In many ways my novel The Hidden Hours is a classic mystery suspense: a woman’s body is found in the River Thames after the office Christmas party, and the last person to see her can’t remember a thing. However, at the heart of the book is the exploration of a troubled soul: twenty-one-year-old Eleanor. I wanted to investigate the kind of childhood tragedies that stem from insidious emotional neglect by well-meaning but misguided parents. And I was also playing with the idea of elements of history repeating. What would happen if a person were unwittingly caught up in a traumatic situation that has uncomfortable parallels to things they’ve already experienced? Would they handle it differently this time, or would it prove their undoing?
I usually have one or two ideas that germinate my whole story. In The Hidden Hours I was keen to write from a child’s perspective about building a house in the Australian outback, because I’d visited some friends of ours doing the same thing (in different circumstances) and it had intrigued me: watching the mother clamber over the half-built roof like a spider monkey; listening to stories of snakes sleeping in the car engine; seeing the temporary lodgings for a family of five, who were all crammed into a large shed. This family were not troubled like my fictional one, and it was one big adventure for them … but still, the isolation struck me, and the uniqueness and demands of what they were trying to do.
At the same time I was also drawn to London, because, just like my main character, I’d worked at HarperCollins publishers in my twenties, as assistant to the fiction publisher. It was an amazing introduction and immersion in the world of publishing – both the glamorous side, and the immense hard work that goes into every book being produced. So I knew how daunted Eleanor would feel at being thrown in the deep end at my fictional children’s publisher Parker & Lane.
The story is told in three parts. In the first section Eleanor’ childhood memory is repressed, and we only see it second hand. In the second part, her memories begin to re-emerge, so the chapters alternate between past and present. And in the third part, those memories overwhelm her and intrude completely into the present, so past and present are intertwined within the paragraphs. Usually, I enjoy telling stories from different points of view as I like the way the story spreads out and becomes larger and the perspective widens beyond a limited world-view. But this didn’t really work with Eleanor, as we need to see intently through her eyes. So I came up with little vignettes at the start of each chapter, from all sorts of characters that are connected with the story – some intimately, and others only remotely. I loved writing these!
At the time of writing I was reading lots of other books in a similar genre and I was good at guessing the endings. So I wanted to challenge myself to write a mystery where you really couldn’t guess the perpetrator until the final chapters. In my story I wanted everyone to be a suspect. So there are five or more possibilities in this story, and I hope the reader enjoys being suspicious of everyone until the final reveal.
Sara Foster was born and raised in England and moved to Australia in 2004. She has published five other novels: Come Back to Me, Beneath the Shadows, Shallow Breath, All That Is Lost between Us, and The Hidden Hours. She lives near Perth, Western Australia, with her husband and two young daughters, and is a doctoral candidate with Curtin University.
