It’s not hard to force a confession from copper turned crime writer Clare Mackintosh. ‘I was never a great thief-taker,’ she says. ‘I have a terrible memory for faces.’
Of course, this is not strictly true. Mackintosh was on the fast track to promotion and had made it to inspector. It’s just that she is naturally inclined to the societal, structural, strategic part of policing, rather than lifting small-time crimes.
Anyway, it wasn’t this that made her unbutton her uniform and pick up her pen instead. It was because of the chaos wreaked by the job on a family made fragile by the death of a baby.
Police Inspector turned crime writer Clare Mackintosh reveals why family plays such a big part in her hugely successful novels
‘I got an appraisal that said my door was always open and that I was a good listener and I cared. I took it home to show my husband, who smiled and said, “That’s great but who is this woman, I don’t recognise her.” I had a moment of clarity. I realised I was keeping all the best bits of me for work and giving my family the leftovers.’
Today, her life couldn’t be more different. Her dazzling 2014 debut, I Let You Go, sold more than a million copies, as did her second book I See You. Her third, Let Me Lie, is out this week.
Success has enabled the family to move from Oxfordshire to a Georgian manor house in Bala, in the Snowdonia National Park, where they all now speak Welsh. Her husband Rob – like her, 41 – has swapped his role as a diplomatic protection officer to become deputy team leader of the South Snowdonia Mountain Rescue Team. ‘The children think he is James Bond,’ she laughs.
Family runs through her work as powerfully as crime. The presence and absence of children is a recurring theme, as are the dynamics of parental and marital and working relationships. She knows a lot about human nature and articulates it beautifully, something that made the publishing industry anxious at first – her work was not a true fit for the police procedural genre that is such a huge seller. Ultimately, it is what has made her a star.
She writes from sad experience. First, she could not have children naturally, and then she lost one of her twin IVF babies, which were born at 28 weeks. Even now, 11 years later, talking about the tragedy still makes her cry.
One of the twins caught meningitis and suffered a brain bleed, causing irrevocable damage, which would leave him unable to walk, talk, swallow or interact. ‘We chose to take him off intensive care,’ she says. ‘He died at five weeks old. The next day we walked past his empty cot to reach his twin and it remains the single worst thing that has ever happened to me. Eleven years on it should not hurt, but when you have twins there is always a shadow. Every first day at school, every birthday, every milestone there is a gap.
‘We had to undo our lives – we had two high chairs, two car seats, yet we came home with one baby. I would cross the road to avoid a double buggy.’
When she fell pregnant naturally five months after her surviving baby came home from hospital, she became obsessed with the idea that history would repeat itself. An early scan was arranged to rule it out. ‘I could see two heartbeats, it was twins. I remember trying to get off the bed and run away. I was in denial, I would not prepare the nursery, wear maternity clothes, buy anything. In the end she delivered both babies safely.
Her children were unimpressed until she beat JK Rowling to a literary prize
The experience of losing a child melded with a shocking, never solved hit-and-run when she was a probationer to form the narrative of I Let You Go. ‘I could not understand how someone could run away knowing they had killed a child and watch the news and drive past the place again and again… and still not come forward. Back then it also seemed to me impossible that a mother could carry on after burying her child. Now I know you have to.’
Her latest book, Let Me Lie, is about a married couple, Tom and Caroline Johnson, who abandon their emotionally stable, affluent lives. A coroner finds they have committed suicide by leaping from Beachy Head leaving a daughter, Anna, bereft and trying to raise a baby of her own.
It is classic Mackintosh, the scriptures of motherhood and family life woven through events of heart-wrenching bleakness, a twist requiring a grand pirouette of imagination from the reader and an ending which casts an unflinching eye over human nature and what we are all unexpectedly capable of when cornered.
Mackintosh has written since childhood but signed up for the police graduate training scheme for its solid prospects. By 2004 she had been made a sergeant and sent to Chipping Norton which, she says, was like being dropped into an episode of Heartbeat. At inspector level she felt that policing was devouring her ability to mother her children, her eldest now aged 11 and the twins of ten. So she quit and wrote a book.
Family runs through Mackintosh’s work as powerfully as crime. The presence and absence of children is a recurring theme
She was in the underwear department of M&S when she got the call to say it was about to go global. ‘Of all the wonderful things that have happened since, it’s the moment in the middle of all the knickers that is still my proudest,’ she says. Her children, she adds, remained unimpressed until she beat JK Rowling to a literary prize and the Harry Potter author tweeted her congratulations.
Fans and fellow writers often think her former career must have given her lots of true crime tales but its real legacy was the access it afforded to other people’s lives. ‘What’s invaluable is understanding why people commit crime. None of us is completely good or evil. I am interested in the line we all walk – and how a single Sliding Doors moment can put us all on the other side.’
Let Me Lie by Clare Mackintosh is published by Sphere, priced £12.99. Offer price £10.39 (20% discount) until March 18. Order at mailshop.co.uk/books or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15.