Louise Candlish on how to write a gripping, nail-biting story

All books have psychology in them and many will thrill to an extent, so there must be other ingredients that set a great psychological thriller apart from the rest, that contribute to that compulsive, page-turning quality. I always say that if you start reading in daylight and then look up and find the room has gone dark, then you’ve been in the grip of something special. This happens to me every so often – Alex Michaelides’ The Silent Patient springs to mind, and, recently, Barbara Vine’s 1980s classic, A Dark-Adapted Eye. I got so immersed I didn’t even want to break to make a coffee or to answer the doorbell.

For me, the key element is an opening question so compelling, so impossible to answer, that it eats away at you until it’s resolved. Why won’t this woman speak, when breaking her silence is the only thing that can help her? I think this needs to be posed in the first chapter. In The Heights, Ellen is in a meeting in Shad Thames, a riverside neighbourhood in London near Tower Bridge, when she sees a young man on the roof terrace opposite who she knows she has killed. The question, for her, is, how can he be back from the dead like this? For the reader, it’s what on earth made her kill a man in the first place?

Pace is another factor, for sure. Yes, we need vivid details of setting, but not lengthy descriptions – it can be a useful shorthand to set a thriller in a well-known city like New York or London, because readers already have a clear visual in mind. Lots of thrillers motor along with short chapters and lots of cliff hangers. I tend to let my scenes vary a bit, but each one will challenge the characters in some way.

I’ve heard people say plot is everything in a thriller, but I would say character is just as important. The hero or antihero needs to feel fully formed, worth biting our nails over. That doesn’t mean we have to like them or even share their instincts. My own favourites are the Patricia Highsmith types, the fraudster on the run, the stranger making a pact he doesn’t expect to have to honour. Yes, they’ve behaved appallingly, but they’ve been unlucky too and there’s a will to survive that you can’t help respecting.

For me, the really crucial element is voice. If you get the voice of the narrator right, if it feels familiar and relatable, then the reader will invest. Because we’re all just a step away from that one fatal mistake, that one wrong decision taken at exactly the wrong time. Aren’t we?