The Monster in the Cupboard

In her 12th novel of suspense, a British writer delivers big hooks with Sheer Abandon (Reviews, Jan. 15).

Sheer Abandon hinges on a baby girl's abandonment in a Heathrow closet, and one of the three young women in the book who could have done it becomes a tabloid journalist. You were a journalist at the London Daily Mirror. Did you work on a "mystery baby" story there?

I was a fashion writer, so I didn't. But like Jocasta, I did get very adroit at writing stories quickly. Whenever people ask me now if I have to be inspired to write, I say "God, no."

This is your sixth novel?

I've actually just finished my 13th. There's an awful lot that hasn't been published in the U.S. yet.

Are all your novels this scale [640 pages]?

Yes. They're all absolutely huge. Immediately before Sheer Abandon, I wrote the Lytton trilogy, The Spoils of Time, which has been published here: it runs from 1901 up to the '60s. That was a huge endeavor, massive. It made Sheer Abandon seem like a novella. They try to make me write them a little bit shorter, and I just don't seem to be able to.

All your novels are suspenseful. What makes good suspense?

Two things. One is having enough strands so you can jump backwards and forwards: you get Jocasta into a difficult situation, and then you hold her there while you switch back to one of the others. The other is backstory. All my books start with a "what if?" What if your husband asked you to lie for him to keep him out of jail? What if you came into an enormous amount of money, how would it affect you? In this case, what if you abandoned a baby—and what if you were that baby? They're good hooks, the sort of things people actually can't quite resist, myself included, and you need enough background to work them all the way through. And as an editor of mine says, the longer you can keep the monster in the cupboard, trying to get out, the more suspenseful the story. When I started this book, I did not know which of those three girls had done it. I think some of the suspense comes from my wanting to find out.