Alison Wonderland by Helen Smith

Alison Wonderland is about a woman called Alison Temple who joins an all-female detective agency in Brixton, south London. Like all the best noir fiction, the action begins with Alison’s life being turned upside down when an intriguing, infuriating, beautiful female client, Taron, contacts her office with a strange request. But Alison Wonderland isn’t really detective fiction. It’s an offbeat comedy in which Taron becomes Alison’s best friend and they set off on a road trip together to Weymouth, on the south coast of England.

I have lived in Brixton for twenty years and I love it. It’s an ethnically-diverse part of London with a jumble of alleyways running through the heart of it, with covered markets crammed with small, independent shops selling everything from fresh fish to wigs to religious icons. I thought this was exactly where Alison’s boss, Mrs Fitzgerald – a local woman – would have set up her detective agency.

When Alison tells the story of her break up with her husband, at first she pretends she didn’t mind about it. Then she admits she was angry; she reacted vindictively. I wanted to show that Alison has a latent wildness in her that Taron will bring out as they go on their adventures together; that Alison is vulnerable and is likely to try to protect herself from further hurt by rejecting romantic love; and that Alison is an ‘unsafe narrator’ – in other words, the reader can’t always trust what she tells them or what she tells other characters about herself. The inspiration for the scene came from Alison’s character rather than real life. I have never done anything like that myself!

I first thought of writing about a character who worked for an all-female detective agency when I read an article about an all-female detective agency operating in Singapore. The idea sounded kick-ass and feminist, but the boss of the agency explained that the reality was that they spent most of their time following unfaithful husbands. I love the gap between perception and reality, and I wanted Alison to be doing fairly mundane, routine jobs at the agency until Taron shows up and sprinkles some magic into her life. I didn’t need to do much research because the story tends towards the absurd rather than the realistic. Insteading of trying to describe the reality of life as a private detective in modern-day London, I asked myself what it would be like if I was hired as a detective by an agency like the one in the book. I thought that I would probably find it difficult to get answers and chase up clues without the resources of the British police force to help me, and instead of Alison being an almost superhuman investigator who always gets her man, she sometimes misses clues that are right in front of her.

Thank you! The characters come from my imagination but I do borrow characteristics and quirks from friends, family and strangers, mixing them in with the fiction to create characters that are interesting and feel real. The exception to this is the psychic postman, who is based on a real-life postman who worked in Brixton. He was a cheerful person who whistled when he delivered letters up and down the street where I live. I never talked to him, other than to say hello, and I only discovered he was psychic when I read in the local paper that he had been sacked for taking too much time off with headaches caused by psychic phenomena (I felt so sorry for him about this that I mentioned the incident in the follow-up to this book, Being Light). As I knew so little about him, I created the character of the psychic postman in Alison Wonderland based on how I thought a psychic postman might behave in the hyperreal, almost- magical world I created for the book.

6. If the book was made into a movie, who would play Alison?

I’d love to have Emily Blunt play Alison. She’d be brilliant at playing an intelligent character with a slight edge to her.

I really like puns. I know some people disapprove of them but they make me smile. The name of the main character in the book is Alison Temple. She’s an independent woman with a sardonic sense of humour who is not looking for a boyfriend. When people ask her why she’s not married, she gets irritated and responds with a quip: she’s waiting for Mr Wonderland; until then she’s staying single. But now she has the job at the agency, she doesn’t need Mr Wonderland anyway.  She’s not looking for love… or so she thinks.

I’m reading Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke, which came up on a lot of ‘best of 2012’ lists at the beginning of this year. I’m also reading a collection of short mystery stories in an Ellery Queen Magazine anthology, by authors including Lawrence Block, P D James and Patricia Highsmith. I’m reading a lot of crime fiction at the moment because I have the first book in a new murder mystery series, Invitation to Die, coming out later this year.

I always find it difficult to choose just one. But I re-read Brighton Rock the other day. It was one of my favourite novels when I was younger. It’s still pretty amazing.

When I was younger I loved Agatha Christie, Monica Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. Later I read Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Peter Carey, Chuck Palahniuk, Jeanette Winterson, Kate Atkinson, Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, Michael Chabon, Patricia Highsmith and Joyce Carol Oates. Writers want to write because they love reading, and all the books I have read have had an effect on me, one way or another. But I’d say the books by these authors have probably affected me the most.

I’m a novelist but I have also written children’s books and poetry. I have had plays produced in the UK, mostly on the fringe and in small theatres in London. I have also been commissioned to write a couple of TV scripts that haven’t yet been produced. I’m focussing my time on writing novels at the moment.

The first book in my new murder mystery series, Invitation to Die, will be published later this year. It’s a comic mystery featuring twenty-six-year-old Londoner, Emily Castles. An American blogger is lured to her death at a conference of romance writers in Bloomsbury, London. Emily teams up with her neighbour, eccentric philosophy professor Dr Muriel, to solve the case. I had a lot of fun writing it and I hope readers will enjoy it and come back for more books in the series.