'You never know who to trust': Sarah Pinborough on her brand new novel and Netflix series
With her bestseller ‘Behind Her Eyes’ about to become a Netflix series, author Sarah Pinborough has turned to the millionaire’s playground of Savannah, Georgia, for her next thriller. David Barnett finds out more
When Sarah Pinborough sat down to write her latest novel Dead To Her, she decided to build on the success of her previous two thrillers by adding a dash of good old bonkbuster fun. “I thought the world was looking a bit grey,” she says from the home near Milton Keynes she shares with her beloved rescue dog Ted. “I thought, let’s write something with a bit of fun to it.” She pauses, considering what everyone has been through over the last five months. “I didn’t realise just how much the world was going to need a bit of fun at the time.”
That is not to say Dead To Her is necessarily a barrel of laughs. Set against a backdrop of the sultry heat of Savannah, Georgia, the novel concerns the lives of a group of elites through the eyes of two women: Marcie, who has married into this rarefied world of old money and powerful families thanks to her affair with Jason Maddox, and Keisha, the youthful, captivating — and black — British wife of Jason’s older boss William.
With Marcie feeling usurped as Keisha draws the attention of everyone, including her husband, the stage is set for intrigue, murder and a sheen of the supernatural in the shape of the heady voodoo that permeates the hot Savannah nights. It’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil meets Big Little Lies.
While it has her trademark darkness and psychological thrills, Dead To Her definitely tips its hat to the fabulous era of the doorstop novels by the likes of Judith Krantz and Jackie Collins, where the rich, famous and morally bankrupt play out their scandalous lives in the world’s most exotic and expensive locales. Has she, in fact, written a bonkbuster?
Pinborough, 48, laughs and says: “I did want to write something with a bit more fun than the last two and I have always loved those 1980s bonkbusters. So I wanted to write something like that, but with a dark, psychological thriller wrapped around it.”
And the result is Dead To Her, which ticks all the boxes on that front and firmly establishes Pinborough as one of Britain’s premier contemporary thriller writers.
If you know her work, it’s probably through her previous novels in this genre, 2018’s Cross Her Heart and her “debut”, Behind Her Eyes, from 2017. That novel, of course, was by no means her debut at all, because the novel she’s now working on, set for a release next year, will be her 27th.
But Behind Her Eyes was certainly the book that catapulted her to the next tier of authorial fame, and put Pinborough squarely in the psychological thriller camp. It’s a busy field, and is often given the term “domestic noir”, though largely when attached to the many women who are writing in the genre, because of their female protagonists and superficially normal home-life situations, which generally quickly reveal secrets and lies beneath the surface.
Behind Her Eyes mined those tropes and then blew them out of the water. Setting out Pinborough’s stall with what would become her favoured multiple-protagonist point-of-view structure, it featured down-at-heel Louise who has an ill-advised fling with her doctor boss, and then befriends his wife Adele. But it’s the ending — and the Hitchcockian exhortations from publishers Harper Collins to not give it away — that helped send the book rocketing up the bestseller lists and led to it being picked up by Netflix, with a series adaptation due to hit the streaming service early next year.
The follow-up, Cross Her Heart, trod an even darker path. It featured three narrators; Lisa, who harbours a dark secret involving the death of a child in her past; her daughter Ava, who is seemingly being groomed online by an older man; and Lisa’s colleague Marilyn, whose apparently perfect life is anything but.
Much of the joy in reading a Pinborough novel is trying to work out who among her principal characters is telling the truth... or at least, who is telling the least lies.
“When you come into the stories, you’re looking at events from different perspectives,” says Pinborough. “I suppose everyone is an unreliable narrator. You never know who to trust, which is a deliberate device in my writing. And I suppose we’re all like that in real life to some degree. I think most people lie, even if they’re meaning to or not, even if they don’t realise it. Like, someone might ask if you want a cup of tea and you say ‘no’, you’re in a hurry, when you’re not really, you just want to get away. Or even, you know, ‘does my bum look big in this?’
She’s married, she’s got a stay at home husband who’s a bit younger than her. Then someone starts messing with her life. That’s all I can really say about it
“We do this all the time, and probably the person we lie to most is ourselves. We’ll say, ‘right, I’m going to do an hour of exercise today,’ and then you make excuses to yourself. And two people can see the same thing in the same room and have different ideas about what they’ve just seen.”
So it’s often not a case of working out who’s lying in a Pinborough novel, because even the characters themselves might not know what the truth is. But when it comes to Dead To Her, there are, thankfully, some truly awful people we can get behind hating in the Savannah jet-set. But why, after two books set under the grey skies of Britain, has she switched locations to America’s Deep South?
“There was a big conference organised for independent bookstores there and I was invited along around the time Behind Her Eyes came out,” she says. “I thought I was going to love New Orleans the most, but when I went to Savannah I really, really loved it there. I thought, I’m going to set my next book there so I can come out here for a three-week research trip.”
She laughs, but there’s a sobering reason she never made the trip; around the same time, her father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He died in the August of 2018, while she was writing Dead To Her. For that reason, it will always be a book that carries the baggage of mixed emotions with it.
Pinborough’s father was a diplomat, and she had a childhood travelling around the world, living in Syria until she was eight and then studying at a school in Bedford, where she described herself as being the “naughtiest girl in school”. A short-lived career managing a strip club in Soho in her twenties gave way to perhaps a more reputable job, as head of English at a school in Luton. But her ambitions had always leaned towards writing.
Which is why those who’ve only come to Pinborough through her psychological thrillers, or domestic noir, or grip-lit, or whatever buzzword comes next for hard-hitting books written by women, might be surprised at the breadth of her back catalogue. Her first published fiction was a clutch of horror novels put out by a US house called Leisure Books, with titles such as The Hidden, The Reckoning, The Taken and Breeding Ground, between 2004 and 2009.
She then had a brief fling with writing licensed novels for the Doctor Who spin-off show Torchwood, before simultaneously writing two trilogies under different names: The Dog-Faced Gods series set in an alternative, dystopian Britain under her own byline, and a young adult fantasy series called The Nowhere Chronicles, as Sarah Silverwood.
Perhaps channelling her “naughtiest girl in school persona”, Pinborough then wrote three rather saucy retellings of classic fairy tales for Gollancz, Poison, Charm and Beauty, which put Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty firmly in Fifty Shades of Grey territory. Then came two supernatural Victorian thrillers, Mayhem and Murder, and a mass-market release for an earlier haunting little novel called The Language of Dying.
While Pinborough had developed a strong reputation over the preceding decade, and was receiving plaudits from the likes of Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, it was around 2015 that her fortunes began to change. She wrote two YA novels, The Death House and 13 Minutes, which came to the attention of the film and TV industry. Then in 2017 Behind Her Eyes was published, and Pinborough’s star was suddenly and quite definitely in the ascendant.
In fact, she achieved some minor celebrity status, even making it into the Evening Standard’s gossip column on the arm of her then-boyfriend, Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh. The Standard referred to her first as a “girl about town” before “fellow author” despite, it should be noted, having published twice as many novels as Welsh. And it does Pinborough a massive disservice; she’s renowned as one of the hardest-working novelists in the business… especially since Hollywood came calling.
“I’m working 10- or 12-hour days at the moment,” she says. “I’m working on a new novel and the screenplay of it at the same time, which is an interesting experience.”
She can’t say much about the next book — Dead To Her is her main focus, of course — other than to say it’s about a career woman to whom strange things start to happen. She says: “She’s married, she’s got a stay-at-home husband who’s a bit younger than her. Then someone starts messing with her life. That’s all I can really say about it. But there’s a lot of stuff about female guilt in there. She’s got a sister with kids and she hasn’t, and it’s sort of about the way some women look at you if you haven’t got kids. I remember even when I’d gone 40 people were still saying to me, don’t worry, there’s still time…”
Pinborough doesn’t have children, and aside from being papped with Irvine Welsh, she tends to keep her relationships private. She was married at 28, after a ceremony in Las Vegas, which was a short-lived thing. She was also, when younger, in an abusive relationship with a controlling partner, which took strength to escape from and seems to have helped forge her independence.
Once a prolific Twitter user, she’s been put off the social media platform of late by a perceived increase in general aggression and bad feeling. “It’s not like it was when I first joined in 2009,” she says. “I still like engaging with readers on there but…” She shrugs. “I’m wary about even posting pictures of my dog Ted on there, sometimes.”
You know, in a lot of ways they are terrible people, but they’re interesting and the dynamics between them are interesting
Not that she’s got much time for social media anyway, promoting Dead To Her, writing the screenplay to the adaptation of The Death House, simultaneously writing a novel and screenplay adaptation, and with several other TV and film projects in various stages, none of which she can talk about. Oh, and there’s the small matter of the Netflix series of Behind Her Eyes, starring Eve Hewson, Tom Bateman, Simona Brown and Robert Aramayo.
Although she hasn’t written the adaptation of Behind Her Eyes herself, Pinborough is gaining traction in the TV and film industry. People are coming to her with commissions and wanting her original ideas. Her first TV script was an episode of the BBC cop show New Tricks; it’s been a steep learning curve since then, but one she relishes.
“I’ve been very lucky with my books being optioned,” she says. “I think my books must be very televisual or filmic. They have something that appeals to the industry. So while they might not necessarily go into the top 10, they do attract the attention of TV and film.
“And writing for TV and film is something that seems to fit my brain. Some people are really skilled at writing in their field and that suits them, but I’ve got this kind of scattershot approach when I come up with ideas, and some of them are suitable for novels, and some are suitable for TV, and some are both.”
Dead To Her has been optioned, and has already made a big splash in America, being released there in the spring. The UK publication was pushed back because it’s considered a big summer book; if you get away this year you’ll probably see someone reading it on the beach.
It’s good timing for the book; it was less so for the States. “It was going to be this big airport thriller but then it was released and… well, nobody was using the airports, were they?” She’s philosophical about it, though. “What can you do? It’s one of those things. And there are bigger problems in the world right now than how many copies of a book are sold.”
Still, the Netflix adaptation of Behind Her Eyes is going to catapult Pinborough to a new audience, and potentially give Dead To Her a second wind in the States. She’s keen for people to meet Marcie and Keisha when the book is out here.
She says: “You know, in a lot of ways they are terrible people, but they’re interesting and the dynamics between them are interesting. Keisha especially, she’s married for money but you feel a bit sorry for her because she’s so young and you think, you’re going to learn a lesson here. You marry for money and you’re going to earn that money.” She pauses. “You’d definitely want to go out for a drink with them, I think.”
Gaiman called Pinborough a chameleon of a writer – and he’s right. Her career has been varied, and she’s hit huge success well into her career, which should give other writers hope. But she also never strays into the territory where she might begin to believe her own hype.
“In a way, I’m propelled by fear,” she says. “I mean, I’m confident in what I do, in doing the work, but it’s the whole career thing. You’re always worried that the next time you get a ‘no’ your career is over. But you’ve just got to keep working hard. Right now, I’m making hay while the sun shines.”
‘Dead to Her’ is published by Harper Collins in August
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