Adam England speaks to a Bala-based novelist whose forays into the crime genre, with the exploits of Welsh border police force protagonist DC Morgan, have proved an instant hit. Clare Mackintosh’s new title, A Game Of Lies, looks set to continue that streak.
“I became obsessed with Married At First Sight, which is a true guilty pleasure,” Clare Mackintosh tells me. The author is talking about the inspiration for her new novel, A Game Of Lies, which revolves around a reality TV show set in the Welsh mountains.
“I binge-watched it last year and just became really fascinated by the way reality television manipulates the people involved in it, and also manipulates the reader. We think that what we’re seeing is the truth, but actually, it’s all curated and edited for entertainment. So, I was thinking a lot about that, and I wanted to put a murderer in a reality TV show, because that sounded like quite a fun challenge for a detective.”
A Game Of Lies is Clare Mackintosh’s second book in the DC Morgan series, after last year’s The Last Party [reviewed by Buzz here]. Given her previous career in policing, I had to ask whether she looks back to her old job for influence.
“I draw on my police experience a lot,” she says, though she explains that she doesn’t tend to draw on real-life cases she worked on. “The sort of thing people are often surprised by is that real-life crimes are often really dull and real-life criminals are actually quite stupid.”
Rather, she explains that her career taught her why good people do bad things and vice versa – and the ease at which someone can find themselves crossing the line. “So a lot of my fiction explores what happens when we’re driven to do terrible things,” she says.
She took a break from the police because she was “pretty much at work all the time – if I wasn’t physically at work, I was kind of mentally at work. I just realised that my ambition and my drive were great at work, but they risked breaking our family. And that wasn’t something I was prepared to do.”
Mackintosh began copywriting and pitching to publications, explaining that though she always wanted to be an author when she was younger, she “didn’t know anybody who worked in the arts” and couldn’t envisage a career in fiction as a realistic option. Just a few years on, though, she’s already writing A Game Of Lies’ follow-up: regarding its plot, Mackintosh says she’s “not entirely sure what’s happening” so far, though she does share that it takes place around a whitewater rafting centre.
But this isn’t all fans have got to look forward to, as The Last Party is being made into a TV series. Mackintosh explains that while she met with a range of production companies, she wanted a Welsh company that would “respect the Welsh settings and themes in the book”. Cardiff-based 5 Acts Productions have got the TV rights for the adaptation, with bilingual dialogue planned: there’s no real timeframe yet, but certainly one to keep an eye out for.
Wales is something that’s a big part of Mackintosh’s writing. While not Welsh herself, she spent time in Pembrokeshire while growing up, and fell in love with north Wales after moving to Bala with her family: “We were at a point in our lives where we could have lived anywhere – I work for myself, I work from home, and my husband had left work in order to look after the children while I travelled.
“I think you would really have to surprise me away from this part of Wales, I love it! And I’m really quite passionate about the Welsh language. I’ve got three children who are at a Welsh-medium school. And I’m working very hard to be fluent. So it’s become a really big part of my life.”
A Game Of Lies is published by Sphere on Thurs 20 July.
Price: £16.99. Info: here
Clare Mackintosh’s website is here
words ADAM ENGLAND
