The author Jess Kidd, known for her genre-stretching supernatural and magical crime novels, is sticking to the conventions of a “nice, cosy straitjacket” in her latest work.
She sits fresh-faced in a white-walled room, a window to her left and to the right on the floor a cream-coloured balancing ball, and speaks via video from north Yorkshire about Murder at Gull’s Nest, her London-Irish heritage and her autism diagnosis.
The new novel, a cosy mystery published by Faber and set in the 1950s, begins when a former Irish nun, Nora Breen, goes in search of her missing friend at a shabby guest house in the overwintering town of Gore-on-Sea, Kent. The book has pockets of Gothic darkness, gentle humour and a cast of intriguing characters drawn with Kidd’s habitual lyricism. It’s the first instalment of a series featuring Breen, and it explores, among other things, how people coped with rebuilding their psyches in the aftermath of the second World War.
Unlike in previous works, including the marvellous Victorian detective novel Things in Jars, there are no ghosts here, no supernatural voices or magic realism. The strictures of cosy crime – the amateur sleuth, a small community, low-key violence and importance of the puzzle – are adhered to, though at times Kidd must have been tempted to allow the sinister Punch and Judy puppets speak without the help of their master, ageing showman Professor Poppy.
She laughs at the suggestion and says, though it was tempting, she’s enjoying the challenges of debunking the supernatural in the series.
“It’s a very interesting genre because you’ve got certain expectations, and I think readership is very loyal, and that’s really interesting as well,” she says. “You’ve got the kind of privileging, I suppose, of the puzzle element and figuring things out, but I didn’t want that to be at the expense of character ... all my stuff is quite character driven.
“I suppose it’s the best of both worlds. I think of the crime genre as quite stretchy and you can do quite a lot, but it’s also quite like a nice, cosy straitjacket.”
The protagonists in her books tend to be Irish, and despite her own London inflections, she feels she writes “with an Irish accent” as a result of her upbringing, which involved multiple trips to Mayo to visit her mother’s large family. She credits her mother with sparking her love of story.
“My mum was a very brilliant storyteller, so I think I kind of tapped into the old traditions ... And for me, it feels very much like an anchor.”
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The characters at Gull’s Nest guest house have a hint of found family about them, and a core of them will return in the series, says Kidd, including the seagull Breen feeds from her bedroom windowsill whom she christens Fr Conway, and the wild, intelligent, neurodivergent eight-year-old, Dinah. The child, daughter of the landlady, doesn’t go to school, “lives in a world of her own” and hides in various places in the house, spying on others. Is she in some ways similar to the child in Kidd’s Costa award-winning short story, Dirty Little Fishes?
“Very much. It’s finding yourself in an adult’s world with adult rules which seem to shift ... And the girl in Dirty Little Fishes is a kind of observer, an outsider.”
Kidd has a great fondness for the character.
“And I love that idea of found families, and I love the kind of intergenerational relationship between her and Professor Poppy.”
Dinah also likes to play pranks, and one in particular causes a satisfying outburst in a guest who has designs on her mother.
“I loved writing it because I think it brings that element of chaos, and I think that’s what I liked about the supernatural. Sometimes the ghosts can say what the living can’t say, or do what the living can’t do, and there’s a kind of slightly rebellious element to them.”
I went through the whole process, and it was bit like The X Factor; you keep getting through to another round
Kidd talks about Dinah’s neurodivergence and her own autism diagnosis in her late forties, prompted by a query from her daughter.
“My daughter said ‘Mum, do you think you might be autistic?’ and I said ‘I don’t know, I’ll look it up’. So I went through the whole process, and it was bit like The X Factor; you keep getting through to another round.”
Once she got used to the idea, she embraced it as a positive, and believes it’s important to add her voice to other women who have had a late diagnosis, and raise awareness.
“Because I think a lot of women and girls are living with this notion that ... life is much easier for other people, and they can’t work out why.”
Every person with autism is unique, with different challenges or strengths, she says, and the stereotype for boys might include acting out, but for women and girls, a lot more of it is internalised.
“We learn from a really early age to mask, but then I suppose that’s the thing, isn’t it? It’s finding some outlet to drop down the mask a little bit so ... other people can experience more of your personality, and you don’t feel like you have to pretend, you know, you’re an alien in a human world.”
She credits her “big, chaotic family” with helping her learn to deal with people.
“I mean, yes, it would have been great to know these things about myself and let myself off the hook a bit more. But at the same time, I think, obviously, I grew up around lots of strong personalities, and I learned how to interact with just about everyone, so I think I’ve got that to be thankful for.”
Relations in the west of Ireland continue to offer support, and some aunts indulge in “a little bit of rearranging in bookshops”, she says, grinning.
Looking back on past challenges, such as face blindness and time-management problems, she can reframe them on the basis of her diagnosis.
“So I would maybe go into a situation where I don’t recognise people if they’re out of context, and say, ‘Oh hello, nice to meet you’ and then you get like, a little voice saying, ‘We’ve already met’, and I would think ‘Why didn’t I remember? Oh, it’s because they’ve changed their hair’, or I would remember certain details, like the name of their cat, but not their name. And so I would think, ‘Well, obviously I’m more interested in the cat’.”
Moving the body around really helps me to open my focus, so things that I can bounce around on, that really helps
Kidd, who dropped out of college aged 21 to have her daughter, later studied with the Open University and availed of a bursary to complete an MA in creative writing, says her persistence with writing could also be attributed to hyperfocus, another trait of autism.
“It makes it very apparent why I can sit there editing over and over again, whereas some people say, ‘How could you do that? How could you go over the same piece?’ I don’t know, it’s just, I can.”
And while she has no desire to “try to explain everything” through the prism of autism, it makes the choices she made along the way “a bit more clear”.
She is hopeful, given recognition now that autism presents differently in girls and boys, diagnostic criteria will evolve and girls will be recognised earlier.
Talk turns to speculation about the connection between the act of writing and autism. Kidd wishes there were more research on the subject. Her diagnosis helped explain her “real obsession about words and infatuation with language”.
“Going back to the idea of a writer as maybe like a Dinah-type character observing and trying to read people ... to put some of those traits into the character was an interesting thing.”
Writers, she says, also have a way of “thinking slightly out of the box and making connections”.
“And that sort of defamiliarisation in writing, which I always feel is the core, isn’t it? It’s learning to see the world in sort of a more vivid way, I suppose.”
Kidd says her happy place is when she’s in the flow of creating work.
“One of the things that’s become very apparent for me is the connection between the physical and the mental, and so especially, moving the body around really helps me to open my focus, so things that I can bounce around on, that really helps.”
Giving time for playfulness while writing is vital, she says, and perfectionism in any aspect of life “is just awful” and can let writer’s block sneak in.
“It starts to become less about getting in that flow state and more about what other people think. And I think that’s often the thing that squishes creativity: not allowing yourself playfulness.”
In certain situations she feels “a bit like a landed seal”.
“But if I’m in my writing and in my zone, then I’m in the water. I’m all kind of graceful for two minutes,” she says.
Murder at Gull’s Nest (Faber) is out now
