It would be ludicrous to attempt to sum up the plot of Mark Edwards’ innovative, clever and totally compelling thriller, The Wasp Trap. But in a nutshell: The story toggles between past (1999) and present, as a group of six young people are attempting to build an early online dating site, working in a mansion outside of London owned by the academic who is behind the project. The approach they take to matching prospective daters is a rigorous series of psychological analyses of users’ personality traits based upon their answers to questions.
Twenty-five years later, the no longer young entrepreneurs are invited to a dinner party by the most successful members of the group, who are now a married with two children and a fancy, well-appointed manor home. The dinner is both a reunion and a remembrance of their recently deceased former mentor. It’s a big deal – catered, spend the weekend in luxurious surroundings and just get caught up!
Right from the start, Edwards drops numerous little asides, odd exchanges, unanswered questions – it’s a bit off from the start. But Will, our primary narrator, keeps telling himself, it’s all good. While the group dynamic of the six is naturally fraught with past slights, unrequited romantic feelings, jealousy – the real tension soon emerges. It seems the caterers aren’t just serving food. As in SO MANY of the current (unending) spate of mystery novels about a reunion or similar gathering of people who have a dreadful SECRET that has been repressed for all these years, this crowd has one, too!
Feeling perfectly engorged after reading The Wasp Trap, I knew I had to ask Mark Edwards a few questions. He’d taken a tired, cliched concept and truly revitalized it, imagining an exciting, fresh perspective. In a recent email interview, Edwards discussed his approach to this ubiquitous crime fiction sub-genre theme.
Peter: When I began The Wasp Trap I thought, hoo boy, yet another group of people share something nefarious from their youthful past, it’s a secret and years later, it’s just impossible not to have it revealed….and you completely turned this much too common trope upside down! So, when you were conceptualizing the plot, were you consciously wanting to bring a very fresh approach to a tired, overused (these days, anyway) plot device?
Mark: Yes, I’m very aware that there are a lot of books out there about groups of old friends with secrets and I always want my novels to be different. The starting point was wanting to write a home invasion book, and I hit upon the idea of it happening during a dinner party. Then I mixed in several other influences: the dark academia of The Secret History, a little bit of The Breakfast Club, my own fascination with psychometric tests and, finally, the game-playing and voting elements of The Traitors TV show. I think mixing all of these elements together helped make it fresh. I was particularly excited when I hit upon the idea of the psychopath test because that wasn’t in the original pitch.
P: Are you a fan of the film Funny Games?
M: It’s one of my favourites, although embarrassingly I have only seen the American remake. It’s so relentlessly bleak and terrifying, and the part where they rewind the film and let us know there is no hope is devastatingly clever. The Wasp Trap isn’t that dark (although the previous one, The Psychopath Next Door, was).
P: Back in 2013 I was involved in a book-related start-up, which, like most, never achieved adequate funding and had its figurative plug pulled after numerous tedious meetings. It was a fascinating if ultimately discouraging period of my life. You captured the vibe dead on. Have you been involved in any start-ups?
M: I worked for a start-up back in 2000, which was based in my boss’s large country house, rather like the one in the book, although we didn’t live there. This was at the peak of the dotcom boom and, like the characters in the book, we thought we were going to get rich. The site was a kind of eBay clone but intended to be more upmarket. Unfortunately, we had so few customers we could have sent them all handwritten Christmas cards. It was fun though and I always knew it would make a good setting for a book.
P: I’ve thought a lot about The Wasp Trap, because of how you incorporated so many diffuse yet harmonious aspects in the story: the single setting – mostly – the notion of “tests” that promise to reveal plenty but of course don’t, the “secret” from the past, false identities, class attitudes – and so on. One gets the feeling you had a ball shaping this story…true?
M: I am a huge culture junkie and hoover up as many books, films and TV shows as I can. I’m constantly trying to create stories that I would enjoy and that pay tribute to the many things I love. It was so much fun to write, especially the 1999 chapters. The nostalgia of going back to the greatest decade and imagining being young again was pure joy.
P: Many crime/mystery authors seem to feel that tossing in one effing twist after another into a story somehow makes it better. (James Patterson, I’m talking to you, and you have deeper issues as well) Yet you completely remained in control of the story, and the twists were perfectly placed, perfectly paced. Your final one is utterly a shock. Comments?
M: There is definitely pressure on us thriller authors to throw in as many twists as possible. This pressure comes from editors but mostly from readers, who want constant surprises. I love coming up with them. I like to imagine readers gasping, although I’m not always in control. I often come up with them in the second or third draft after much agonizing on long dog walks, after which I reverse engineer the story to make it all work.
P: I see you have written a ton of novels, but I have to admit I had not heard of you before. Could you talk a bit about your previous work?
M: You probably haven’t heard of me because all my previous books were published by Thomas & Mercer, part of Amazon, so they exist in a different space outside the mainstream, selling large numbers on Kindle while not being in stores. My books are all about ‘scary things happening to ordinary people’. Stephen King without the supernatural stuff. The most popular so far have been The Magpies, which is about neighbours from hell, Here To Stay, about in-laws from hell, and Follow You Home, set on the holiday from hell. If I can describe my book as the X from hell I know I’ve succeeded.
P: And finally, I always like to ask novelists if they know the whole story before they sit down to write it – are you one? I would think that this story had to be well thought-out from the start – was it?
M: This was the first book I’ve written that was planned out fully before I started writing it. In the past, I was always a pantser, making it up as I went along. I would throw away many thousands of words as I tried to make the book work. Because I had a new publisher and editor for The Wasp Trap I wanted to make sure they knew what they’d be getting before I started writing it.
And those books, the ones about the neighbors from hell? They are sitting on my nightstand, ready and waiting to take this reader down a psychopathic lane!
Peter Handel has been writing about crime fiction since the early 1990s. His reviews, interviews, and profiles have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Portland Oregonian, Pages Magazine, Mystery Reader’s Journal, The Rap Sheet and CrimeReads. Join his Substack here.
