If someone who knew Mo Hayder in her teens and 20s had looked into a crystal ball, they would have been very surprised to see that this tattooed "rock chick" at age 43 had become a bestselling writer with three brooding thrillers and a three-year-old daughter to her credit.
Hayder left school at 15, we learn from the jacket of her new novel, The Devil of Nanking, published in April by Grove. In her native England, she shared an apartment with a bunch of bikers, worked as a barmaid, a security guard, and a filmmaker. She taught English in Asia and was a nightclub hostess in Tokyo, where she dated a Korean loan shark. She certainly doesn't sound like a typical resident of the genteel, historic spa town of Bath—famous for its connection with one of her least favorite authors, Jane Austen—where she now teaches creative writing at the university.
"I suppose I was trying to live life to its extremes," says Hayder, snatching a few minutes to chat via transatlantic telephone while Lotte is at nursery school. "My mother's a teacher, my father's a scientist, and we had quite a dry sort of life: a lot of dusty books, we visited ruins on our holidays, things like that. So anything that had to do with learning I just found utterly stifling; it represented my parents."
Hayder's mother's loved Jane Austen and the Brontës, but the headstrong daughter was having none of it. " 'Oh, Mummy, you always give us such boring books!' " she recalls with a laugh. But then one day her mother gave her a copy of Kafka's The Metamorphosis. "I vividly remember opening it and thinking, 'Hang on, Mum's made a big mistake here!' That first line, when poor Gregor Samsa wakes up and finds he's an insect, I just remember all the hairs on my body sticking up and thinking to myself, 'Ah, now, thisis fiction!' I was only about 10, but I was completely intrigued by this giant beetle who had to live under the bed. That's my first memory of being enthralled by anything slightly out of the ordinary."
Hayder spent 10 year "as a rock chick, almost a groupie." She wore her life lightly, going from boyfriend to boyfriend, living hand to mouth and working at jobs she calls "very weird." By her early 30s, she was back in London and living with Lotte's father-to-be. Hayder found herself writing down ideas that always seemed to end with someone dying horrifically. "One morning I woke up and thought, 'Oh my God, I'm writing a crime novel!' " Her inexperience certainly didn't show in the completed manuscript of Birdman, which was snapped up by U.K. agent Jane Gregory, sold to Transworld Publishers (part of Random House's English empire) for "quite a lot of money," and upon publication shot up the bestseller lists. The Treatmentand Tokyo(The Devil of Nanking's U.K. title) sold equally well all over Europe. "I was really spoiled," Hayder says. "When you sit down as a writer you're told that maybe your 10th novel will be published for $5000; it was completely the opposite for me." But it was a different story for Hayder in the U.S.
Her first two novels didn't match their European success in the States, where they were published by Doubleday. But when Grove Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin read Tokyoat the urging of Hayder's American agent, Kim Witherspoon, he was sure he could do better.
"I just was riveted," he recalls. "There's depth to Mo's work, and the writing is so good; there's more going on than with most straight commercial thriller writers. I read thrillers and mysteries voraciously, and I'm beginning to publish them, most successfully with Donna Leon."
Entrekin immediately called Witherspoon and expressed his amazement at Hayder's work. "I have to publish this," he told her, "but I think the title's wrong: Tokyosounds like a travel book.'" Entrekin suggested The Devil of Nanking and was amused to discover that this had been Hayder's original title, but her English publisher made her change it. "That was a good sign!" he jokes.
"I think Mo is better coming from a house like Grove Atlantic," Entrekin continues, "because she's a little more literary and she defies easy categorization. Part of the change in the marketplace is that if the big houses take a position on an author and it doesn't pan out, it's more difficult for them. I think that's creating opportunities for publishers like myself to look for the sort of very strong writers who build over several books."
Although Entrekin has no intention of getting into million-dollar bidding wars with big group publishers for "the next new hot thing," he believes he can publish writers like Hayder "on perhaps a more modest level and try to establish them here." The Devil of Nanking,he reports,is having very nice success in hardcover, and his reprint plan—to publishing under a joint Grove Penguin imprint next spring, is part of his overall strategy for otherwise midlist authors like Hayder.
This three-year-old co-publishing venture enables Grove Atlantic to take advantage of Penguin's mass market expertise for authors who don't fit as comfortably into the Grove Press trade paperback format. "Penguin has an established program in this area, and it's easier to do when you've got a partner like that," comments Entrekin. "Although publishers are starting to do trade paperback mysteries, I think most people expect to be able to spend $8 rather than $11 or $12." The Penguin Grove titles' $7.99 cover price, he believes, has played a key role in the paperback success of Donna Leon, and he expects The Devil of Nankingto benefit from its placement in the mass market racks as well: "I think that's the way to get her going in this market at the level she works at in the English and European markets."
The critical reception has been laudatory—PW, Kirkusand the New York Timesall praised The Devil of Nanking for its unsettling exploration of evil, ignorance, and guilt. The book's troubled heroine, Grey, is obsessed with atrocities committed by the Japanese during the 1937 occupation of Nanking in China. Grey comes to Tokyo in 1990 because she has heard that a visiting Chinese professor possesses film taken in Nanking that she desperately wants to see. The film shows an "unspeakable" torture mysteriously linked to a horrific event in Grey's past; we only learn the exact nature of these two crimes in the book's grim climax. While trying to persuade the reluctant professor to show her the film, Grey takes a job in a nightclub, where she meets a sinister gangster who turns out to be the perpetrator of the atrocity filmed in 1937.
"I used to look at these elderly businessmen on the train in central Tokyo, or in the nightclub where I worked, and I'd think, 'My God, you could so easily have been one of those soldiers!'" says Hayder, who learned about Japanese wartime atrocities while visiting relatives in the Philippines. She knew she wanted to write about the massacre of Nanking, but she knew it would be in the context of a novel. "I haven't got the courage for nonfiction, but when I write fiction I have got courage: it's the sense that actors have that you can't be yourself but you can be someone else."
Speaking of someone else, Hayder the mother and professor, back in idyllic Bath, is hard at work on her next book—and perhaps it's another good sign for her enthusiastic new U.S. publisher that this one has an American connection. She spent a couple of years in the States as a child while her father worked for NASA, and she remembers "being absolutely terrified of this blurry footage from California that was supposed to be of Sasquatch, the Big Foot. It was probably a guy in a gorilla suit, but I thought it was real."
Hayder admits to being drawn to "damaged people." She finds them "deeper and more interesting—and more dangerous. I probably feel slightly damaged myself, if I'm honest about it. I'm not very good at feel-good characters." So now she's writing a novel that started its fictional life as The Devil of Pig Islandbut at the moment is tentatively called The Beast.Maybe she can get Morgan Entrekin to come up with a better title.
