Cara Hunter talks to John Marrs

John Marrs is one of my absolute favourite authors – not only ludicrously talented, but one of the nicest and most generous writers I’ve yet met. His books are extraordinarily inventive (I wish I knew where he gets his ideas from!) and I’m not surprised broadcasters are taking such an interest.

I look back rather wistfully now at meeting him in person at Harrogate’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in 2019, but let’s hope we can do that again later this year. In the meantime, virtual conversations are better than nothing!

So you started your writing life as a freelance journalist working on the entertainment industry and interviewing celebrities – that must have been huge fun! How did you get into it? And do you have a favourite celebrity story?

I used to edit local newspapers in Northamptonshire before gravitating to London and working for the News of the World’s Sunday magazine, interviewing celebs from film, music and TV. And it was great fun and incredibly surreal at times. One day I could be in a hotel room talking to Jack Nicholson about his snakeskin boots and the next, a Spice Girl might be serenading me across a table in an empty restaurant. When I look back, I wish I’d kept a diary of those years.

What prompted the decision to start writing fiction?

Just to see if I could do it, like a challenge to myself. I read an article in a magazine that had me thinking ‘this sounds like a great concept for a book’ and I just started writing it. No plotting, no forward thinking, just writing. A year or so later and it was complete. It eventually became When You Disappeared.

You really hit the big time with The One, which was a book of the month on Radio 2. It’s a fantastic book with a hugely inventive premise – talk us through how you got the idea and how it felt to suddenly be a smash hit?

In 2016, my partner and I were planning our wedding for the following year in New York’s City Hall. I was working in London at the time and one evening on my way home, I was on the escalator heading for my tube train, people watching. I was looking at the folk on the other side thinking how lucky I was to have found my match. Then I began wondering how much easier it would be if there was something inside us all that matched us with just one person in the world. And if we came into contact with them, we just knew on instinct that they were the perfect person for us. I started writing The One later that week. Four years later and a day doesn’t pass when I receive at least a handful of messages from readers somewhere in the world who want to talk about it. Its longevity still surprises me.

You’ve now written eight books – you’re so phenomenally productive you put me to shame! And, not only that, all the books are completely different. What’s the secret?

I have a low boredom threshold, Cara! Once I have finished writing and re-writing a book and then listened to the audiobook, I will never read it again. It’s like splitting up with a partner. You had a great time while you were together, there are no hard feelings but you have grown apart and are ready to move on to the next stage of your life. I have such respect for writers such as yourself who use the same characters but develop them so thoroughly throughout a series and manage to keep each storyline fresh. It’s a skill I don’t possess.

I see you describe your fiction as ‘speculative’ – and there’s certainly a dystopian/near-future/sci-fi theme running through many of them – The Minders, The Passengers, as well as The One. Why does that area appeal to you so much?

I’m fortunate as get to write psychological thrillers for one publisher and speculative fiction for another. I particularly enjoy the latter because it allows me to use my imagination more. All of my concepts, be it finding love through DNA, data storage or driverless vehicles, are all based on fact. But then I like to put my own spin on it and enjoy seeing how far I can take my story and my readers.

You’ve also tried your hand at police procedural with Her Last Move. What attracted you to that, and what did you like or dislike about it?

When I read about a branch of the Metropolitan Police whose officers are super-recognisers – a team with photographic memories for faces – I thought it would make for a great story. I also wanted a new challenge, to write in a genre I had no experience of. Thankfully, I found a couple of police officers willing to help me with the accuracy of how an investigation is carried out. I’m really proud of that book and it’s had great reviews but, compared to my others, it wasn’t a huge seller. So I’m going to leave this genre to the experts like you! But if I hadn’t tried my hand at it, I don’t think I’d have written last year’s What Lies Between Us which became one of my biggest hits.

You have a new two-book contract with Pan Macmillan. The first book is called The Marriage Act, and is described as a ‘dark, high-concept thriller set five minutes in the future’. What else can you tell us about it?

All I’ll say is that it comes under the same umbrella as The One, The Passengers and The Minders but it isn’t a sequel. It involves love, relationships, an ensemble of quirky characters with dark secrets and Artificial Intelligence. I plan to start writing it in the summer.

You’ve achieved all this success without an agent – that makes you very unusual (at least in my experience). Can you tell us why you took that approach, and how easy (or difficult) it is to manage that side of things yourself?

To begin with, I had no choice because eighty agents I approached with my first book all rejected me! So I self-published my first three novels and in one week, I was approached by two different publishers for two of my books and a production company for The One. It was a strange old time. I negotiated everything myself and have just kept doing so with the help of my husband who has some legal training. I have an agent for TV and film rights though, who is based in LA. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that.

And now The One is coming to Netflix! That must be amazingly exciting! How did it come about and can you tell us how the filming is going, especially in lockdown? Have the main roles been cast?

I’ve just watched the first episode this morning. It was all filmed just before the first lockdown and I got to visit the set in January 2020 to watch a few scenes being shot, which was amazing. I’ve had nothing to do with the TV adaptation, so I’m very excited to see where they will be taking my idea.

And What Lies Between Us has also been optioned, by Renée Zellweger’s production company. Any news on that?

Frustratingly, I’m not allowed to say at the moment! But I have my fingers crossed that they can turn it into something interesting. My book, The Passengers, has also very recently been optioned by a different production company in the USA so I’m really excited about that too.

And here are two questions I always ask… If you could only take three books with you to read on a desert island, what would they be?

Aside from yours, of course, I’d take with me The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne, The Beach by Alex Garland, and Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. The latter is a weighty tome that I’ve yet to read so it will keep me occupied.

Looking back, what would you tell your younger self?

Start writing at an earlier age! Don’t wait until your forties before you begin. But perhaps I needed to live my life so that I could draw elements from it to use in my books. Otherwise I might now be looking back and cringing at what a 30-year-old John Marrs once thought made up a great thriller…