Greg Fleming talks to Paula Hawkins about her new thriller, A Slow Fire Burning

Paula Hawkins. Photo / Getty Images

"I am always interested in people, particularly women, who don't necessarily meet societal expectations," says Paula Hawkins - whose new novel A Slow Fire Burning delves deep into the troubled lives of a group of women - and one man - who are brought together after a homicide on a Regent's Canal houseboat.

"I'm interested not only in how they perceive themselves, but also how they are judged by others if they don't meet those expectations," she says.

"I think either you choose not to or you try and fail. Those people who live in the margins, who live slightly difficult lives - those are the kind of stories I'm drawn to."

I have a strict half-hour on the phone with Hawkins, who, despite whatever else she does, will likely forever be known as the writer of 2015's The Girl on the Train, her gripping debut crime novel about an alcoholic woman who witnesses something shocking from the window of a commuter train, that went on to sell over 20 million copies and inspire two movie adaptations - the most recent a Hindi version set in London.

But Hawkins was far from an overnight success.

The Girl on the Train was a last gasp for a writer who was then in her early 40s and toiling as a financial journalist and a rather unsuccessful chick-lit author.

At her lowest point she had to borrow money from her father to support herself.

The chick-lit books she wrote under the pseudonym Amy Silver had been getting increasingly darker. The last, The Reunion, which she struggled over for two years, sold just 1000 copies.

"Oh, it was a disaster, no doubt. People came to an Amy Silver book for one thing and ended up getting something else - there was definitely a dissonance there. At that point I could either give up writing fiction and go and do something else or change what sort of fiction I was writing."

She chose the latter and started to explore ideas she'd had for a crime fiction novel.

"I'd had ideas but I hadn't really followed through. I was lacking in confidence for obvious reasons.

"Thankfully I had an agent who saw merit in some of them, particularly the drunk woman who ended up being Rachel in The Girl on the Train - that was definitely a turning point in what was a pretty dark time."

There's a character, Theo, in A Slow Fire Burning, a mansplaining writer fallen on hard times, who also resorts to crime fiction "in desperation".

"'It doesn't matter if it's any good,' his agent tells him, 'it doesn't need to have worth. We'll slap someone else's name on it. Just write something.' And so he tried. Romance was a bust and he didn't have the brain for sci-fi, but crime? Crime he could see working. He loved Morse, he'd read Dostoevsky. How hard could it be?"

Was that a wry commentary on Hawkins' recent past?

"It's true, when I began writing The Girl on the Train I was pretty desperate, but I didn't turn to crime fiction the way Theo does - I didn't think, 'Oh this will be easy, I'll just bang something out" - I found my way to crime fiction by a very circuitous route.

"Now, of course, it seems to me so obvious that I should've been writing crime all along. I'm drawn to darker things and I'm interested in the psychology of crime and what happens to people in extreme situations. I've always liked reading that sort of thing but it just took me a very long time to find my way to it. Still, I think that was probably for the best because I needed a lot of other experiences and a lot of practice in writing before I came to the genre."

The enormous success of The Girl on the Train brought with it challenges.

"There'd been some excitement but nobody expected it to be the juggernaut it became," Hawkins says. " I mean, it was thrilling but it was also overwhelming.

"And then I wrote Into the Water while the craziness of The Girl on the Train was going on and that was really quite difficult and that novel was poorly received by critics."

She remembers it as a painful time; many critics pointed to its confusing structure and multiple narrators - "Her goal may be to build suspense, but all she achieves is confusion," said Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

Nevertheless the book sold well - it was another number one bestseller - and she says now that many readers have told her that they love it.

"So it wasn't a complete failure but it's fair to say it wasn't a happy publishing experience from my point of view. But to some degree you just have to roll with the punches."

While she's grateful for the financial freedom The Girl on the Train has afforded her (Hawkins loves to travel - pre-Covid she rented a house for a month in the Dolomites in Italy, where she skied the days away and she took a lengthy road-trip around the United States after completing Into the Water), success has brought pressures and much is expected of A Slow Fire Burning after the lack-lustre reception of Into the Water.

An extensive virtual publicity campaign is underway, the audiobook is read by none other than Rosamund Pike, the star of the film version of that other breakout crime book, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, to which The Girl on the Train is often compared.

"Yes, you feel those pressures," says Hawkins, "but when I'm in the thick of the writing I don't pay attention to what other people are expecting of me - but it's tricky …

Emily Blunt in the film version of The Girl on the Train. Photo / Supplied

"Of course there are also advantages. Now when I publish a book people pay attention and write about it, and people who bought The Girl on the Train are excited to see what I'm going to do next. But in some ways you just have to not think about how a book will be received, otherwise you'd never get anything done."

The good news is that A Slow Fire Burning, the bulk of which Hawkins completed last year as the UK went through lockdown - ("I remember reading Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club and that was the perfect thing at the time") - may be her best book yet - a beautifully written character-based thriller full of Hawkins' trademark difficult, complex women who the rest of the world patronise and underestimate at their peril.

The book had its beginnings on one of Hawkins' regular walks around Regent's Canal.

"There are all these little houseboats on the canal and it was such an interesting little corner of London - this community that was part of London but not really part of it. There are all these boats there and you can peer into some of them. They're obviously people's homes and they're beautifully kept but every now and again you'll come across ones that are grubby or sinking slightly into the water and it just struck me that there could be anything in one of those boats and being a crime writer my mind went to, 'Oh you could hide anything in one of those, even a body!'"

She has little time for critics and readers who hold that protagonists should be in some way likeable and the cast of A Slow Fire Burning are, bar none, damaged, angry and alone, all struggling to find their place in a world that has dealt them a raw deal.

Here's how Hawkins describes one character: " Low self-worth was indeed one of Laura's problems, but it wasn't the only one. She had a whole host of others to keep it company, including but not limited to: hyper-sexuality, poor impulse control, inappropriate social behaviour, aggressive outbursts, short-term memory lapses and quite a pronounced limp."

Another character, Miriam, lashes out at people as she suffers a form of survivor's guilt after a traumatic incident she suffered as a teenager.

Were those characters hard to live with day in and day out?

"I think when you write people you get to know them so well that you love them more than the readers do," says Hawkins.

"I become very invested in them, after all I know everything about where they're coming from.

"So, yes, they are intense and difficult but I find those people quite easy to inhabit.

"It's quite a recent thing that readers require likeability from characters in fiction. Actually I think it would be very strange if you came to crime fiction for likeability; I mean you are expecting murder and mayhem aren't you? Not everyone is going to be nice … I'm interested in writing people who feel real, who are compelling and three-dimensional - likeability doesn't come into it. It may, of course, but that's not top of the list for me. I'm writing about people in difficult situations who are behaving in extreme ways because they are in those situations."

I tell her a quote by American writer Willa Cather came to mind after I read A Slow Fire Burning, which returns and expands on themes in her previous crime novels: "There are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

"Yes, absolutely," says Hawkins. "I think the thing is that all writers, even if they write different sorts of books, they find themselves returning to issues that bother them, ones they ponder over. I know I'm drawn back to recurring themes - the way women are judged, the way memory works, the way we remember our stories and tell them, particularly the way we shape narratives to make sense of our lives, and, to some degree, societal violence against women.

"No matter how much you try to break out of those things you do find yourself returning to them. As writers we all have our corners that we keep excavating for more insight, more excitement, more meaning."

A Slow Fire Burning (Doubleday, $37) is out on September 7.