Claire Allan: ‘My daughter was diagnosed with autism – it was a lightbulb moment’
Claire Allan: an "accidental crime writer"
Claire Allan is in the middle of moving house. She apologises for talking to me ‘from a fort of boxes’ in her Derry home, but I’m too busy admiring the dark glamorous wallpaper behind her.
“I wish I could take it with me,” she says – but on the plus side, she’ll have a dedicated writing room in her new house, a few minutes’ drive away.
As the international bestselling author of unputdownable crime thrillers, Allan’s ‘room of one’s own’ is more than deserved. Her latest book, The Nurse (Avon/HarperCollins), looks set to further ignite her reputation as a writer of empathetic, character-driven, page-turning crime, with none other than Marian Keyes announcing on Twitter that she ‘horsed through The Nurse, pure HORSED!’ This story of a young woman – Nell Sweeney, the titular nurse – being stalked on her way to and from work is as tense and page-turning as it is relevant.
Featuring a villain pulled straight from one of the most toxic corners of the dark web, the book is enhanced by Allan’s unerring eye for complex characters – including Marian, Nell’s mother, who is left to cope when the unthinkable happens.
“I always say I’m an accidental crime writer,” Allan laughs. Having begun her career in the genres of historical and popular fiction, she migrated to crime based on the suggestion of an editor, who saw the bones of a great thriller in Allan’s novel-in-progress.
“My first reaction was: ‘no, I can’t do it. You have to have a really methodical way of working. It’s too complicated to write thrillers!”
But over the course of a lunch meeting, the editor convinced her. “She said: ‘You have to give yourself permission to step outside your comfort zone and allow yourself to release your dark side.’’
The resulting book was Her Name Was Rose, the 2018 psychological thriller that became Allan’s breakthrough hit in crime fiction.
“I absolutely fell in love with writing all over again,” she says. “It was just so exhilarating an experience. I was learning as I went along, because I wasn’t even a big crime reader at that stage. I wrote it in about three months because I just had to be writing all the time. The sense of satisfaction when it all comes together – it’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle.”
She is delighted that her popular fiction fans have followed her into the domestic noir genre, noting that there are many similarities between the two.
“There is an overlap there because ultimately it’s about humanity and human experience. Women’s fiction is often really character-based.
“It’s important to me to flesh characters out and make them real and relatable – even the villains. I think in most of my books, you feel sorry for, or you understand the motives of the person who does the bad thing. All of us in the right or wrong circumstances can do very bad things if we’re pushed.”
Researching The Nurse involved taking a deep dive into the internet subculture of incels – short for ‘involuntary celibate’. Discussion on incel forums can often be characterised by misogyny, entitlement, resentment and hate, and Allan confesses that spending time on these forums took a mental toll.
“There were times when I was uncomfortable with what I was writing, getting into the mindset of the male antagonist.
“And I wanted – not to make him sympathetic, but to make him understandable, so the reader could see how somebody could be drawn into that world.
“It was definitely a challenge and I did sometimes have to just switch off – go hug a dog, or walk along the beach and clear my head.”
When reading The Nurse, one can’t help but think of the recent tragic deaths of Ashling Murphy and Sarah Everard, who, like Allan’s character Nell, were attacked by strangers in public. Allan recalls having a frank conversation with her editor in the wake of Everard’s death last year.
“It just felt too close to reality,” she says. “We had a conversation about whether this was the appropriate time for this book to come out, and would people think we were piggybacking on tragedy. But there have been 125 women murdered in the UK since Sarah Everard, which is terrifying. So in a way, there’s never a sensitive time for the book to come out.”
Among her crime influences, she cites Jane Casey, Brian McGilloway and Liz Nugent, adding that the TV series The Fall “gave me confidence that crime stories could be set in Northern Ireland that weren’t Troubles-based”.
Much of her inspiration, however, is drawn from the 17 years she spent working as a reporter for The Derry Journal, covering the courts, health and education, and the Saville Inquiry.
“I spoke to so many women who had lost children, or who had survived sexual abuse or domestic violence. There’s a commonality to those experiences that really impacts on you,” she says.
“I suppose I had this bank of really dark stuff, just sitting there, ready to be let out. But I don’t think I could have written about that while still working as a journalist. I needed to be able to be away from the profession and to process a lot of what I’d heard. If I was still going out as a reporter and chatting to people, it would feel too exploitative. But a lot of the novels were inspired by things that women told me. It may just be one sentence that has stayed with me for years.”
On her Twitter feed (@ClaireAllan) and elsewhere, Allan has spoken very honestly and compellingly about being a parent to autistic kids, and how this experience has helped her to realise that she too is neurodivergent.
“My daughter was diagnosed last summer and that was a lightbulb moment,” she explains.
“She has a very similar personality to me, so when she got the diagnosis and everything was pointed out, that was basically me. I went, ‘oh, okay’. It has helped me understand why book signings and events are difficult for me or why I get nervous about them. It’s not that I’m rude or ignorant or couldn’t be bothered. It’s given me the confidence to be able to say ‘this is why it’s difficult for me’. And people generally do cut you a bit of slack and go a little bit easier on you.”
She mentions a book that she has found very helpful: Drama Queen by Sarah Gibbs, who was diagnosed as autistic at age 30.
“I cried a lot, because it’s so funny, but also because I just related so much to everything. It was like somebody saying to you, ‘do you know what? Your brain just works a wee bit differently. You do have a place in this world and in this industry’.”
She smiles. “It was like someone saying, ‘you’re actually all right’.’
