JP Delaney on Why are houses so often the heroes?

There are, obviously, lots of good books that aren’t about houses. But, my goodness, there are even more that are. Brideshead, Pemberly in Pride and Prejudice, Alconleigh in The Pursuit of Love, Top Withins Farm in Wuthering Heights, Green Gables, Hill House… There’s something about making a house central to a story that brings together landscape, history, and the personality of the owners, past and present – all useful elements for psychological fiction, in particular. 

Everyone’s favourite fictional house is Manderley in Rebecca, famously based – at least, in terms of its setting – on Menabilly in Cornwall. Du Maurier first stumbled on it, abandoned and almost derelict, as a teenager, trespassing in its grounds. Later, stationed in Cairo with her husband during the war, her thoughts turned back to it as she dreamt Rebecca into life. That the success of Rebecca – and, in particular, Hitchcock’s film version – made her wealthy enough to negotiate a twenty-year lease on the dilapidated property she had, at that point, barely stepped foot in, is one of life’s extraordinary ironies.

Du Maurier’s relationship with Menabilly was always a romantic, almost obsessive one. In her autobiographical essay ‘The House of Secrets’ she describes how, after she saw it for the first time, ‘the house possessed me from that day, even as a mistress holds her lover.’ (The reversal of gender is revealing: du Maurier sometimes attributed her ‘writing energy’ to ‘Eric’, an alternative persona she dubbed ‘the boy in the box.’)  Her daughter Flavia noted her habit of occasionally kissing its stone walls: ‘When she turned, her slightly flushed face had a look close to ecstasy.’ And du Maurier herself wrote to a friend, ‘I do believe I love Mena more than people’, and compared having to leave it when her lease expired to the screaming of a pulled-up mandrake. When she was sick with pneumonia on her deathbed, by then exiled to the nearby Dower House, she manged to haul herself up and go out in a storm, just so she could gaze on Menabilly one last time.

My new psychological thriller, The Move, was directly inspired by du Maurier’s relationship with Menabilly, though I chose to transplant her domophilia to Hampshire. Rosemary and Paul Finch, both in their eighties, are downsizing from their beloved Trade Cottage after many happy decades there. Paul has terminal MND and will soon be in a wheelchair; their son Jamie and their grandchildren are all in America; and the house is starting to get too much. At the viewing, they hit it off with a nice family with young children who are looking to make the move out of London, even going so far as to accept an offer that isn’t the highest bid, so keen is Rosemary for them to have it. (Another nod, perhaps, to a fictional house story, in this case E.M Forster’s famous plot device in Howard’s End.)

And for Kate and Matt Crowther, the move is initially idyllic. Sure, it’s a little strange to discover, the day they move in, that Rosemary and Paul have chosen to leave most of their antique furniture behind – but then again, it wouldn’t fit into the ultra-modern passive house which, it transpires, they’ve built just at the end of Trade Cottage’s garden, close enough for them to pop round whenever they want. And it’s great that they want to look after the children when Kate and Matt are in London; to teach Tilly how to ride and Will how to shoot, and to help Kate and Matt throw housewarming parties so they can meet the rest of the village. Rosemary in particular is so welcoming that it takes Kate a little while to realise there’s something almost obsessive about her need to maintain Trade Cottage’s aura of picture-perfect loveliness just as it always has been – and that her own children’s time there, twenty years previously, might not have been quite the Swallows-and-Amazons paradise Rosemary paints it as.

Because that’s another great thing about houses: they have facades, and facades can be deceptive. Remember Cowslip’s warren in Watership Down? On the face of it, it’s wonderful – the farmer even leaves food nearby. It takes even Fiver a little while to work out that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Writing about houses, of course, immediately brings you close to the Gothic tradition. In the classics of the genre, there’s usually an isolated, ancient, crumbling manor, full of shadows and unexplained noises, presided over by a brooding, damaged master, as stuck in the tragic past as his dwelling place is. To this fearsome abode comes an innocent, usually a young woman; both the house’s potential victim, and its saviour. It’s an archetype that stretches all the way from Wuthering Heights to Beauty and the Beast.

Personally, I like to play around with the trope, to defamiliarize it. In The Girl Before I made my crumbling mansion a tiny minimalist house in London, and my brooding master its obsessively minimalist architect. (In a nod to my influences, I called the digital home controller ‘Housekeeper’.) In The New Wife, it’s a dilapidated finca on Mallorca that turns out – when the young man who has inherited it from his estranged father visits – to have been gorgeously renovated by his father’s third wife and her daughter, who he’s there to evict. And in The Move, it’s a Grade-II listed country property that, even run down, requires the heftiest of mortgages to purchase, and is crying out to be turned into an Airbnb.

When du Maurier titled her essay ‘The House of Secrets’, she put her finger on another aspect of houses which makes them such fertile ground for writers. Houses have pasts, and those pasts are sometimes hidden. Again, there’s an archetype: in Bluebeard’s Castle, there was one single room that his new bride was forbidden to enter. Needless to say, she does. In The Girl Before, it’s a service cupboard containing a dusty old sleeping bag and a pair of women’s pyjamas. In The Move, it’s a smugglers’ cellar, latterly used by teenage boys as a kind of nightclub, not unlike the ‘Club H’ Princes William and Harry created for their friends at Highgrove. It contains an ancient sofa, complete with some rather suspicious-looking stains.

Perhaps the final aspect of houses that makes them so good to write about, though, is their relatability. We all live somewhere, and that somewhere is our sanctuary; the way we choose to furnish it, an expression of who we are. Our homes are where we should feel most safe – and when that safety is threatened, we might all react in ways it takes a novelist to predict.  

             

The Move by J P Delaney (Quercus Books) Out Now

New beginnings can be deadly . . . Kate and Matt Crowther are finally moving out of London, in search of a better life for their young family. Trade Cottage seems to be the house of their dreams - and they immediately hit it off with the sellers, Rosemary and Paul Finch, who brought up their own family there. When Kate and Matt move in, they're pleased to discover the Finches still very much in evidence: offering advice, introducing them to the local community, and becoming honorary grandparents to Will, 11, and Tilly, 9. But when the Finches take exception to Kate and Matt's renovations, relations with the neighbours sour, and Kate and Matt find themselves subjected to a vicious campaign of hate. But Kate isn't giving up her dream home without a fight. And it turns out Trade Cottage has secrets of its own to reveal - secrets that may endanger the very family Kate has moved there to protect . . .

More information about JP Delaney and his books can be found on his website. J P Delaney can also be found on Facebook. He can also be found on Instagram @jpdelaney

Perfect Instagram interiors make me feel like a failure every single day, so I set a murder in them.

For eighteen months now there’s been a piece of unpainted, raggedy skirting board behind my bed, lurking there like a dirty secret. When I last decorated the room it needed sanding and filling. I filled it and intended to do a good, seamless job – like those Instagram adverts for easy filler stuff - but it took ages to dry and by the time it was ready for the sanding and painting bit, I was really over the whole thing. Eager to carry on with life like a child begging to be released from the dinner table to play, I popped the bed in front of it telling myself I’d fix it later but (spoiler), I never did. At least it’s hidden so no one aside from me would know it’s there. I’ve only thought about it a few times a day since.

As an Instagram addict (sometimes I just find myself on there with no memory of opening the app in the first place?) I see pictures of other people’s perfect houses a fair bit. Every faultless interior causing the piece of skirting to flash into my brain like a nightmarish apparition, closely followed by the doorhandle I botched in 2021 and my attempt at ‘cutting in’ without using tape. Realistically, I tell myself that the Instagram people must have something similar somewhere in their house, if not masked in the very picture that’s prompted my horrors. 

As well as my Instagram addiction, I’m kind of a cliché. A thirty-something childless woman obsessed with her cat, Selling Sunset and the Real Housewives. So, it made sense for me to set my new novel How to Make a Killing in a luxury estate agency. The women of Harringtons Estates sell expensive houses with the indication that buying them will give the buyers their dream, perfect lifestyle. They’re the equivalent of the perfectly curated Instagram feed, polished on the outside, but the façade’s hiding metres of unfinished skirting. Though in their case, the filler is more outward facing. 

When one of the women is found dead at an open house for a £10 million mansion, the imperfections start to show, and it turns out all of them have a skeleton or two - metaphorical or otherwise - under the floorboards. 

As I’ve got older, I’ve become suspicious of people who have perfectly clean houses. It’s not just bitterness and jealousy; I can’t help but wonder why? Are they hiding something? Maybe people with messy houses are far more trustworthy? Not trying to be something that they aren’t. Not presenting us with a perfectly clean house yet still answering the door all of a fluster with cries of, “So sorry, you’ll have to take us as you find us! We haven’t had chance to clean. We’re a MESS!” If Dexter taught us anything, it’s that it’s easier to clean up mess in a space that’s already spotless, after all. 

Years ago, I bought one of those natural carpets for my hallway because Instagram said it was cool (I’m becoming more aware as I write that I really do have a problem, and when I’ve finished, I’ll be downloading an app to help with it. I’m sure there is one). I’m not being overdramatic (I am) when I say it’s the bane of my life. That carpet is never clean – and even with the best will in the world, it never will be. The cat’s fur sticks to it, small bits of dirt nest in its fibres, vacuum cleaners alone cannot penetrate the straw-like weave. I am here to tell you that you could never get away with committing murder on a jute rug, just in case you were considering it. 

Like (in my opinion) the people who answer their door proclaiming to have not lifted a finger, despite their immaculate houses, the women of How to Make a Killing all have something to hide. Each one of them presents as a confident picture of lifestyle perfection. But under the surface there are cracks, despair, personal torment, secrets and for at least one of them, murder. Much like me shoving a bed in front of the patchy skirting, the women of Harringtons Estates cover secrets with an Instagram filter, a bit of Botox or a peppy smile. So, I guess we’re not so dissimilar, aside from one of them being a murderer. Obviously. 

How To Make A Killing by Kate Weston (Headline) Out Now

Meet the women of Harrington Estates. They're one big happy family. At least, that's what they all say... New arrival Bella is determined to get to the top, and she doesn't mind stepping on some Louboutin-clad toes to get there. No-nonsense Hannah was the rising star, but now Bella's stealing her thunder - and her agent of the year award. Olivia wants it all - the glittering career, the picture-perfect family. But lately it feels like something - or someone - is trying to snatch it away. Then there's poor Claire, who has lost more keys than sold properties - and Bella makes sure the whole office knows it. When Bella is found dead at the open house for a £10-million mansion, everyone's a suspect. They'd all die for that listing, after all. But did one of them kill for it?

More information about the author and her books can me found on her website.

She can also be found on Instagram and on Threads @kateelizabethweston 

Anna Kent on writing The House of Whispers

‘Write about what you know,’ they tell you when you’re starting out as a writer. Then you write a thriller, or a murder mystery or, in my case, something creepy, dark and twisted, and everyone asks you, with a nervous laugh, if it was based on true events – ‘did you really poison Granny?’ (not a spoiler) – and, even after you’ve explained that you made it all up, they never quite look the same at you at parties.

But there are ways in which authors can write about what they know, even when writing the grimmest and grisliest of plots. My characters, for example, are always drawn, a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, from bits and pieces of people I’ve known, or even celebrities or people I’ve read about in the news: a nervous tic here, a sentence there, a noticeable walk or a particular style of dressing. Emotions, too, are universal and easily transportable into books, no matter what the topic – as are locations.

The House of Whispers is set in a Victorian house somewhere in the commuter belt of north London – I was picturing somewhere around Northwood or Watford – but I didn’t want to name a specific district because I wanted some creative license, for example, protagonist Abi and her husband Rohan are able to see the spread of London’s skyscrapers before them as they leave their favourite Chinese restaurant one evening – and, for that view, I was thinking more Hampstead Heath.

To get a good idea of the house itself, I searched property websites until I had a very real image, inside and out, of the fairly dilapidated, three-storey, red-brick Victorian semi that I had in my mind’s eye. In the novel, it stands at a bend in the road, where its top-floor attic window, along with the matching one on the house next door, look like eyes watching the street, observing all the comings-and-goings of the past century. I very much wanted to give the sense that the house had existed long before the characters I was writing about, and that it would continue to exist long after they’d moved on; that the house was wiser and more knowing than they would ever be. 

Abi and Rohan take on their house as a ‘doer-upper’ but Abi secretly understands that you can renovate and refurbish all you like; that you can strip and paint and recarpet and even put in new kitchen cabinets, but it’s all cosmetic. Ultimately, the house is still the house.

I’ve always been fascinated by the history of houses, especially Victorian ones. I lived for a long time in a house which was built in the late 1800s and I always used wonder about the people who’d lived in it before; the generations whose layers of paint lay under our own tasteful neutrals. There was a small room, halfway up the stairs, that I learned would originally have been the maid’s room. What had her life been like, sleeping halfway between the kitchen and the upstairs bedrooms? What sort of emotions did she infuse into the walls of that little room?

I used to like climbing up into the attic where I could touch the original timber beams holding up the roof and think about how the bricks and the cement, the floorboards, the rafters and the roof all made up the same frame that had enclosed the people who’d lived in it over a hundred years ago. In my imagination, the breaths of all those people were woven into the very fabric of the house. As it sheltered families before us, the house would have witnessed love, laughter, anger and tears. Babies would have been born inside it – and people would also have died in its bedrooms. Was that energy still somehow there? 

It’s no wonder then, as I started to write The House of Whispers, that the house started to become a character itself. In the second chapter, we see Abi sitting in the kitchen, mentally stripping it back to pre-gone days and imagining the ghost of a girl who used to live there. Abi’s an artist and she’s often able to tune in to the energy of her home: she feels the walls breathing; she feels the house flinch as her husband accidentally bashes his suitcase against it on his way downstairs, and she feels its approval as she cleans and polishes it. But The House of Whispers has its own secrets, and it’s not always on Abi’s side – no matter what we try to hide, there are some truths that simply have to be told.

The House of Whispers by Anna Kent (HarperCollins) Out 5 August 2021

Some secrets aren't meant to be kept... When Grace returns to Abi's life, years after they fell out at university, Abi can't help but feel uneasy. Years ago, Grace's friendship was all-consuming and exhausting. Now happily married, Abi's built a new life for herself and put those days behind her. And yet as Grace slips back into her life with all the lethal charm she had before, Abi finds herself falling back under her spell... Abi's husband, Rohan, can't help but be concerned as his wife's behaviour changes. As their happy home threatens to fall apart, he realises that there's something deeply unnerving about Grace. Just what influence does this woman have over his wife, and why has she come back now?