Chris Chibnall, the creator of Broadchurch and former Doctor Who showrunner makes his literary debut in Death at the White Hart (Pamela Dorman Books, June), a crime novel with an unforgettable detective at its center.
What led you to try your hand at a novel?
Well, I'd been wanting to write a book for a very long time. When I was working on Broadchurch, after the first season, there were a lot of offers for me to do that. But then I was doing the subsequent seasons, and went on to do Doctor Who. Coming out of that last job, I really wanted to make time to try and write a novel to see whether I could do it. I had a creative bucket list, and number one was that nagging thing that so many writers have, "I need to try and write a novel," and so I gave it a go. I did some sample chapters, which I very cautiously handed over to my agent, who then sent it out to some publishers, and here we are. So it started. It started tentatively with a desire to write a novel but I knew I wanted to write crime fiction. I wanted to be in a genre that I loved.
To what extent did the final book differ from your original idea?
It was very close, actually, because the aim was to write us a murder mystery that feels like it's set now, and that all of the characters lives resonate with how we're all living our lives now, but that also took the Golden Age mystery novel tropes; it's set in a village, there is a finite list of suspects, there's a dissonance between the idyllic nature of the setting, and then the heinous nature of the act. I wanted to write a very propulsive, page-turning story, but for it to have emotional undertow, and characters, particularly the central character of Detective Nicola Bridge, who would be relatable, complex, contradictory, and hopefully then I would be able to carry some over into into another book, and into a series.
How early did you settle on who the killer was?
It evolved. It's a bit of planning rigorously, but allowing for happy accidents - that is always how I like to plot. And this was what have just done as a screenwriter, adapting Agatha Christie's Seven Dials Mystery for Netflix. I always start out with an idea, but I think that the joy of writing is that you have to lay yourself open to the characters' knowing more about the world than you do. You have to listen to your writing as well as controlling it.
The novel opens with a harrowing scene, in which a motorist comes across the murder victim, in the middle of the road, tied to a chair, and adorned by antlers. Where did that idea come from?
That was the first image, really, that came into my head, because, the book opens, as you know, with a guy is driving home, along a very deserted road in Southwest England, the A35. It's a drive that I've done a lot, and I've done it a lot at midnight, at one in the morning. It's completely deserted then, and it's very spooky. And so, having done that drive often, being late home or coming back from work, I would think that there could be anything ahead, just around the next bend, just through that mist. My mind was active on that, and then the image of a body tied to a chair, in the middle of a road, felt incredibly incongruous, and demanded a lot of questions.
Once I had that, the idea of the deer antlers came from an image that has haunted me all my life, from an old British family television show, Robin of Sherwood, that was on in the 80s. There was a figure in it, Hern the Hunter, from British folklore, who would come out of the mist with these incredible antlers on his head. It was a really spooky image, and I've carried that with it with me all my life. Here, it is just the extra thing of what would be that striking image that would stop you, that would make you brake in your car if you just suddenly saw it at two a.m., on a September night, driving home.
How would you compare writing a book with writing for the screen?
It's both very different and very similar. Number one, there's a lot more words. That's the big thing that I learned—the script has 60 pages and a lot of blank space, and obviously the novel is about 90,000 words. There are some things that are helpful in having been a screenwriter in terms of world-building, in terms of character-building, in terms of propulsion of the plot, and knowing that you need to find those and lots of twists and turns and figuring out how you pace those out and where they're satisfying. That's been very helpful.
I think the the big shift, and one of the reasons that I wanted to do a novel—and also the thing that I most enjoyed about it— was the interiority of the characters, and being able to tell the story from their perspective. Within this novel, there are a number of chapters told from the points of view of different characters; I wanted some of the suspects to be telling their stories as well, that sense of every chapter could take us deeper into character, deeper into their hearts and minds in a way that you just can't do on screen. A close-up shot on an actor for three seconds in a TV show or a film can be a chapter in a novel because of what they're thinking about. And obviously, as it's a crime novel, and it's a murder mystery, you have that joy of wondering if any of them may be unreliable narrators. I think that prose operates more like thought, whereas, I think, when you're watching a movie or TV, it's much more like observation.
You are adapting this novel for ITV. What's that been like?
Adaptation is the key word. You're not transposing. You're not just moving it across into another form, because as soon as you move it through that ether it just transmogrifies. So I think where one starts is understanding what the essence of the piece is—identifying what that is in its most kind of condensed or or intense, or kind of espresso shot form. What do you love about the novel? What do readers love about it? What is memorable? How does it make you feel? What is the tone? Because that's what you're trying to communicate. You should, in an ideal world, where you end up having watched an adaptation, have the same feelings from having read the book, even if the experience is by its very nature different.
To what extent did your work as a showrunner for Doctor Who influence Death at the White Hart?
It influenced my desire to write the novel because that show is such a story-devouring machine. I did three seasons, and we did in the region of 30 stories. You are going all over the place in history, in the universe, constantly generating stories. So it's an incredible, thrilling, creative challenge. I think, coming out of it, one of the reasons I wanted to do this novel was to answer the question of how do you not replicate what you've done? I was looking for a creative challenge in the sense of, I've got to find something that's really new and fresh, and is on the edge, and I don't know if I can do it. And that was why I really devoted all this time to the novel—to do something that is going to really give me a really exciting, thrilling, creative challenge.
