Stephanie Marland on The Creepy Fascination of Abandoned Places

For me there’s something pulse-poundingly creepy and yet utterly fascinating about abandoned places, and that makes them the perfect setting for a crime novel. 

I’ve had a love of abandoned places ever since I was a child. Back when I was young, my Nanna took me to visit the long forgotten Italian gardens in the grounds of Halton House, Buckinghamshire. The stately mansion had originally been owned by the Rothschild family (complete with private zoo, tropical gardens and the Italian-inspired gardens) but after being given to the Ministry of Defence in the war and turned into an RAF base; the outer gardens had been long forgotten. To my child eyes the secret gardens were like entering another world.

Nature had reclaimed the once manicured lawns, trees had grown through the iron rose pagodas, toppling many to the ground, and the once trained roses had spread, winding their way across bushes and trees, untamed and free. 

I stepped through the wrought iron gates (luckily open a few feet) and stopped. The white and pink marble mosaic path was almost entirely covered with brambles. At the far end stood the summerhouse, a beautiful stone building with a domed roof. Slowly we made our way along the overgrown path towards it. I was in awe. Creepers had wound their way inside, curling up the walls, through the cracks in the plasterwork, and across the fresco painted ceiling. It was like no other place I’d seen.

I didn’t get the idea of uses abandoned places as a setting until many years later. That happened when I was taking a cruise down the Thames and spotted an abandoned film studio across the water. The fenced off grounds, and the boarded up windows got my mind whirring. What would it be like to go inside the old studios? What would you find there?

In that moment, from those questions, I got the idea for the opening of You Die Next – a group of urban explorers breaking into an abandoned film studio and stumbling into a murderer’s kill room. I pulled out my phone and frantically tapped some notes. 

As research for the book I’ve watched videos posted online by explorers far more daring than I. I’ve seen them riding Ferris Wheels at long abandoned theme parks, exploring derelict old mansions, and climbing through the half-built levels of urban high-rise construction. 

But when I think of abandoned places something always draws me back to the beauty of the abandoned garden at Halton House. Over the thirty or so years since I first went there with my Nanna I’ve been back many times. I’ve seen the awe-inspiring power of nature as she’s continued to reclaim the place as her own. I’ve noticed how one-by-one all the rose pagodas fell, how the mosaic path began to crumble, and how after one particularly ferocious storm a tree branch fell onto the summerhouse and the domed roof caved in. 

I wanted to go back when I was researching You Die Next, and I tried to, but was unsuccessful. In recent years the security on the RAF base has been raised higher and the opportunities to get access are near on impossible. Perhaps if I had the tenacity of the group of urbexers in You Die Next I would have succeeded. As it is, the sign ‘Attack dogs on patrol’ put me off! 

You Die Next by Stephanie Marland (Published by Orion Publishing)

When a group of urban explorers stumble across a murderer's kill room in a derelict film studio, terror strikes. And when one of the group is found dead, the team realise - they're being hunted.  DI Dominic Bell is investigating the murder, but as the body count rises, time is running out. The only person who can help him is a figure from his past, Clementine Starke - but Clementine is haunted by her own demons. Can the two of them pair up to catch the killer? Or is it already too late?

The trailer for You Die Next can be seen below.

Creating Character: Clementine Starke

I always wanted Clementine Starke to be rather unconventional as a character but it took me a number of drafts of the book before I finally figured her out. From the start, I’d had the idea of a reclusive young woman, damaged by an incident in her past that still haunted her, but trying to make her way back into the real world through connecting with people on social media who shared her interest in true crime. The tricky part was getting the balance right.

When the book begins, due to the incident in her past, Clementine doesn’t feel emotion. She’s not a sociopath or psychopath in the traditional sense – she was able to feel emotion as a child – but trauma from an incident left her with a prevailing feeling of ‘nothingness’. In the first draft of the book I didn’t know what exactly had caused this. I’m not a writer who plots the story out in advance – preferring to ‘pants’ it, writing by the ‘seat of my pants’. This made writing Clementine tough. The storyline of her teaming up with the true crime addicts who she met online in the forum of website True Crime London flowed easy enough, but her inner thoughts and deepest motivations evaded me. It was a frustrating time.

In my mind she was a determined female lead, a strong woman, refusing to be kept down by her traumatic past. But I couldn’t write her like a typical action heroine, because although she was the driving force of the story she was also reclusive and doubting. Her behaviour was less predictable, her decisions more erratic. Yet, she wasn’t like Amy, the psychopathic lead character in Gillian Flynn’s amazing thriller Gone Girl. Clementine wasn’t born without empathy; she was made that way by the incident. It always came back to the incident. And yet even at the end of the first draft I still didn’t know what had happened.

I got feedback on the book, and set about improving it in the second draft. I rewrote my detective, Dominic Bell’s, side of the story relatively quickly. I felt it was taking shape. But Clementine’s voice, and her inner world, still eluded me. I wanted her to be strong but vulnerable, make bad choices that put others in danger but somehow still likable, and I wanted her to feel emotionful, even when she couldn’t feel and understand the emotions herself. I needed to know what happened in her backstory. I had to know more about the incident.

In the end, the key to Clementine’s character – the motivation that drives everything in her life – and her own voice, came to me in the middle of the night. It woke me up. But it wasn’t divine intervention or ‘the muse’ or anything mystical that helped me, it was Gillian Flynn. Not actual Gillian Flynn in person, obviously, but something she’d said in an interview. Earlier that day I’d been watching a youtube video of her The National Writers Series appearance, speaking about her writing process and creating characters. It’s a great talk – I recommend you check it out – and I’m pretty sure that’s what kicked my subconscious into overdrive to figure out what the hell I was going to do with the Clementine.

I woke up with the opening paragraph to Clementine’s chapter in my head, and a sudden realisation of what the incident was, so I groped for my notebook (always on the floor by my bed) and scribbled down the lines that are still the opening lines in chapter one:

They say I was dead for three thousand and six seconds. They say that when I woke I was different, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that my world became a different place once every one of those precious seconds had expired.

Then I got up, took my notebook with me, made myself a mug of coffee and sat down at my desk. I spent the rest of the night writing Clementine Starke.

My Little Eye by Stephanie Marland published by Trapeze Books

Can a group of true crime addicts take on the police to catch a serial killer?

KISS THE GIRLS… A young woman is found dead in her bedroom surrounded by rose petals - the latest victim of 'The Lover'. Struggling under the weight of an internal investigation, DI Dominic Bell is no closer to discovering the identity of the killer and time is running out.  AND MAKE THEM DIE...  As the murders escalate, Clementine Starke joins an online true crime group determined to take justice in their own hands - to catch the killer before the police. Hiding a dark secret, she takes greater risks to find new evidence and infiltrate the group.  As Starke and Bell get closer to cracking the case neither of them realise they're being watched. The killer is closer to them than they think, and he has his next victim - Clementine - firmly in his sights.