Entertainment
Janice Hallett Spins Murder Mysteries Out of Emails, Memos and Texts
After years of this-and-that jobs, Hallet began to write a novel: “What do I have to lose?” Now a widely celebrated voice in crime fiction, she just launched her fourth book, “The Examiner.”
Janice Hallett never imagined that, in her 50s, she would become a novelist, let alone a celebrated new voice in crime fiction. But a few years ago, after a lifetime of other jobs — beauty-industry journalist, government speechwriter-for-hire, frustrated author of unproduced screenplays — she fired up her laptop and opened a blank document.
“I thought, what do I have to lose?” she recalled recently.
The result was “The Appeal,” a murder mystery set among the members of a provincial drama group, which was published to rapturous reviews and huge sales in Britain in 2021. A fiendishly clever modern-day reimagining of the classic epistolary novel, using emails, text messages, newspaper clippings and interoffice memos in place of letters, “The Appeal” invited readers to become detectives themselves, teasing out the mystery within.
Three years on, Hallett has used variations on this approach in equally innovative novels about, among other things, a pair of competing true-crime journalists investigating a possibly supernatural cult (“The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels”) and an ex-con describing his hunt for the code concealed in the novels of an Enid Blyton-esque children’s author while also, it turns out, describing something else entirely (“The Twyford Code”).
Her most recent book, out this month both in the United States and Britain, is “The Examiner,” an even more complicated puzzle box of a story using instant messages, emails and academic essays to plumb the nefarious goings-on in an online multimedia art course at a British university.
Reviewers have marveled at the books’ ingenuity. “Hallett’s treatment of crimes as intellectual puzzles looks like a logical progression in a market hungry for locked-room thrillers,” Madeleine Feeny wrote in The Bookseller. “Yet she has somehow managed to revolutionize the genre.”
In person, Hallett, 55, is low-key, unfussy and wryly funny. She describes herself as an introvert and seems genuinely surprised at the turn in her fortunes.
