When the Locked-room Itself Wants to Kill You. by Kate Simants

 

It was a kind of masochism in a way, writing a locked-room thriller in the height of lockdown when the last thing I – and everyone else – really wanted was to be locked in. My third novel, Freeze, which is published by Viper on March 2nd, follows the cast and crew of Frozen Out, a reality TV show set in the Arctic. The fear of the threat from within the boat – the killer – is rivalled only by the threat from without – the endless wastes of ice, the sea, the frankly terrifying weather. But though that climate is many people’s idea of hell, I found it to be the escape I desperately needed. 

Heat, for a born goth like myself, has been a lifelong adversary. When the post-Christmas adverts break out, seemingly tapping in to our collective yearning for bikinis and baking sand, I look out the window and wish the frost would last forever. So when it came to looking for a location for my new book – a place which could double as an imagined escape while under Covid house arrest – somewhere very, very cold was the top of my list. 

Not that it’s anything new, of course. Locked-room mysteries – or more accurately, closed-circle mysteries, where the murderer must be among a very limited number of characters – are often set in less-than welcoming environments. Though I’d shy away from the well-worn cliché of the location of a novel being one of its characters, the backdrop of Arctic certainly did a lot of the heavy lifting when it came to manipulating the events of the book. Early in my research, I spoke to a handful of Arctic guides, who talked me through what Greenland would really be like for a group of inexperienced people like those in my fictional TV show. I knew I’d made the right choice when one source told me, ‘make no mistake – the Arctic wants you dead.’ Obviously I shamelessly stole that line and gave it to the character of Craig Nduka, Frozen Out’s Arctic expert, then built on that sense of innate hostility at every opportunity. 

Ally Reynolds, author of Shiver, says a similar thing of her choice of the French Alps for her acclaimed debut Shiver. Twenty years ago, she was a freestyle snowboarder, and spent her first winter season in Chamonix. ‘It was such a unique environment,’ she told me, ‘stunningly beautiful, yet also incredibly dangerous. The weather could change at short notice, bringing storms, heavy snowfall and avalanches that could cut off roads and villages. The terrain is full of crevasses and cliffs, meaning you are literally one step away from death a lot of the time, so it seemed a perfect setting.’

Writing a powerful thriller means keeping the sense of fear close to hand at all times, so choosing a location that has some menace built-in means your baseline level of fear is already pretty high. Emma Haughton, author of locked-room Antarctica thriller The Dark and, more recently The Sanctuary based in the Mexican desert, says a similar thing. 

‘In terms of research,’ she says, ‘it came down to making deep isolation plausible as possible to the reader. That was easy to do with Antarctica because people there are completely cut off during winter. I always feel you’ve got to maximize the obstacles that any location might bring for your characters, so [in The Sanctuary] I built in scenes that hung on dangers like heat stroke, thirst, snake bites, large spiders (ugh!) and so on.’ 

For me, it was the location for Freeze that took up the bulk of my research time. As a former investigative journalist I have a terror of misrepresentation, and without the chance to go to Greenland myself, I spent weeks and months meticulously reading around the place. I made life slightly easier for myself by using a boat as the base, and writing about a TV show: having lived on boats and worked in TV, these were things I could write about naturally. But the deep-dive I did into resources about the Arctic served a dual purpose: not only of making the setting authentic, but also of taking me away from the crushing tedium of being stuck at home -even if it was only in my mind. 

That said, it wasn’t until I’d finished the novel that I noticed how much Covid itself had informed my story. Without even realising it, Freeze was a reflection of the real-life horror-show that started in 2020: a claustrophobic world of enforced enclosure, while an even greater threat lurked outside. 

Freeze by Kate Simants published by Viper (Out Now) £14.99

The show is Tori Matsuka's baby. After years working her way up the ladder, she's finally launching her own production company with Frozen Out, and the late nights, the debts, the strain on her relationship will all be worthwhile. Everything is riding on the next twelve days. For camerawoman Dee, it's a chance to start again after the tragedy that tanked her undercover journalism career. Not even Tori, her oldest friend, knows the full truth of why Dee left her previous job, and she plans to keep it that way. But as errors and mishaps mount on set, tempers among the cast and crew start to fray. And when one of the contestants is found dead, only Dee realises the death wasn't natural - and from what she's seen from behind the camera, it won't be the last. As the Arctic ice closes in around them and all chance of escape is cut off, it becomes clear that although the world outside wants them dead, it's the secrets inside the ship that might cost them their lives.

More information about Kate Simants and her books can be found on her website. You an also follow her on Twitter @Kateboats and she can also be found on Facebook.