Catherine O'Flynn

Catherine O'Flynn

Catherine O’Flynn was born in Birmingham in 1970, where she grew up in and around her parents’ sweet shop as the youngest in a large family. She has been a teacher, web editor, mystery customer and postwoman. Her first novel draws on her experience of working in record stores – and of growing up as a child intrigued by clues, suspects and methods of detection.

What was your inspiration for the book?
I had a job working long hours at a large shopping centre – and there were many things about it that made me want to write: the trance-like state of the shoppers consuming everything in their wake; the eeriness of the empty centre at night; the constant awareness of surveillance; the differing experiences of staff and shoppers; the industrial past buried beneath it. I kept writing about it – almost obsessively, I really wanted to pin down the essence of the place – but at that stage there was no plan for this to be a novel. Then I heard a story doing the rounds amongst the centre security guards of a child being seen on one of the CCTV monitors in the middle of the night and that image stayed with me and was the starting point for the novel.

Is Kate’s character based on yourself as a child?
There are certainly similarities between Kate and myself at that age. There was a ten-year age gap between my closest sibling and me and so I spent quite a lot of time on my own. I had various Usborne books filled with advice on clues and suspects and methods of detection. It never occurred to me to take these with a pinch of salt – they were gospel to me. There was (and still is) a branch of Lloyds Bank near where I grew up in Nechells. It was a gleaming 1960s structure, which seemed unspeakably glamorous and a likely hub of international crime. I used to sit outside for hours and take down car registration numbers diligently. I can’t fully express my disappointment that nothing remotely clandestine ever occurred.

Who are your favourite authors?
Some of the authors I’ve enjoyed most are: David Foster Wallace, Patricia Highsmith, Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett, Anne Tyler, Cormac McCarthy, Mervyn Peake, James Ellroy, Gordon Burn, Toni Morrison, Anthony Cartwright, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Coe.