Less than four years ago, Janice Hallett tells me, she could sum up her writing career with the phrase “years of failure”. Today, at 55, she’s a fixture on the bestseller lists, hailed as the new Queen of Cosy Crime, with readers flocking to tell her that her novels are life-savers.
“People come up to me at readings and events,” she says, “and say my books got them through chemotherapy, or through bereavement. And there was a woman who told me that The Appeal [Hallett’s first novel] helped her connect with her mother after being estranged for 10 years, because they had both read it and were able to bond over it. She was very tearful, and then so was I.”
The Appeal is a murder mystery centred on an amateur theatrical group in a sleepy village. What Hallett didn’t know when she wrote the book was that the twin phenomena of Covid-19 and Richard Osman would awake in readers a hunger for murder most gentle, just in time for the novel’s publication in January 2021. “I love Richard Osman’s books. I know people don’t like it when celebrities come along and get book deals quite easily, but I think if somebody’s going to write a book that injects that much power and passion into the genre, other writers can benefit.”
And yet Hallett doesn’t entirely embrace the “cosy crime” label. “I’d say all of my novels have an underlying seam of darkness. I think, although there are those very light-hearted novels where a cat solves the murder, most novels that appear to be cosy do actually deal with dark subjects – they just don’t linger pruriently on the details.”
It’s true that in her new novel, The Examiner, Hallett devises a murder method that might make Thomas Harris feel a bit queasy, but wraps it up in a story as notable for charm and humour as it is for tension and cunning plotting. Like all her books so far, it takes the strangely gripping narrative form of a dossier: telling the story through emails, message board conversations, official documents.
At school, Hallett was academic and not popular: “It’s a good foundation for life, perhaps, to learn that not everyone will like you.” She read English at University College London, and then worked as a trade journalist in the beauty industry. “After 15 years,” she says, “I was really fed up with writing about bubble bath and had my midlife crisis. I knew I had to write creatively.” She gave up work to do a screenwriting MA at Royal Holloway, then wrote Retreat (2011), a horror film that starred Cillian Murphy and Thandiwe Newton.
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***The Telegraph reports:***
Less than four years ago, Janice Hallett tells me, she could sum up her writing career with the phrase “years of failure”. Today, at 55, she’s a fixture on the bestseller lists, hailed as the new Queen of Cosy Crime, with readers flocking to tell her that her novels are life-savers.
“People come up to me at readings and events,” she says, “and say my books got them through chemotherapy, or through bereavement. And there was a woman who told me that The Appeal [Hallett’s first novel] helped her connect with her mother after being estranged for 10 years, because they had both read it and were able to bond over it. She was very tearful, and then so was I.”
The Appeal is a murder mystery centred on an amateur theatrical group in a sleepy village. What Hallett didn’t know when she wrote the book was that the twin phenomena of Covid-19 and Richard Osman would awake in readers a hunger for murder most gentle, just in time for the novel’s publication in January 2021. “I love Richard Osman’s books. I know people don’t like it when celebrities come along and get book deals quite easily, but I think if somebody’s going to write a book that injects that much power and passion into the genre, other writers can benefit.”
And yet Hallett doesn’t entirely embrace the “cosy crime” label. “I’d say all of my novels have an underlying seam of darkness. I think, although there are those very light-hearted novels where a cat solves the murder, most novels that appear to be cosy do actually deal with dark subjects – they just don’t linger pruriently on the details.”
It’s true that in her new novel, The Examiner, Hallett devises a murder method that might make Thomas Harris feel a bit queasy, but wraps it up in a story as notable for charm and humour as it is for tension and cunning plotting. Like all her books so far, it takes the strangely gripping narrative form of a dossier: telling the story through emails, message board conversations, official documents.
At school, Hallett was academic and not popular: “It’s a good foundation for life, perhaps, to learn that not everyone will like you.” She read English at University College London, and then worked as a trade journalist in the beauty industry. “After 15 years,” she says, “I was really fed up with writing about bubble bath and had my midlife crisis. I knew I had to write creatively.” She gave up work to do a screenwriting MA at Royal Holloway, then wrote Retreat (2011), a horror film that starred Cillian Murphy and Thandiwe Newton.
**Full interview:** [**https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/janice-hallett-interview-women-crime-fiction/**](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/janice-hallett-interview-women-crime-fiction/)