The Whisper Man

by Alex North

‘It was the boy in the floor.’

Around the time I first started planning The Whisper Man, my family moved into a new house. Not long afterwards, I was in the kitchen while my son was playing with his toys in the front room. As children do, he was talking to himself - or rather, talking through his toys, making stories with them. This was not unusual. But for some reason, I was curious. I walked to the doorway and leaned against the frame. "What are you doing?" I said. "Oh," he replied, without looking up. "I'm just playing with the boy in the floor." Which gave me a shiver. I've always been interested in the creepy things children can sometimes come out with, often without understanding the impact they can have on adults. Fortunately, that was the only ever mention of the boy in the floor, but my son's words gave me a thrill of a different kind too. Back then, all I really knew was that my book was going to be about a bereaved father and son. But right there, leaning against that door frame, I decided the boy in my story would have imaginary friends - and that some of them might be quite sinister...

Words my son must have just read. And I closed my eyes as I understood only too well.

Given that I write dark, scary crime novels, I have sometimes been asked if I'm worried what my son might think of them - or if he's ever caught a glimpse of what I'm working on. The answer in both cases is no. With regard to the latter, I guard even my fifth or sixth drafts carefully, never mind my first, because the idea anyone might see what I'm working on before I'm happy with it fills me with horror. I often write in bars and cafes but, when I do, I always make sure there's nobody behind me who might be able to see over my shoulder. I write very roughly at first, and without too much care. I wouldn't want anybody to read anything I've written until I've beaten it into something approximating decent shape. It would be too embarrassing. So I'm very careful. As to what my son might think of The Whisper Man - well, he can read it eventually, when or if he wants to. My biggest concern at that point wouldn't be the content, so much as him demanding a writing credit for inspiration and a share of the royalties...

He had been aware before now that there were people in the world who were driven to acquire such macabre things, and that there were even thriving online marketplaces dedicated to the activity. But he had never before stood in the heart of such a collection.

‘Murderabilia’, as it’s called, is a real thing. There are people who collect and trade items associated with crimes and killers, and some of those items can change hands for substantial sums of money. I’ve always been intrigued by what might drive a person’s interest in such things. Is it the feeling of touching darkness from a safe distance? A fascination with a particular crime such that it demands a tangible connection to it? Or simply the desire to possess a rare object – the same as any other collector, albeit with the item’s provenance adding an extra frisson of danger? Perhaps it’s some mixture of all three. Regardless, there’s another aspect that interests me just as much, which is the forbidden, underground nature of the whole business. I’ve long been drawn to stories that deal with secret knowledge: tales of rare and rumoured items that you shouldn’t seek out because they might be dangerous for you to find, but which some people are drawn to search for anyway. I keep coming back to it, and there’s a focus on that in my third book (The Angel Maker in the US; The Half Burnt House in the UK), which deals with the search for a semi-mythical book written by a serial killer. And I’m sure I’ll return to it again in the future, at least in some capacity. I mean, we all like crime fiction, don’t we? So it’s not so strange. Secrets and darkness are our common currency.

How long does it take, and how much does a person have to change, before the person you hated is gone, replaced by someone new? Pete was someone else now.

This is something that has always interested me, and this particular passage comes from the philosophical problem commonly referred to as the Ship of Theseus: the idea that a famous ship might be tied up at a dock for many years, its steadily rotting planks replaced one by one over time until the ship is entirely new. At what point does it stop being the original ship? If you took all the rotting planks you'd removed and made them into a new ship, would *that* have more of a claim to be the original ship? It's different with people, of course. Pete has slowly changed from the man he once was, even if a few of the original rotting planks still remain. So is he still - now - responsible for the things he did back then? It's a difficult question. But most important of all, of course, is the fact that even if he is different in the present, that still might not matter so much to the people who knew him in the past...

As a child, his father had been a language he was unable to speak, but he was fluent now. The man wanted him to be someone else, and that had been confusing. But he could read the whole book of his father now and he knew that none of it had ever been about him. His own book was separate, and always had been.

Among other things, The Whisper Man is obviously very much about fathers and sons, a theme that runs through several different strands of the book. In the next book, (The Shadows in the US; The Shadow Friend in the UK), my focus is more on the relationship between a son and his mother. Families – whether close or broken, and along with all their complications – are endlessly fascinating to me, and always seem like fertile ground to explore. When I started work on my third book (The Angel Maker in the US; The Half Burnt House in the UK), I knew that I wanted to write about the relationship between siblings. And I did. But it also ended up being about fathers and sons too. And mothers and sons as well, come to think about it. I can’t seem to help myself, in other words. At this rate, my next book will have to be a 900-page epic family saga just to fit everything in.

His words would bounce off her, and he would still be rotting where he was afterwards, and she would still be here. It wasn’t like with Pete. Carter had nothing to hold over her. No way of hurting her.

I think of myself as writing standalone thrillers, and so my intention was to leave Amanda here – that this was the last I’d see of her. It was only when I was some way into writing a draft of my second book (The Shadows in the US; The Shadow Friend in the UK) that I realised I needed a detective, and it occurred to me that I could bring Amanda back in a way that might develop her character and give her some degree of closure. So while The Shadows can be read as a standalone, it is a sequel of sorts. My intention afterwards was to leave things there. But, once again, things did not turn out quite the way I planned. (Narrator’s voice: “Do they ever, Alex?”) While Amanda is not in my third book – The Angel Maker in the US; The Half Burnt House in the UK – it does feature a cameo appearance by a character Amanda speaks to in The Shadows. Which means that all three books must technically take place in the same fictional universe, and that perhaps, whatever I might like to think, I’m not writing standalone thrillers after all.

I shook my head. I was sitting by Jake’s bed, holding Power of Three open at the last page, staring into space. We had just finished the book, and then I had got distracted. Lost in thought.

When I was a kid, Diana Wynne Jones was my favourite writer, and Power of Three was my favourite of her books. I chose it for Tom to be reading to Jake throughout The Whisper Man not only on that basis, but also because I happened to be reading it to my own son at the time. It was a little later in the writing process that I realised - as Tom does earlier in the novel - that the title has meaning for a family of three reduced to two and struggling with that loss. In addition, I also realised that Power of Three is about a father and son who are having trouble understanding and connecting to each other. So what started as pure coincidence turned out to be a serendipitous choice. As a nod to that, the house Tom and Jake move to is on Garholt Street, which I named after Garholt, the magical place on the moor in which the family in Power of Three live. Make sure to check out my latest book, THE SHADOWS: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52796734-the-shadows For which I've also written Kindle Notes and Highlights: https://www.goodreads.com/notes/51026324-the-shadow-friend/119790035-alex-north