From The Girl on the Train to Granite Noir - How Paula Hawkins is inspired by Scotland

With a house in Edinburgh as well as one in London, bought with her partner just before lockdown, her Scottish links are strong but this is the first time she’s set a novel here.

Hawkins will be talking about The Blue Hour and also introducing a screening of her worldwide bestseller The Girl on the Train, which has sold 23 million copies worldwide in 50 languages and was made into a film starring Emily Blunt, at Granite Noir crime writing festival in Aberdeen next month.

“I came as a child on holiday with my family when we were living in Zimbabwe and I was just gobsmacked by Edinburgh,” she says. “It was like something out of a book. There was a literal castle on a hill. Never seen such a thing in all my life! Anyway, I’ve always liked it, and then we have friends who live here and my partner’s mum was Scottish and he has family nearby, so we just like it.

“I love the landscape and the kind of emptiness. There’s something about it that is just very appealing, and obviously it’s very beautiful. The west coast is so extraordinarily beautiful, and it’s been such a pleasure being able to get away there so easily. I’ve rediscovered my love of swimming in the sea which I had as a child.

“It is also the perfect landscape for this kind of fiction. It’s wild and stormy and gets dark in the middle of the afternoon in winter, and you can just imagine the terrible deeds being committed under cover of darkness.”

Born and raised in Zimbabwe before settling in London in 1989, the former journalist’s debut novel The Girl on the Train (2015) became a number one bestseller, as did Into the Water (2017) and A Slow Fire Burning (2021), and The Blue Hour has followed suit since its October publication.

Set on Eris, a fictional tidal island on the West Coast, and focusing on its lone inhabitant and the secrets and lies linked to a human bone at the centre of a famous sculpture, the creative spark for The Blue Hour (the hour between light and dark) was ignited in the author initially on a holiday in France, then consolidated by her travels north of the Border.

“The location was the first thing I thought about. I really liked the idea of a tidal island. I had been on holiday in France in 2017 and was walking along the Brittany coast where there are lots of tiny islands, and I remember seeing one that had a single house on it and I got that little prickly feeling at the back of my neck.

“Then I took inspiration from the landscape of the West Coast of Scotland. I thought a tidal island was such a great location for a novel, particularly a crime novel, because it’s beautiful and remote but you have all these possibilities. You could be trapped there or need to get there and not be able to. People don’t pay attention to the tide and get caught and there’s always that danger you could mistime something so it has an element of peril built in.”

After deciding on a tidal island, Hawkins’ thoughts turned to character and plot.

“I was intrigued by what kind of person would choose to live on an island that’s cut off twice a day by the tide. I thought an artist, because of the beauty of the landscape and the solitude, and then I’m thinking ‘OK, she’s trying to get away from something’. And it starts to build from there.”

Given her fascination with islands, does Hawkins harbour a desire to live on one like her characters, Vanessa the recently deceased artist, or Grace the doctor?

“There is something about the act of physically removing yourself, so yes it’s attractive to me - in theory. I probably wouldn’t enjoy it for too long. I think I would find it lonely, and frightening probably. To be alone is a frightening thing. Anyone who has any kind of imagination will start to think terrible thoughts.”

And we know Hawkins has imagination, with her books amassing millions of fans for their tense psychological dramas and dark deeds set among everyday domestic scenes. With the Blue Hour influenced by writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier, what would Hawkins say are the themes?

“It’s that tension between feeling the need and desire to belong and also be free. Also it’s about friendship, the very complicated friendship that at times is very toxic and spans over a long period of time. We write about marriages and love affairs as being very complicated but friendship is often just treated as something very simple and I don’t think it is, particularly a friendship that spans a long time. And it’s about art and obsession and what it is to want to live a life where you create art and what that costs.”

With an artist as her main character Hawkins immersed herself in researching the art world, something she has a love for anyway - her home is full of paintings, a line drawing hanging on the wall behind her chair - but school put paid to any artistic ambitions. “I was told I wasn’t very good at it and it just stays in your head. But I’m quite happy just writing. That’s enough for me.”

However, she’s a big fan of visiting galleries and for The Blue Hour read extensively on the lives of artists.

“I read biographies and memoirs and I enjoy looking at art and knew a little bit about it. I drew on the writing of people like Barbara Hepworth who writes very well about her life and work and there was a very good biography of her out not that long ago, and borrowed a bit from the life of Joan Eardley. She took herself off and lived in an isolated place on the East Coast and liked to paint the sea and landscapes and when I’m describing some of the paintings in the book I at times had her paintings in my mind.

“But a lot of it was trying to get my head into how a modern artist thinks and talks about their work and the challenges you have. The fact that it’s physical, you have to carry canvases around, the weight of clay, the strength those things take. Then all of those bits went into the creation of the characters.”

With the characters suggested by location - Vanessa the artist, Grace a GP, their family and friends - sorted, the plot came rapidly, faster than usual says Hawkins. The Blue Hour took a year to write, The Girl on the Train a little more and the others closer to two years.

“I’m not one of those who is going to write a novel a year every year. I don’t work like that somehow,” she says. “Sometimes I spend ages trying to make the plot work, but for some reason I didn’t have to do that this time.”

Could this be why she says The Blue Hour is a book she enjoyed writing more than any of the others?

“I really loved it. There were lots of things, but partly it was the setting which was a joy to think about, and partly that I was writing about an artist and I loved immersing myself in their world, but it just came together quite easily plotwise. Once I had this idea that there would be this bone in the sculpture and that’s where the mystery would start, I could see where I was going so I didn’t have to spend ages fiddling with the plot which I had done in the previous books. That left more time to concentrate on language and characters and creating the atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion and threat all the way through. It was really lovely that it happened to all come together nicely. And so obviously the next one will not be like that,” she smiles, “but I’ll just enjoy it when it happens.”

Everyday characters - Laura who works in a launderette, Rachel who does a daily train commute, Grace who is a GP, neighbours, colleagues, friends - Hawkins writes about ordinary people whose lives are revealed to be extraordinary when she peels away the layers.

“That’s who I want to write about. Very ordinary people. I’m not delving into the world of criminality, serial killers, spies or people who are in gangs. I am interested in the way ordinary lives go wrong and those are always the stories I find myself drawn to when I’m reading the newspaper. Stories of people who are coping quite happily then something has gone terribly awry in their life. I’m always fascinated by how did that happen? How did you go from being an ordinary suburban person into this terrible situation?

“There is a sense of ‘there but for the grace of God’. It could be you or your neighbour or any of us. There is always a path that leads people in that direction and that’s what I’m interested in finding.”

On the cover of A Slow Fire Burning, under the title is the warning: ‘It’s the quiet ones you have to watch’ and in The Blue Hour, Hawkins returns to this idea. Why is she fascinated with ‘the quiet ones’, the ones who don’t fit, or are loners?

“They’re the characters I find fascinating. Those who are a bit unknowable in some way or you’re not exactly sure what it is about them that means that they don’t fit. But there’s something that makes them an outsider, whether they have chosen it or been forced into it. For me that suggests a back story and that leads me to interesting places. That idea of how somebody becomes the person they are and what it is that makes them behave the way they do.

“I always feel there is lots of scope for conflict in the lives of people who aren’t bad necessarily but somehow don’t get the rules or follow them, and those are the areas you want in a crime novel. There’s a point of misunderstanding and miscommunication and to me that’s the fascinating part about a character.”

Violence in relationships, trauma and abuse feature in Hawkins’ writing. What is it about that that interests her?

“The central characters in my books are usually women. I tend to write about women’s lives. It’s just kind of natural I feel that I should write about women, and the fact is that if women are to encounter violence, it is usually in a domestic setting. That’s most commonly where women are threatened, in a relationship or in the aftermath. Men are far more likely to be victims of crime but it tends to be outside the home, in fights or is associated with criminal activity, whereas with women it is very much domestic, so if you’re writing a crime novel and you’re writing about women’s lives, that’s probably where you’re going to find acts of violence happening.”

In The Blue Hour, Hawkins adds to the atmosphere of uncertainty through the use of various narrative threads, some more reliable than others, which arise from what she calls our “ very human need to make a clear understandable narrative arc of our lives, which is not actually how life happens at all” as we follow art curator Becker’s search for the truth among diaries, letters, shopping lists, art reviews, personal recollections, paintings and photographs.

“He’s having to piece bits together, things he knows, has been told, things Vanessa’s written, but they’re all out of sequence, so he’s got a complicated job. Also there’s a desire on his part to believe she was good but a suspicion she might not be. And he has Grace constantly in his ear, who he is suspicious of but not perhaps in the way he should be. He never sees her for what she is, partly because she’s just an old woman. Well, she’s middle aged, but he’s a young man and just sees some old woman. He never takes her seriously and I think that’s very common for older people, to be dismissed because they don’t seem to have power. And if you’re a dowdy, middle aged woman, you can probably get away with murder.”

Here’s to middle age and being able to be invisible, slip under the radar and people watch.

“Exactly, and it’s one of the few good things about getting older,” says Hawkins who is 52, “that you just don’t have to worry what other people think,” she says and laughs.

So is her house full of shopping lists and letters and papers like the ones in the book?

“I write on a computer but do make lots of notes and I like to print things out because I think I’m more attentive to what’s on paper. That’s probably just a sign of my age, but yeah I keep cards and notes, pin them to a board.

“I think it is a nice way to construct a novel and gives you possibilities. Boxes with stuff that’s been dumped and loads is probably junk but every now and then a real treasure. Imagine how much fun that would be if you’re like Becker with an obsession, to get your hands on someone’s things, an artist or a writer. I’m on the board of the Royal Literary Fund and they give money to writers, like Dylan Thomas and they have this archive with some of his shopping lists, because he had to provide his grocery list when applying for a grant. It was basically Swiss rolls and whisky and it’s just fantastic.” she laughs. “Those kinds of things give you a particular insight into somebody.”

Hawkins is now working on her next novel, but it’s early days and she never talks about work in progress.

“I feel like I’m going to jinx it, so I don’t,” she says. “But to be honest I couldn’t really tell you anything now. It’s still one of these things where I’ve got a number of characters I’m interested in but I’m not really sure how everything’s going to fit together. It’s still very much experimental at the moment. I tend to think about things for a long time, then once I get all the elements, I can kind of go with it.”

In the meantime, we can all retreat to a tidal island, let the tide cut us off and enjoy The Blue Hour and Hawkins’ tale of what happens in the space between light and dark.

Granite Noir 2025: The Blue Hour – In Conversation with Paula Hawkins, 8pm, Friday 21 Feb 2025, Music Hall, Aberdeen. Chaired by Alex Clark. www.aberdeenperformingarts.com/granite-noir

Paula Hawkins will also be introducing a screening of The Girl on the Train on Saturday 22 February at Cowdray Hall, www.aberdeenperformingarts.com/whats-on/granite-noir-2025-the-girl-on-the-train-film-screening

The Blue Hour, by Paula Hawkins is published by Transworld, £22