JP Delaney
Deeper darker psychological thrills!
Ever since I started to study psychological thriller writing, I’ve continued to seize opportunities to examine how the masters of the genre do it. 
Recently I’ve mentioned a couple of JP Delaney‘s novels on this blog, but in Believe Me he takes things one step further.
‘… a pitch-perfect psychological thriller’, Lee Child reckons! (Wouldn’t we all love to gain that particular accolade?)
Claire Wright is a 25 year old British actor, who since the age of eleven has been pretending to be someone other than an orphan girl who’s been in and out of foster homes, desperate to love and be loved. Her scholarship with the Actors Studio at Pace University in New York covers some of her tuition fees but not her living costs and here she is in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Her visa allows her to work as long as it’s not on the university campus, but she has no green card. So she takes a job working for a firm of divorce lawyers, posing as an easy pick-up in hotel bars in order to entrap errant husbands. She’s not proud of the work she does – breaking up families – but she is proud of how well she does it. She’s a consummate actor.
But then one of the men she’s supposed to expose as a cheat, Patrick Fogler, becomes chief suspect in a murder investigation. His wife is found brutally murdered in her hotel room soon after Claire meets her. He’s also known to have been in the vicinity of several other unsolved killings. 
What’s more, he’s an academic with a penchant for the macabre works of Charles Baudelaire, and many of the murders bear distinct overtones of the fate of women in his poetry. But there’s nothing definitive to provide concrete evidence of Fogler’s guilt.
Then Claire is offered an attractive deal by the police: take on a terrifying role as someone Patrick would be attracted to, in return for a green card … if she survives!! She agrees and it becomes an all-consuming role requiring her to completely submit to the part of the character she’s supposed to be. She attends some of Fogler’s lectures in order to start up a conversation and intrigue him, and they begin a tense relationship, both suspicious of the other, but becoming increasingly in thrall to each other. The whole enterprise takes her into dangerous and mind-bending places: into police custody, into prison and a psychiatric facility; deeper and deeper into the psyche and heart of Patrick, and the reader can’t be sure anything is as it appears.
It’s a tense and constantly spinning tale with so many twists and turns that I gave up trying to decide who was guilty, who was sane, who was real, who was play-acting, and just allowed the narrative to unspool. Because, convoluted and confusing and unreliable it may be, unsavoury and unsettling too, but it’s certainly cleverly constructed. I was intrigued to discover this is its second iteration, the first having flopped early on in Delaney’s career. This time round he’s definitely crackled it!
One particularly neat and unusual ploy adopted by the author is to record some scenes as scripts for a play, with instructions for the actors, and lines of dialogue, as if Claire as actress is picturing them in her head. It fits perfectly with the theme of the novel and the part acting plays in the whole story.
Oh, and the short chapters – 106 of them in less than 400 pages – do help those pages to keep turning.
Fiction illuminating ethics
As most of you will know, all my novels explore ethical issues in medicine in an accessible form. So my antennae twitched big time when I saw a trailer to Playing Nice, a series on ITV/STV where a couple were being told that the little boy they had brought home from the hospital was not their biological son.
It’s a psychological thriller set in the fabulous landscape of the Cornish coast with its rugged cliffs and crashing waves (my homeland!); not altogether believable but it doesn’t need to be to hold the attention and exercise the mind.
In a nutshell:
Theo was born prematurely and cared for in a Neonatal Unit (again, my world!!) alongside another baby boy, David, and somehow the boys have been swapped. The children are now three years old so this discovery tears at their very roots. When the scenario moves from the formal legal to the personal with the appearance of the other father at their door, apparently keen to negotiate a mutually agreeable arrangement, there are big questions to be answered, and it soon becomes clear that the two couples are worlds apart – temperaments, home circumstances, material possessions, approach to parenting, expectations. Different in every way except that all four adults love these children – who’re played by two enchanting little boys! The ensuing unequal legal and psychological battles eat away at relationships and undermine trust, and the underhand shennanigans lead to dangerous and threatening situations.
Irrespective of the limitations of the adaptation, the storyline offers plenty of challenge:
Would you give up a child whom you’ve raised for three years?
Does biology trump years of nurturing and loving?
Whose interests take precedence?
Who should decide?
Can such situations ever be resolved satisfactorily without involving professionals?
What factors in a person’s background should be regarded as rendering them unsuitable to parent a child?
Is it fair to instantly suspend the professionals caring for the babies who were swapped?
Should there be a formal inquiry?
Does a history of mental illness sway the decision?
At what age should the child have a casting vote?
Does/should a higher standard apply to parents taking a non-biologically related child into their homes?
And so on, and so on. Questions raised not just by circumstances as improbable as in this drama, but in cases of fostering and adoption, of child abuse, or indeed in any circumstance where vulnerable children are involved or at risk. OK, the critics and nitpickers will gripe, but nevertheless the drama serves a very useful function, so I salute JP Delaney who wrote the book on which it’s based, and Grace Ofori-Attah who adapted it for the small screen.
Psychological control
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time on train stations of late, and browsing in the book sections on platforms while I wait … and wait … and wait. This week I was struck by the proportion of books in the top 60 which deal with psychology and crime – not just through fiction (there were several of those), but factual books.
Confessions of a Psychopath by ME Thomas
Stalkers by Rachel Cassidy
Talking with Psychopaths and Savages by Christopher Berry-Dee
Talking with Serial Killers by Christopher Berry-Dee
Unnatural Causes by Dr Richard Shepherd
…
Hmmm. Is this the current trend, d’you suppose/know?
Weirdly enough, I had a book for the journey on Thursday that takes psychological thriller writing to a whole new level. “A wonderful portrayal of psychological obsession at its creepy best’ as one reviewer puts it. The Girl Before by JP Delaney. Creepy serendipity? or just my mind atuned to the subject?
The setting for The Girl Before is an ultra-minimalist house in South Hendon in London: One Folgate Street. Austere, sterile, disciplined. Serene, calm, beautiful emptiness. A mausoleum of a place. Its award-winning architect and owner, Edward Monkford, insists on a huge number of rules – over 200! – for anyone leasing the property: no flatpack furniture, no cushions or rugs, nothing to be left on the floor at any time, no animals, no handrails, no books! …These rules constitute a restrictive covenant, a legal condition imposed on the property in perpetuity. Potential inhabitants must sign documents, fill in questionnaires, submit to being interviewed, before being selected to move in, and undergo repeated ongoing psychometric measurements grappling with intense ethical dilemmas – we get glimpses of the penetrating questions they’re asked throughout the book. Once in, they must undertake to keep the property completely uncluttered and regimented in line with Edward’s exacting standards. And every tenant so far has been a beautiful red-headed girl with determination and intelligence – facsimiles of Edward’s dead wife. Every one a vulnerable woman who has know grief and loss.
I’m always somewhat fascinated by the concept of the unreliable narrator, but it’s a tricky tactic to adopt in reality. This story follows two of the tenants – Emma and Jane – as they attempt to live up to the expectations of One Folgate Street, as they unravel the tragedies and stories relating to their predecessors. Because, for all its outward perfection, the house’s history is dark and sinister. Three people have died tragically – Edward’s wife and son amongst them. And Edward’s obsessive tendencies spill over into his control of the women sexually as well as mentally. He is looking for a pure relationship, unencumbered by convention, with a sense of simplicity and freedom on both sides. When it’s no longer perfect, each must be ready to move on, without regret.
Well written, cleverly plotted, interesting structure, well researched – and a runaway success. It took the author a decade or so to work out how to write the book, but she has captured something very special. It was well worth the wait.
I don’t pretend to be an expert in obsessive perfectionism, but it rings true. As does Delaney’s description of grief and loss, and the emotions around having a disabled child. Not surprising maybe as the author has herself lost a son, and has another one with a rare medical syndrome.
And the poignancy of this book is enhanced further for me by a report out the very day I finished it, about a five year high in the statistics for deaths relating to domestic violence in the UK. There is something particularly sinister about pathological behaviour behind closed doors. And Delaney has captured the essence of it in The Girl Before.