. You know, it was very much like I was just listening and transcribing and thinking. And I like the idea that he’s really worried about entertaining the reader and not boring the reader, and he’s very conscious of the reader’s presence. So you are quite right to say that it’s quite performative in a way.
When it comes to a thriller, or a mystery, there are so many aspects of the story vying for attention — the actual crime, the process of detection and investigation, but then, all the other subplots and threads; relationships between characters, the ambience of the setting, the build up, setting the context. How do you find your balance there?
Well, it’s tricky. I always think it’s like writing two stories at once, because you’re writing the apparent story which is the one that the reader is reading, and then underneath it there is the real story of the murderer and their intentions and what’s really going on and the truth between all of these characters and the reality of their relationships. So you have to juggle two things at once. Again, it’s a very perceptive point you’re making because what interests me specifically is that, as I improve as a writer and I write more books, is to try and and make the relationships real and not contrived. My problem with a lot of thrillers and detective stories is I just don’t believe anything that the characters do, because they’re doing it in order to fulfil a plot. What I aspire to do is to bring them together and to try and write a novel that where it it functions as a thriller, but it also functions as a novel with real believable people. And so in The Fury, I spent an awful lot of time thinking about the the childhood of all of the characters and I wrote pages and pages of stuff that I didn’t include in the novel. But it felt very important to me that even if I don’t tell the reader, I know everything that happened to them and why they are the way they are.
What about the psychological thriller genre has kept you to it? You’re three books down, and it’ll be interesting to know what attracts you to these stories.
That’s a great question. No one’s asked me that before. I intended to be a a novelist before I became a crime novelist. It’s something I fell into. I think it’s just because it’s what I love to read. I love to read detective stories because they bring order from chaos. We have a very satisfying structure and you know there has to be a crime, an investigation, a solution, and I think that’s the building block on which I work now. I wouldn’t know how to write a story that didn’t have those elements in it to some degree. And I think most, most books too. I mean, every book has a kind of mystery at its core. I never know what to call my books because I don’t know whether they’re thrillers or detective stories or mysteries and suspense novels or crime or whatever. But that kind of thing will always, I think, play a big part in what I write.
It’s impossible for anyone who’s read Christie to not think of And Then There Were None while reading an island mystery, or not think of some of her other big books while reading of unreliable narrators. In fact, too often the mind goes to a particular Christie book while reading mysteries today. Would you agree, and how do you feel about that?
I think it’s kind of impossible in a way. I think the reason that I find her so inspiring is not necessarily the characters but the form. There’s nothing she hasn’t done. So you have one where they all did it. You have one where the child did it. You have one where the detector did it, and it just goes on and on and on, these permutations of these ideas. It’s just so brilliant. And I think everybody, however much they try, cannot come up with something she didn’t come up with. That’s kind of what attracts me, is that aspect of it. What I think I try to bring to it that makes it fresh for me is the structure. The Fury goes back in time. The Silent Patient operates on a big time loop. I love the idea of ending a book right back where we began. When I was younger, I was very obsessed with the films Pulp Fiction and also Memento. I love stories that play with time in that way. So I like the idea of colliding a detective story with that kind of narrative structural play. I think it’s very exciting.
I’ve always wondered this — do mystery writers want their readers to be completely surprised by a twist they didn’t see coming? Do they want them to figure it out as they read the book? Which one is it for you?
Ideally, I would like them to get there just before I do, Because I think that’s quite satisfying. But I think what’s very important to me in the the climax or that you know the plotting of a story. Laura Thompson wrote a biography of Christie and she said that the best Christie plots are where the emotional resolution and the plot resolution occur in the same beat, like in Five Little Pigs, for example. When you find out the truth of the relationship and who the murderer is, it’s heartbreaking. What I want to and try to do, is to make sure that the the twist, the reveal has an emotional beat. I want the reader to be, on some level, emotionally touched or moved, affected in some way by it,because when I read a thriller and there’s a reveal and it’s empty, I’m not really interested.
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