Janice Hallett, The Killer Question - Author Interview
- Becca Hughes
- Aug 18
- 7 min read
Thank you to Janice Hallett and Megan Rudloff at Simon and Schuster for the ARC copy!
Buy the book on the website HERE.
Read my review of the book here.
The Killer Question Synopsis:
Janice Hallett, “the new queen of crime” (Electric Literature), returns with a fresh, edge-of-your-seat mystery that takes place at a pub’s weekly trivia night, revealed through quiz categories, phone messages, and email correspondence.
Sue and Mal Eastwood run an isolated rural pub called The Case is Altered where a weekly trivia game has revived its flagging fortunes—that is, until a body is found in the nearby river. Soon after, a mysterious new team arrives and shakes up the diverse field of regulars by scoring top marks in every round...every week.
Meanwhile, Sue and Mal have a secret of their own. Before arriving here, they were caught up in a secret police operation which meant they had to leave town—and whatever happened back then seems to have finally caught up with them.
Five years later, the pub lies derelict, and their nephew Dominic is determined to make a documentary about their story. What happened at this unassuming pub? And can a single question really kill?
Author Interview:
Did your idea for setting the plot around a small-town pub quiz come from a real-life experience? Are you a quizzer?
I’m a very keen quizzer and belong to a team called ‘Friends & Family’ as some of the members are related and some aren’t. There’s a local quiz community here in North West London that’s friendly, but still competitive. After a while, you get to know each team’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as your own. Quizzing opens up a lot of doors in one’s thought processes. Since quizzing regularly I’ve had to become a more active learner and remember facts and details I would otherwise forget. It definitely helps keep your brain ticking over. What’s more, it’s a safe space to exercise your competitive spirit without having to play sport, or even get out of your chair. Quizzers are famously passionate about quizzing, but few people realise how dedicated quiz-setters are to their task. It’s not as easy to come up with good, entertaining, inventive and challenging quiz questions as you might think. I’ve dedicated my newest book, The Killer Question, to quizzers and quiz-setters alike.
Does the absence of traditional prose change what readers get out of the story or enhance it? And how do you choose what to reveal through messages and documents versus what to leave between the lines?
I hope my epistolary format creates a more active experience for the reader. They won’t be told what clothes the characters are wearing or what colour eyes they have, but will see exactly how they communicate with everyone else in their life, and have the chance to interpret what they say – and what they don’t. My readers get to see the world from every point of view in the book and deduce what happened from there. I spend a lot of time making sure key facts are revealed at the right time, but leave other things to the reader’s imagination. Those tantalising gaps in the narrative are sinkholes where the reader will become immersed in the story.
What first drew you to the epistolary format, and what keeps bringing you back? Is it the puzzle, the intimacy, or something else entirely?
I worked as a screenwriter and playwright for many years so delivering character and atmosphere through dialogue was second nature. When I switched to novel writing I adopted the same approach – in all my novels the reader is eavesdropping on characters who don’t realise we’re ‘listening’ in on what they say. I’m fascinated by how what we say, and don’t say, can reveal so much about how we feel and how we see the world. I love the ‘found footage’ genre in film – The Blair Witch Project is one of my all-time faves – and that comes through in my novels too. It’s the added opportunities for mystery and intrigue that get me!
What do you say to those who think the epistolary format is limiting or too gimmicky for serious storytelling?
They are welcome to read my novels to see if they change their mind!
The setting gives off cosy mystery vibes, but the story doesn’t shy away from violence or dark detail. How do you manage that tonal balance between charm and shock?
I have an uneasy relationship with the ‘cosy crime’ moniker. It’s a broad church, with the cosiest examples being very different in tone to my books. Even in my cosiest moments, I’ve never shied away from the reality of murder. However, I think keeping any lighter, ‘cosy’ elements firmly grounded in reality will help the darker moments feel real too. After all, what is life but a blend of light and dark?
Big question, but what usually comes first for you: the twist, the characters, or the setting? For example, that profound reveal about Chris’s name on his phone made me wonder how early you build in backstories versus plot structure.
It’s a big question and a good one. For me, characters always comes first, although to start writing I do need a setting to put them in. For this book the pub community that centres around a group of pubs that run quizzes. That was all I knew when I started and from that the characters emerged. What people call themselves, and the different names people are known by, is a recurring theme for me. It intrigues me when people call themselves something other than their name, because it speaks to how they see their identity and how they want others to see them – often a key factor in a whodunit. I wrote Chris’s pseudonym the very first time his character ‘spoke’, which was long, long before I knew why he called himself that. All I knew was that he had a very good reason. I needed to write the whole book before I realised what it was.
Is there a mystery genre convention you particularly enjoy subverting or one you think is overdue for retirement?
I always seem to subvert the six-people-in-a-room whodunit, who are all suspects in the murder that happens on page one, much as I love the best examples of that. My novels have huge casts and you often don’t know what the crime even is until later on. As for retiring a trope – I much prefer reinvention!
Have you ever come up with a twist so elaborate you had to tone it down, or risk losing the reader?
This has happened a few times. It’s always a risk, because I never plan my books in advance, so at the end of that first draft I can be left with a baggy, meandering narrative that contains all sorts of dead ends and unresolved plotlines that need simplifying and sorting out. My editor will then say the same when she sends me her structural edit. What I’ll know for sure is the feel and the themes. There’ll be a story in there somewhere!
Do you deliberately plant red herrings, or do they emerge naturally as readers second-guess everyone? I found myself suspicious of nearly every character at some point.
A bit of both. I set cliff hangers, clues and potential red herrings throughout the first draft, but not all will be relevant or will make it into the final draft. A lot happens organically because I write a book just as the reader will read it – without knowing what happens, to whom or why. Having said that, when I know what the final twists will be, I always go back and plant clues and misdirections that give the reader at least a fair chance of guessing.
This is easily the funniest murder mystery I’ve read this year. How important is humour to your storytelling, especially when dealing with something as dark as murder?
Thank you! Finding comedy even in the darkest moments is a very human thing, but I’m always very careful to keep it natural to the character and narrative. You can think of the funniest line ever, but if you haven’t got a character who would naturally and realistically say it at that moment, you simply can’t use it. I guess that’s where humour in a crime novel differs from humour in a comic novel – where you’d change the narrative to fit that golden gag. Also, you have to balance humour very carefully if you want to build tension, because a joke in the wrong place (even if it might happen in real life) will disperse any hard-won tension in a split second.
Which character would be the worst person to be stuck in a group chat/on a quiz team with?
Poor Andy. He’s at the end of his tether with no support, in an exhausting job that takes up all his waking hours, drains his spirit and destroys his confidence, yet gives him no satisfaction, recognition or reward. It’s no wonder he’s not great company to start with, but when he hits his stride in the quiz team, things are bound to change – one way or the other!
About the Author:
Janice Hallett is a former magazine editor, award-winning journalist, and government communications writer. She wrote articles and speeches for, among others, the Cabinet Office, Home Office, and Department for International Development. Her enthusiasm for travel has taken her around the world several times, from Madagascar to the Galapagos, Guatemala to Zimbabwe, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. A playwright and screenwriter, she penned the feminist Shakespearean stage comedy NetherBard and cowrote the feature film Retreat. She lives in London and is the author of The Killer Question, The Examiner, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, The Appeal, The Christmas Appeal, and The Twyford Code.
Book release date: September 4, 2025
Book Review: here
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