Interview: C.L. Taylor, Knowle’s thriller queen

Bristol is home to one of the UK’s most popular psychological thriller writers, C.L. Taylor. The Knowle-based writer has sold a combined total of more than a million copies of her first three absorbing, tension-filled tales. This month sees the release of her fourth, The Escape – and the promise of more heart-rate-increasing and sleep-depriving torment for her rapidly growing readership. Joe Melia finds out more.

When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I’ve wanted to write since I was a child. I was hugely inspired by Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree series, which really fired my imagination. When I was eight I discovered that another child, a nine-year-old called Jayne Fisher, had been published (the Garden Gang series) and decided that, if she could do it, so could I.
I sent a book I’d written, illustrated and bound with wool to Ladybird publishers. Shortly afterwards I received my first rejection letter. I tried again when I was 11 – and was rejected again. Twenty-four years later I sent my first adult novel to an agent and she offered to represent me. It took me a while to become a published writer but I got there in the end.

Has moving to Bristol changed your writing in any way?
In some ways, it has. I lived in Brighton for thirteen years before I moved to Bristol and my life is very different now. When I lived in Brighton I mostly socialised with my friends and workmates but now, as a mother doing the school run every day, I meet a wider variety of people. Knowle is a fascinating place to live because so many different types of people live here and there’s a definite sense of community that I haven’t experienced before.
It’s something I’ve explored in some of my books. In The Missing I imagined how a community like this would rally around to help a family with a missing child. And how they would react if there was a whiff of a scandal about the disappearance. In my new book, The Escape, I focused on a very isolated woman, suffering from agoraphobia, living within this community. Life goes on around her – but she observes it, rather than participating in it.

You’ve sold over a million copies of your previous three thrillers. What impact has that had on your writing?
Popularity is a double-edged sword. It’s wonderful that so many people are reading my books, but also… so many people are reading my books! The knowledge that thousands of readers have enjoyed my work and are excitedly anticipating my new novel can make me feel really self-conscious. There’s a weight of expectation that wasn’t there when I wrote my first book. I’ve developed a mental trick now where I say to myself, ‘no one is ever going to read this apart from me’ when I sit down to write. It’s the only way I can deal with the pressure.

Your thrillers are full of tension and are very pacy, none more so than The Escape. Much of the narrative is spent in the characters’ heads. How difficult is it to maintain the pace when writing in this way?
My favourite writing quote is by Elmore Leonard: ‘leave out all the parts readers skip’. It’s my mantra when I sit down to write a novel. I’m not a writer that particularly enjoys writing descriptive passages and, as a reader, I often skip over them. As a result, my novels are very light on descriptive writing. I prefer to focus on action and dialogue. I also try to ensure that there is conflict in every scene so, even if we are in the character’s head, they always have a difficult decision to make or an obstacle to face. My aim is to keep my readers frantically turning the pages long after they should have gone to sleep.

What led you to The Escape’s main character, Jo Blackmore, and her terrifying predicament?
A local news story inspired me to write The Escape. I follow Avon and Somerset Constabulary on Facebook and noticed an update asking for help finding a woman who’d gone on the run with her young son instead of turning up at court to hand over residency of the child. The woman’s family began commenting on the update, telling members of the public not to tell the police if they spotted the runaway women. They said she wasn’t a danger to her son, she was actually protecting him by running away.
That made me wonder how I’d feel if I had to go on the run to keep my child safe. I channelled that fear into Jo Blackmore and then I made life even trickier for her by making her an agoraphobic whose mother has kept a shocking secret from her for over 30 years.

What is the latest news on The Lie being optioned for a TV series?
I’m very lucky that The Forge, the production company that made the amazing Channel 4 drama National Treasure featuring Robbie Coltrane, have optioned the TV rights to my second psychological thriller, The Lie. TV dramas can take years to make, if they are ever made at all, so I need to be patient and wait and see what happens next!

You have two young-adult thrillers in the pipeline. What can we expect from them?
I recently completed the edits for my first young-adult thriller, The Treatment. It’s about a young woman who tries to rescue her younger brother from being brainwashed in a remote reform school in Northumberland. When I pitched it to my agent I described it as Prison Break meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – and it’s due to be published by HarperCollins HQ in September. I need to start writing my fifth adult psychological thriller soon: then, once that’s done, I’ll start writing the second YA book. It might be a sequel to The Treatment, it might be something completely different. I’m not sure yet.

What is the best book you have read in the last year?
That’s a tough decision, but I think I’ll have to go for Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty. I was feeling a bit blocked when it came to reading (I can sometimes find it hard to lose myself in a story because I’m too aware of how it’s been constructed/written) but Big Little Lies was such a pacy, entertaining, witty read that I quickly lost myself in the story.
Liane Moriarty is an incredibly insightful author. She has a way of zooming in on the minutiae of life in such a way that makes you nod your head, smile or think ‘oh my God, I do that too’. As the mother of a Reception-age child, so many of her observations about school-run mums made me laugh or cringe and I couldn’t put it down.

The Escape (£7.99, Avon) will be published on March 23. For more info, visit www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780008118075/the-escape