John Marrs’ latest book, The Minders, is out today from Del Rey, set in the not too distant future where a drastic plan is implemented to keep the UK’s most vital secrets safe – using people rather than machines. The former journalist chatted to Paul Simpson about his eighth book, which he admits is “the only book I can say I’ve found really difficult to write”…

Why was it so difficult?

It was a strange book to write because I’d completed most of it and then our son was born, a couple of months prematurely, so we spent a month in hospital with him, living away from home. Then I took another month off after that when he came back – he’s perfectly alright now – then trying to get my mojo back into writing this… It was bloody hard when you’ve got a little baby in the other room screaming his head off, just trying to get through early morning feeds and things like that.

Do you outline first or do you do it more seat of the pants for the first draft?

This one was a mixture of both. Most of the time I’m a pantser. I think I’m impatient and I just want to get started. If I’ve got an idea and I know in my head where it’s going to start, the middle and the end, I’ll just get started on it. But because this was going to be a bit more intricate, there was a lot more research that I needed to do; my other half helped out a lot with that.

I tried to plot where I was going with each chapter but towards the end it wasn’t quite working how I wanted it to so I ended up just freewheeling with it and seeing where it took me.

Is this effectively a sequel to your earlier book The One?

No, I don’t think it is. There’s obviously elements of similarity. People who’ve read The One and then the follow up to that, The Passengers, it’s all under the same kind of umbrella, it’s all in this same universe. I know there are references to it you might have picked up on.

The Match was the thing that jumped straight out at me.

Yes. It’s just set in the same world, same universe.

So did the idea for this come while you were working on either of the other two books? Or was this a completely separate thing?

Completely separate thing. That first book, The One, was just a mad idea that I had one day when I was working in London. I used to work for Express Newspapers for a few years, so I worked in London, lived in Northampton and did the commute every day.

My husband and I were working out our wedding plans, and going down an escalator one day, I thought how happy I was that I’d found that right person for me. I was people-watching and thinking how much easier it would be in life if you knew there was somebody out there for you and you knew how to find that person.

That was just a self contained book and The Passengers was another self contained book but there were references to The One in there. I thought in this one, The Minders, I could do references to both of them. So, it’s less subtle than an Easter egg but just a few casual nods in there.

It feels like a “lived in” universe, like you as the author feel confident talking about accidents involving passengers, driverless cars and a Match as just things that the characters take for granted. You often find when it’s a “high concept” the author has to go round the houses a little bit to try to sell that to the audience whereas you don’t do that.

I think I underplayed that at first – my editor asked me to expand a little bit on what happened in The Passengers and The One.

You don’t want to be repeating stuff, do you? You want to get people interested in what you’re writing but you don’t want to be rehashing something that they’ve already read in another book, so it’s that fine line.

But equally for someone like me who has come into this having not read any of your previous stuff, the information was needed for it to make sense.

What was the inspiration for this one?

I’d love to come up with some massive lie to you and tell you how this suddenly came to me in a vision, an angel appeared from nowhere and whispered into my ear…

I’ve got no idea. You know when you end getting sucked into some internet black hole? I ended up getting sucked into something about conspiracy theories. I’m no expert on them whatsoever but had a little nose around. I thought, “What must it be like to just know everything? If you knew absolutely everything but you couldn’t tell anybody, would you want to know?” I’m not sure myself whether I would, but it got me thinking it might make an interesting book. I started working on that. I’m no expert in futurology or sci fi or anything like that, so therefore it took a lot of research to try and find out what we’d be doing.

I never date my books. The One or The Passengers or this, they’re all just set somewhere in the near future – what do they call it now? Five minutes in the future?

Five minutes in the future yes. It used to be ‘the day after tomorrow’ but then they made a terrible film called that so we can’t call it that anymore!

So what was the biggest challenge for you in writing this?

I think the biggest challenge aside from our son being born was that you’ve got a story that you want to write but the background is the fact it’s slightly set in the future. So it’s working out what technology you think we’re going to be using in the future and trying not to obviously shoehorn that into a book so that it just jumps out from the page at the reader.

You want the reader to be able to casually read it and think, ‘Oh OK, yeah’ and just accept that and continue reading, rather than reading one huge page all about what kind of mobile phones we’re using, how we’ll be communicating via the internet or anything like that. It’s trying to be subtle, I think.

I put out a little shout out on Twitter to ask for any brain experts to get in touch with me, because I was quite curious as to how in theory it might be possible to store all this information in your head.

A neuroscientist in America got back to me, and said that people with synaesthesia have a different way of processing things that might be an interesting way of doing things. So I researched that and that fitted quite nicely with this.

I always watch the BBC’s Click programme and there was a whole feature on turning anything into DNA and you can store it absolutely anywhere. So then my neuroscientist gave me a hand with that as well and worked out where in the brain it could go.

These things don’t come easy to me because this is not my world. I don’t pretend to be a great sci-fi expert – people would see straight through me if I did. So those were probably the biggest challenges.

Is sci-fi stuff that you grew up watching? Did you grow up on Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 and all that sort of thing or did you not have that much interest?

No, didn’t have that much of an interest. I can honestly say I think I’ve only ever seen a couple of episodes of Doctor Who. I used to watch it when I was a kid but not to a point where I really remember it or was fanatical about it. The more recent ones, I’ve seen a couple of episodes, that’s about it. It’s not really a world that I can resonate with in any way and I really wish I could because I feel like I’m missing out on so much.

I just find there’s something about the underlying question: what are we going to be doing in the future? How we’re going to be acting and how we’re going to be behaving, that interests me.

But I don’t know if my imagination is good enough to appreciate things like Doctor Who. I’ve seen your typical Star Wars and a couple of Star Treks but it feels like a club that I really wish I was a member of but I’m not good enough to be a member of!

There’s such a wide spectrum and people find their own place on it. There’s no question this is a SF novel – science fiction is there to take something from today, then extrapolate it to the next level and see what would that be. You’ve gone, “Right, if I want to have plot point A, how do I get from 2020 to plot point A?” That’s how science fiction works.

I don’t read a huge amount of SF either but just looking at my bookshelf here there are a few ones scattered around. I quite like a bit of Blake Crouch,  I love The Circle, It’s one of my all time favourite books. It’s one of those books that I really wish I’d written because I think it would have fitted really nicely into my little universe.

What sort of things did you read growing up?

The Hardy Boys, I was a massive fan of The Hardy Boys books.

Nancy Drew as well?

Just The Hardy Boys. I loved them. I grew up wanting to be Franklin W. Dixon because I thought he was the coolest man on Earth then when I got older I discovered that he didn’t exist and it was a conglomerate of loads of different writers. That kind of made sense because he would have been about 131 and written about 150 books. That was a bit of a disappointment.

I remember reading The Lord of the Rings when I was quite young. My Mum and Dad used to go to Tesco and do the fortnightly shop and just leave me in the library. I’d be getting books out each week, so The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, I used to love. I don’t think I necessarily understood them but I used to devour them.

What do you pick up now to read if you’re not in research mode and you’re not wanting to keep away from stuff that’s similar to what you’re doing?

I pick up pretty much anything. I like John Niven, his latest one The Bucket List was quite entertaining. My Sister the Serial Killer I enjoyed.

I do like a bit of Gillian Flynn, Peter Swanson I’ll read anything of his I think he’s great. C.L Taylor, Cara Hunter. I read a lot. I listen to a lot of audio books as well when I’m taking the dog for a walk, I usually have a couple of books on the go at once, one audio book and one physical book.

You’ve got a lot of different characters with some quite nice reveals as to how they link across. Did you write the characters separately to stay in their heads or were you writing through the plot?

Depended on what mood I was in that day as to who or what I’d write. So, some days I was more in the mind of Bruno so I’d write a couple chapters of his or just go back and do some rewrites. Other days I’d be more in Amelia’s mind.

I can’t sit down and write a book start, middle and end. I have to do a bit here, a bit there, bit everywhere. The fun for me is when you join everything together and then try to make sure it’s quite seamless.

It’s funny because when I finished writing a book, that’s it for me. As soon as I’ve gone through the rewrites and the proofs, I listen to the audio books and that’s the last time I’ll have anything to do with it because my mind will be somewhere else. I can’t focus on something new when I’ve still got something else hanging around in the background.

Were there any characters you didn’t want to be inside the head space of?

There’s one character who was there to be killed off quite soon and maybe that was in the back of my mind all along that they weren’t going to have a long journey in this book, so therefore I wasn’t as invested in them as the others.

No problem with writing a serial killer?

No they’re fun to write. In my third book The One, I’d always wanted to write some kind of serial killer but I’d never done it before because it just didn’t feel right, but in The One there’s a serial killer and that was great fun. Oh I could be really dark in that.

Speaking of The One, what’s the situation with the TV series of The One for Netflix?

Yes, it’s all been filmed, was completed just before lockdown. It was supposed to be on in the autumn but it’s been pushed back just because of post production. As far as I’m aware, it should be out early next year. I don’t know exactly when.

I’ve had absolutely nothing to do with the television version of it.

Have you seen the scripts?

Nope, not seen anything. I went on set one day in January which  was an interesting experience because this mad idea I had once just going down an escalator meant I found myself sitting on set surrounded by about eighty odd people.

I’m quite excited to see what they do with it,  I think it’s going to be really interesting. It’s going to be quite different to the book, as far as I’m aware. As I said earlier, for me once I’ve finished writing it, that’s it. It’s done and I want to move onto the next thing which is why I’ve never written a sequel, I don’t think I’d have the patience.

Yet you’ve written now three books in the same world…

Yes, that’s true.

So you obviously like living in this world?

Yes, it’s interesting, I’m really curious. Like I said earlier on, I’m quite impatient, I think that’s why I like to write a book rather than sit and plot it out.

I want to know what’s going to happen in the next ten, fifteen, twenty years. I’m excited about driverless cars, I’m excited about the mundane things like how we’re going to be communicating or travelling, so yes, I think it’s just an interesting place to live in. When my little boy’s grown up, will he ever put petrol in a car? I doubt it. Or diesel? No. It’s a weird concept for me.

Finally, what’s next for you?

Another psychological thriller. I’m taking a year or so out just to be parenting. I’ve got the opportunity to do it so it’s been fantastic. But I’m going to start work on that at some point soon and then I do have a thriller with a sci-fi twist in mind. I’m just plotting that out at the moment.

The beauty of my life at the moment is I’ve got the time t do that. I can sit and actually work out what’s going to happen with that story.

It will be in the same kind of universe, possibly a little bit looser than The Minders because otherwise I’ll be rehashing three books and I don’t necessarily want to do that!

The Minders is out now from Del Rey

Thanks to Isabelle Ralph for assistance with arranging this interview.