By Vaseem Khan
Why do we Brits keep writing America? And do we deserve to be thrown into the Boston harbour along with our precious tea?
Imagine a Brit from London, an English author of Indian extraction, in a tiny town in rural Pennsylvania. Now imagine him walking into the town library, two women behind the counter pausing, mid-conversation, to stare. And now imagine our Englishman introducing himself, and then, partway through his garbled explanation of a writer-conducting-research in small town USA, one of the women holding up a finger, saying ‘Just hold on there’, sallying forth from behind her counter, and returning with a ten-year-old, dog-eared copy of our hero’s debut novel.
You couldn’t make it up. Yet this is precisely what happened to me during my extensive tour of small American hamlets whilst researching my first psychological thriller The Girl in Cell A. The book is set in a forested mining town (Eden Falls) run by the factious Wyclerc dynasty and their ruthless patriarch Amos Wyclerc – think Succession transplanted to the backwoods. The 17-year-old daughter of the Wyclerc’s housekeeper, Orianna, is convicted of murdering the heir to the dynasty. She claims she cannot remember the killing. Eighteen years later, she returns to Eden Falls to figure out the truth, in a town still haunted by the killing and hiding a surfeit of dark secrets. In a separate timeline, we see Orianna’s initial years in prison as she is interviewed by a forensic psychotherapist attempting to break open the black box of her memory.
Why do we Brits keep writing America? What inspires us to do so? And do we do it well or do we deserve to be thrown into the Boston harbour along with our precious tea?
When I was young, I fell in love with American cinema. I particularly loved small town Americana, especially if it had a dark edge. I remember the first time I saw In The Heat of the Night, starring Sydney Poitier, about a black policeman visiting a small American town, being mistaken for a murderer, and then asked to help the local cops to solve the murder. It captured the explosive mix of crime mystery, social commentary, and sense of menacing claustrophobia that only small town settings can generate.
It has taken me some thirty years to finally write my big American thriller – it’s my twelfth novel overall, but my first standalone and the first set in the States. Packed with twists and turns, the early reviews tell me that it works as both a psychological thriller and a compelling family saga. But does it do justice to the voice? Will it pass muster with American readers? That’s not for me to judge, but what I can say is that several American readers have already commented that they couldn’t tell that a Brit had written the book. Perhaps that’s the best compliment I can hope for.
