My inspiration for writing The Rumour

Photo by Sanja Gjenero from FreeImages

I started writing The Rumour in August 2017, but the original idea came to me a few years earlier, when someone I was working with passed on a rumour to me. It concerned a notorious figure who had once committed a terrible crime and who was now, allegedly, living as a protected person in a safe house in my neighbourhood.

I kept this rumour to myself, but for a few days after hearing it, I found myself looking at my neighbours and people I saw in the street a little more closely than usual, and whenever I saw someone of the right gender and age, I would speculate on whether it might be them. 

I knew it probably wasn’t true, but the notion of someone with a shocking secret trying to assimilate into a new community must have really resonated with me, because when I was trying to come up with ideas for a novel, it was one of the first things that came into my head. 

I wanted to explore how fast rumours spread and the damage they can inflict on individuals, so I deliberately decided to set the novel in a small community where there are more and closer links between the various inhabitants, and since I’d recently moved away from London and settled in a small town on the coast, I drew inspiration from my new environment. 

The subject of The Rumour, loosely inspired by the real life Mary Bell case, is called Sally McGowan - at least that was her name as a child when she killed a little boy - and as I started to think about the nature of her crime and her release back into society as an adult, it made me want to explore deeper, more fundamental issues, such as how far children, often victims themselves, can be held responsible for their crimes and whether true redemption is ever possible. 

The year I was completing the novel - 2018 - was the 50 year anniversary of the Mary Bell killings and the 25 year anniversary of the James Bulger murder by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, which proved to be a strange and unsettling coincidence. The more articles about these high-profile cases I read, the more I thought about the vitriol levelled at the perpetrators and how this sometimes spills over into revenge fantasies and vigilantism, fuelled by sensationalist stories in the press. Our sense of disgust and outrage when it’s a murder committed by a child seems to be far, far worse than when it’s committed by an adult. Perhaps it’s because we think of childhood as a time of innocence and purity, so when a child carries out a violent crime, it shakes us to the core and makes us fearful.

I like to think that my main character Joanna represents that side of us that on the one hand doesn’t like the idea of rumours and gossip and understands how dangerous such things can be, but on the other hand, can’t quite resist listening in. 

Speculating on a colleague’s love life, indulging in a spot of schadenfreude, or just having a guilty giggle about something we have no business knowing – it’s human nature, isn’t it, to be curious about others? And being chosen as the recipient of a juicy or sensitive piece of information makes us feel privileged. Someone has deemed us trustworthy enough to deal with the information sensibly, to keep it to ourselves. 

The trouble is, once you know something you shouldn’t, it’s hard not to share it. It bubbles up inside and demands to be released. But as Joanna in The Rumour soon discovers, a casual comment is all it takes to change a life – for ever.