shortlisted for Crime Book of the Year in the British Book Awards 2019 and No Way Out was selected by the Sunday Times as one of the 100 best crime novels since 1945. Hunter’s books have sold more than a million copies worldwide. She lives in Oxford, on a street not unlike those featured in her books.
The newest title in the DI Fawley series is The Whole Truth.
My Q&A with the author:
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Learn more about The Whole Truth and visit Cara Hunter's website.
Titles play such an important part in establishing the reader's route into a book. Like the jacket design, it's like a signpost for the sort of experience to expect. You only have to look at the original titles for classic novels to see how vital they can be - would The Great Gatsby have been such a hit if it had been issued as Trimalchio in West Egg? And what about All's Well That Ends Well - doesn't have quite the gravitas of War and Peace, does it.
As for my own books, all the novels in the Fawley series thus far have had three-word titles, all of which have a double meaning. Thus Close to Home (literally, figuratively), In the Dark (likewise), All the Rage (fashion, but also anger - the theme of the book). The Whole Truth is number five, and here the title is - of course - a deliberate reference to the oath taken by witnesses in court, but it's also, as the reader quickly discovers, the name of a podcast, included in full in the book, which analyses a possible miscarriage of justice. The rub there is that the case in question is one where my lead character, Adam Fawley, was instrumental in securing the conviction. And as he well knows, he wasn't the only one back then who didn't tell 'the whole truth'...
What's in a name?
I never intended Close to Home to be the start of a series - I had no idea it would even be published. That story was conceived as a twist on the oft-repeated crime-fiction theme of the disappearance of a child (and no, I'm not going to tell you what the twist is!). In any situation like that there's inevitably a police investigation, so Adam started life as - in effect - a necessary piece of plot machinery for that particular novel. And the name I gave him reflected that. The book is set in Oxford, and the surname Fawley is an echo of Jude Fawley, the 'hero' (if that's the right word) of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. Jude has a son who commits suicide in one of the most tragic scenes in Victorian literature, and Adam, too, has a son who took his own life, shortly before the action of the novel begins. I made this part of Adam's back story because I wanted him to be acutely aware of what parents who've lost a child will be going through.
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?
I think my teenage self would be surprised to see me as a writer at all! We didn't have many books at home, and no-one in my family had had a university education, so being a writer wasn't on my radar at all, not even as a distant dream. But I was always a voracious reader, and eventually went to Oxford to study English literature (that's where the Hardy comes in!). But even then, I didn't have any idea of being a writer; I had a career in banking and PR and as a copywriter and it wasn't until much, much later that the urge to write creatively started to evolve. But that's all good: as I always say to readers who ask about my writing career, this is one of those things you can come to later in life; in fact, you may well have more to say.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
Beginnings are vital - I work on the basis that you have about a page to reel your reader in - but it's endings that are the real challenge. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been intrigued by the premise of a novel, only to find the whole thing ends in a damp squib. It’s as if the author has a great initial idea, but absolutely no clue how to resolve it. Not like all those Victorian classics I studied at Oxford - they really knew how to do a decent final page.
And of course getting the ending right in crime fiction is even more important than in other, more self-consciously 'literary' genres. The contract with the reader demands closure and tidiness (though a few loose ends are allowed), but there's also the elephant-in-the-room issue of The Twist. I love doing these - as a writer, nothing gives me more pleasure! But you have to follow the rules - your perpetrator must have been in plain sight throughout (Agatha Christie is the acknowledged queen here), but so well hidden that the reader's first reaction is'OMG!' followed swiftly by 'But of course'. Because looking back, there is, to paraphrase Frank Kermode, 'sense in the ending'.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
I think there's quite a lot of Adam in me, probably because I write him in the first person. Some of his background is mine too - the sense of humour, the upbringing in a dreary London suburb - so some, but only some. He's definitely not a surrogate me. Occasionally I'll see an aspect of myself peering out from another character, and that's usually a surprise when it happens - something unintentional. I think that happens to writers a lot - you find facets of your own life snaking into your fiction.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
Mainly crime on TV, both crime drama and true crime. The best of these are truly innovative: the way stories are told, the pace, the rhythm, the energy, the rapid changes of point of view. Not to mention the use of mixed media (a major aspect of my writing style, which I took to its logical extreme in Murder in the Family by eliminating the author's presence entirely). That's the sort of experience I'm looking to replicate in my books. But you'd have to ask my readers if I've succeeded!
--Marshal Zeringue