It’s difficult to admit that spending copious amounts of time with my children is what inspired me to write a book about two serial killers.
For the sake of their future therapy bills I hasten to add that this is no reflection on their delightful personalities and calm loving natures (when they haven’t had any sugar). As a mother-of-four I have spent many years hanging out at soft play and in playgrounds constantly pleading with my children to ‘use their words’, and not wipe their noses on their sleeves. Few would consider cries, screams and plastic matting an inspirational setting, but whenever I was suffering through these very ordinary parenting activities, I started to wonder what it would be like doing them if perhaps I was not ordinary.
I pictured a hardened killer gently pushing their kid on a swing. I tried to imagine if they would use a baby voice when speaking to their toddler, or how tightly they’d grip the handles of the baby’s pram at a perceived threat. Above all I kept thinking – how would they cope with the compromise and sacrifice that came hand-in-hand with marriage and parenthood?
Swapping out the murder kit for the nappy bag; what would life be like for killers who became parents?
Two protagonists came charging into my head. Haze and Fox. A couple deeply in love and deeply bonded by their love of ending bad men. Vigilante serial killers who made the most of everything their looks, money and bloodthirsty natures brought them. Namely a lot of air miles and a high body count.
Getting married, having a baby and moving to the suburbs is a well-trodden traditional path. But how would an untraditional couple, more used to slicing and dicing victims in glamorous European hotspots, cope with convincing a two-year-old to eat a carrot at a soft play centre in Slough?
I loved trying to imagine how fierce, unapologetic Haze would navigate the boredom and frustration that all new mothers can face.
Putting an extraordinary woman into ordinary circumstances felt like a way to shine a light on all the feelings, good and bad, that parenthood unleashed. I wanted Haze, for all her violent tendencies, to still be somewhat relatable. It might be higher stakes when juggling dead bodies, an extensive knife collection and evading the police, but her struggles revolve around how to still feel like you when you’ve been forced to give up something you love for the sake of your family.
All those times I headed to the playground, I never expected to gain anything more than the joy of my children burning off steam in a setting I didn’t have to clean up afterwards. Finding inspiration in the most unlikely of places could be down to my dark mind or just a sign of how deeply I wanted something else to think about, other than how many minutes until bedtime. Either way I remain grateful for how a seemingly mundane parenting duty helped lead to ‘A Serial Killer’s Guide to Marriage’ in a creative process that, unlike Haze’s, no one was harmed in the making of.
