SELF STARTING

If you’ve come to writing later in life and are worried about making it in a young person’s game, look to Rachel Abbott for inspiration. Rachel only started writing in her fifties. She went on to become one of the most successful self-published authors in the world, selling more than three million copies of her books. A decade after she put her first book on Amazon, she’s now a hybrid author, known to her fans as ‘the Queen of twisted suspense’, continuing to self-publish one series and with a traditional publishing deal for another. With more than four million copies of her books sold, her latest thriller, The Murder Game, was published in April by Headline’s Wildfire imprint.

It’s a dark, twisty, horribly unputdownable take on a locked-room mystery, telling the story of a group of people invited to celebrate the anniversary of what should have been Lucas’s wedding by playing out a tense real-life mystery at his isolated Cornish mansion.

‘I think it was the whole idea of a murder mystery thing that started it,’ says Rachel, talking from her home in Alderney just before lockdown. ‘I thought, how about if it was real? If it was a real event the people there were forced to investigate, and everybody was provided with costumes and character profiles – but everyone was something very strange. The intrigue of somebody setting it up.’

Rachel’s way of operating starts with the creation of a central premise it was the idea of the real-life murder mystery party. ‘I always have one central premise in there and then have to work out what happened first. Human behaviour.’ It’s an effective way of working, ensuring that all the material is tailored to amplifying the core idea. ‘More than anything I’m interested in psychology,’ she says. ‘All the ideas are based on differences between people and how their minds work.’