Janice Hallett never imagined that, in her 50s, she would become a novelist, let alone a celebrated new voice in crime fiction. But a few years ago, after a lifetime of other jobs — beauty-industry journalist, government speechwriter-for-hire, frustrated author of unproduced screenplays — she fired up her laptop and opened a blank document.
“I thought, what do I have to lose?” she recalled recently.
The result was “The Appeal,” a murder mystery set among the members of a provincial drama group, which was published to rapturous reviews and huge sales in Britain in 2021. A fiendishly clever modern-day reimagining of the classic epistolary novel, using emails, text messages, newspaper clippings and interoffice memos in place of letters, “The Appeal” invited readers to become detectives themselves, teasing out the mystery within.
Three years on, Hallett has used variations on this approach in equally innovative novels about, among other things, a pair of competing true-crime journalists investigating a possibly supernatural cult (“The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels”) and an ex-con describing his hunt for the code concealed in the novels of an Enid Blyton-esque children’s author while also, it turns out, describing something else entirely (“The Twyford Code”).
Her most recent book, out this month both in the United States and Britain, is “The Examiner,” an even more complicated puzzle box of a story using instant messages, emails and academic essays to plumb the nefarious goings-on in a multimedia art course at a British university.
Reviewers have marveled at the books’ ingenuity. “Hallett’s treatment of crimes as intellectual puzzles looks like a logical progression in a market hungry for locked-room thrillers,” Madeleine Feeny wrote in The Bookseller. “Yet she has somehow managed to revolutionize the genre.”
In person, Hallett, 55, is low-key, unfussy and wryly funny. She describes herself as an introvert and seems genuinely surprised at the turn in her fortunes.
“If I sat down and thought about how to write a novel, I never would have come up with this format,” she said in an interview over the summer. But it makes sense for her, she added, since her preference for listening rather than speaking has made her acutely sensitive to what people say and what they leave out.
“There’s a lot of deception, and self-deception, in communication,” she said. “People try to cover things up and don’t admit things even to themselves, and that thrills me.”
Wearing comfortable pants, a sensible black cardigan and a pair of fuzzy pink house slippers, Hallett was chatting over lunch in her house. It’s a compact two-story structure identical to hundreds of other houses on a very long street in Northolt, a suburb in West London. Hallett was born nearby and sees no reason to move away or to change much about the way she lives.
“You may have noticed that the furniture is from the ’90s, which is the last time we decorated,” she said, laughing. (She has ordered a new sofa, though.)
She had set out a variety of salads and sandwiches — along with a spectacular selection of fancy cakes and cookies displayed on a tiered pastry stand — for lunch. Her partner, Gary, a gas engineer whom she first encountered in a local drama group, the Raglan Players, when both were teenagers, was out.
Hallett’s parents met at a local factory that produced the pungent liquid antiseptic TCP. “They said you had to out with someone else who worked there because no one else could stand the smell,” she said. Later, her mother worked at the local gas board, and her father became the manager of an appliance-rental shop — a point of familial pride.
“My mother always made sure you said ‘manager,’” Hallett said. “If I were to give my family a class label, I would say they were in the aspiring working class, always trying to better themselves.”
When Hallett was 12, her beloved brother, Brian, who was as gregarious and outgoing as she was reserved and private, died of Hodgkin’s disease. He was 21. There was no option to give in to grief, or to address it with therapy, and Hallett retreated inside herself. But it sparked something.
“It gave me my creativity,” she said. “It’s what makes me write.”
Hallett’s parents weren’t remotely bookish, but she was. Though her classmates derided her as a nerdy “swot,” she found school a refuge and — after getting unexpectedly good grades on her pre-college A-level exams — realized that higher education was an option. “I had to hastily ring round the universities and say, “Have you got any spaces?” Hallett said. She ended up studying English at University College London.
She always wanted to write, she said, even if it meant writing about topics she wasn’t naturally interested in, like makeup. She worked at Cosmetic International, a trade magazine, and left it to help start Pure Beauty, a publication for people who sell beauty products. In her late 30s, she quit.
“I thought, ‘it’s now or never,’” she said. She wrote speeches and policy documents for politicians and government agencies; she got a master’s in screenwriting; she wrote, directed and acted in plays for the Raglan Players.
In 2006, after answering an online ad, she was hired to help rewrite a screenplay for a movie about people on an island who have been told that they are the survivors of a pandemic. The movie, “Retreat,” starred Cillian Murphy and came out in 2011; the relative ease of the experience filled Hallett with confidence about her future in the film industry.
“Hahaha,” she said, looking back. Though she wrote numerous screenplays and TV pilots, along with experimental plays that were put on in pubs — including “NetherBard,” a feminist comedy about three actresses caught in some sort of Shakespearean alternative universe — none of her work made it to the screen. “Nothing convinced me to give up, not even failure,” she said. “I wasn’t discouraged. Isn’t that weird?”
Finally, she was admitted to a program for would-be screenwriters “who had fallen through the net,” as she described it. “They were into diversity, and I was an older, working-class woman, so I qualified.”
Her mentor in the course, Cameron Roach, the former head of drama at Sky Studios, said, “Have you thought about writing a novel?” she recalled. That’s what led to “The Appeal,” which — after its success in Britain — was published in the United States in 2022; Barnes & Noble made it their mystery pick of the month that November.
“It’s not a usual trajectory, no,” said Lucy Fawcett, an agent at Sheil Land Associates, in Britain, who had been working with Hallett for years as she wrote screenplays. “I must admit I was initially bemused that a head of drama would suggest to a screenwriter that they write a novel, because in many ways it’s a very different discipline and not straightforward at all.”
Fawcett conferred with her colleague Gaia Banks, who became Hallett’s book agent. “Janice started delivering chapters and we couldn’t read them quickly enough,” Fawcett said. (In a satisfying plot twist, several of the books are now in development for television.)
Her literary success means that Hallett has had to adjust to, among other things, being “required to go places and talk” to promote her books, she said. “I had no idea that novelists did that sort of thing.”
She shuddered as she recalled her first appearance, on a panel for debut writers at a literary festival. “I repeated myself; I trailed off; I forgot the questions,” she said. “I’m good on paper, but talking in public is something I’ve always struggled with. Finding my actual voice has been a lifelong problem.”
Currently, she’s at work on a series for children about a pair of siblings investigating a cold murder case using documents they’ve unearthed from a box in the attic. Her next book for adults will be set in the world of pub quizzes, a familiar milieu since she and Gary are on a local quiz team.
“Talk about bragging — these are my two quiz trophies,” she said, pointing to a pair of statuettes on a shelf. “Gary’s specialty is music, and mine is supposed to be books, but I can guarantee if I’m asked a question about a book, it’s one I haven’t read.”
Her greatest recent triumph, she said, was helping her team to victory by correctly spelling the word “diarrhoea”— it takes an “o” in Britain — in a local quiz.
Lunch was nearly over, and Hallett began to pack up some of the uneaten pastries into a little box, kindly insisting that I take it with me — the first time I’ve ever left an interview with a care package.
She had to think for a moment when asked how success had changed her. “I was quite old when it happened, so I was very set in my ways,” she said. Then she tried again.
She feels happy in her work and her life, she said. More than that: “The dogged determination I always had, which meant that I wasn’t put off by failure, has finally worked,” she said.
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