In “Conviction”, I wanted to write a book about getting completely lost in a story and what that does for us. Escapism deserves more credit. Escapism has saved more lives than penicillin.
When I’m involved in a story, whether in a book or a podcast, I feels as if I have a secret door in my mind. Whether it’s to get through a boring journey or for fun, I know that at anytime I can escape through that door into another world. Researching for a book feels like going through the same door: yacht interior design, Google map street view trips through Venice canals, the train journey from Lyon to Paris. All of those things described in the book were researched online or in real life. I don’t know why people call research ‘painstaking’ because for us real nerds it’s joyous. It is literally like being paid to read.
Being lost in a story is an extraordinary human capacity, but the story has to be right.
In “Conviction”, Anna is listening to a true crime podcast and hears her friend mentioned in it. That really grew from a question an interviewer asked me about my previous book, “The Long Drop.”
“The Long Drop” is a true crime novel about a case in the 1950s. I had a play staged in Glasgow about the case. Many of the audience seniors. Glasgow seniors are not shy. They told me that the official court story in the case was wrong, that was not what happened at all, in fact the story was much more complicated. So I wrote a book I suggested a different solution from the official one and a journalist interviewing me was troubled by that and by true crime in general: how would you feel, he asked, if someone told the story of your friend or family member?
“Being lost in a story is an extraordinary human capacity, but the story has to be right.”
I didn’t have a smart reply. I think he was right because I probably would find that upsetting. That question stayed with me.
Months later I was at a book festival and two men in their eighties waited on chairs at the side of the room until the signing queue was finished. The book seller brought them over to me and explained that they had travelled quite far to come and see me. Their mum was one of the people killed. They wanted to say that the version I had in the book was what they had always believed and they were glad someone had finally told that story because they had been listening to the other version all their lives.
This isn’t a justification of what I did, those ethical questions still stand, but I was struck by how much it hurt those men to listen to the wrong story all their lives. Because the stories we hear about ourselves really matter. They’re incendiary.
If it happened now I’m sure they would have a true crime podcast of their own.
