There are a number of surprising twists to first-time novelist A.J. Finn’s psychological thriller, The Woman in the Window (Morrow, Jan. 2018), which chronicles several weeks in the life of a female psychologist isolated in a Manhattan townhouse with a serious case of agoraphobia. Not least of those is the identity of Finn—the pen name for Dan Mallory, v-p and executive editor at William Morrow.
In the novel, Anna drinks a lot, spies on her neighbors, and is certain she has witnessed a murder. Parallels to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window are hard to ignore, but the protagonist here is no James Stewart: she’s a middle-aged woman traumatized by recent events in her life. Rights to the book have so far sold in 37 territories, and a major film is in development at Fox.
Mallory says that he chose a pseudonym in order to keep his writing separate from his other work. At his day job, he is well positioned to understand his chosen genre; he has edited and published a range of mystery and thriller writers. He began his editorial career at Ballantine, then moved to Little, Brown UK, where he specialized in crime fiction. He was brought into Morrow in 2012 to work on crime fiction and thrillers.
Like many writers, Mallory says he was a bookish kid. He abandoned the idea of being a writer as a teenager and became a reader instead. “I loved Patricia Highsmith,” he says. “As a graduate student at Oxford I anointed her for the subject of my dissertation.” He discovered that detective fiction has manifested itself in all sorts of stories, from Bleak House through The Ambassadors to The Talented Mr. Ripley. “We don’t think of these books as suspenseful, but they are. Many, many novels can be said to travel in the tropes of detective novels even if the writers didn’t say that that was what they were doing,” Mallory says. What excites him is seeing how thrillers, like Gone Girl, can attract readers to the genre.
As for writing a thriller, he learned that it could be hard. “I thought plotting would prove the tricky part, but that flowed,” Mallory says. “The actual writing, getting those words on the page, I had not appreciated the effort it takes, and I came to appreciate how effortless many writers make it seem.”
On the other hand, writing in first person from Anna’s point of view came easily. “Contemporary psychological suspense novels are usually told from the point of view of a woman,” he says. “I thought, if that’s what readers want, that’s what I’d like to do. I’m savvy enough as a publisher not to go against the grain.”
Today, 10–10:45 a.m. A.J. Finn will appear at the Adult Author Buzz Panel on the Uptown Stage.
Today, 11 a.m. Galleys of Finn’s book will be given away at the HarperCollins booth (2829).
