A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
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Holly Jackson on A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A podcast she played three times throughThe book began with Serial, the true crime podcast that consumed her in the mid-2010s, and she came to it late enough to binge the whole series in one sustained obsession. She went through it three times.
I don’t think this book would exist had I not discovered true crime podcasts; that’s how significant their role has been in shaping this book and me as a writer.
What Serial taught her was also what it withheld. The form gripped her precisely because real investigations rarely close cleanly, and that unresolved quality created a problem she decided to solve by writing fiction instead.
with true crime, often you don’t actually get the answers at the end, or you don’t get 100% of the truth, which can be frustrating, which is why I chose to write my own mystery in like a true crime style so that I could have the answers [paraphrased from audio]
The school project that Pip, the book’s seventeen-year-old protagonist, uses as a structural frame is, in Jackson’s own description, a thinly veiled true crime podcast. The fictional cover let her have the format and the resolution at the same time.
The book existed before there was any plan to write it. Jackson had finished an adult thriller that drew interest but no offers from agents. One agent told her to try something more commercial, then asked what else she had. She pitched a teenage detective story on the spot and wrote the entire manuscript in roughly seven weeks, driven by a single practical fear.
because I didn’t want him to forget me
How she wrote it
The plot on the floor, the twist at the startShe committed to the solution before writing a single scene. For Jackson this was not a preference but a logical precondition of the genre: a mystery writer who does not know the answer cannot plant evidence deliberately, only accidentally.
Yes, before I even wrote the first sentence of the book I knew exactly ‘whodunnit’ and all the resolutions to the mystery.
Knowing the ending determined how she built the plot physically. Rather than outlining in software or notebooks, she arranged every scene on index cards across the floor of her office, organized in columns by act. The system had one recurring hazard.
I don’t quite have a ‘murder board’ because it’s not on the wall, but it is on the floor. It does rather take over the room.
Structural precision extended to exact percentages. In a Women’s Prize video interview, she described tracking where her midpoint twist landed within the manuscript, with a tolerance narrow enough that a few pages off would bother her.
that my midpoint twist hits around the 50% mark. I’m very upset if it’s more than like 3% either way. I’m very strict that way. [paraphrased from audio]
The book’s mixed-media texture, with interview transcripts, project logs, and annotated maps woven into the narrative, was planned from the draft stage and not added in revision. Her editor approved the approach immediately, though the practical consequences during production were less smooth.
I really wanted the book to have a ‘true crime’ feel, with multi-media elements and found-footage type items to create an immersive experience.
Those elements, Jackson noted, often caused formatting hijinks while editing. The feel she wanted came at a production cost her publisher absorbed.
The genre’s signature demand, the twist, was the part that gave her the most sustained trouble. She wanted the reveal to feel both shocking and retrospectively inevitable, and she had grown impatient with a particular shortcut other writers used.
I think, with any crime thriller, a lot of pressure is put upon having THE BIG TWIST. It’s an expected part of the genre and you want to strike the right balance between shocking the reader, but also that they accept the twist was guessable all along, they just didn’t see it.
On what the book is wrestling with
Guilt that resists a verdictJackson grew frustrated with crime fiction that produces a villain whose only function is villainy. She told IndieWire she wanted the motive in AGGGTM to do more than explain an act; she wanted it to implicate the reader. Her frustration with easier versions of the genre was the direct pressure that shaped what the killers in the book are asked to carry.
getting frustrated with [twists like], ‘Oh, it’s this guy and he does it just because he’s the bad guy or he’s a psychopath.’ I want more than that. I want something meaty.
The design of her killers follows from that frustration. She wanted the reader, once in possession of full context, to feel something more uncomfortable than relief that the right person was caught.
I wanted my killers to have, once you’ve had the full story and then motivation and everything, I wanted it to be a bit more confronting for the reader like, ‘Okay, put yourself in that exact situation and all these dominoes, could you see yourself committing a similar action if you were in that situation?’
Pip herself is not exempt from the book’s moral pressure. She begins the investigation with a clean faith in truth as sufficient remedy, a position the plot is designed to erode. The loss Jackson describes is precise: it is not cynicism but a specific disillusionment with the machinery of justice.
She has a loss of innocence moment where she realizes that’s not quite how the real world works and the justice system doesn’t actually equate to justice or even the truth quite a lot of the time.
Jackson also made a structural decision about what violence the book would and would not depict, a decision grounded in her reading of how crime television handles women’s suffering. She drew the line early and has kept it across her career.
I decided, early on, that I would never put one of those gratuitous ‘violence against women scenes’ on the page. We’ve seen too much of it on TV, these shows that focus on a woman’s pain as torture porn. I will never write a rape scene.
Her alternative is a deliberate inversion: to concentrate the depicted violence on those who commit the crimes rather than those who survive them.
What she wants us to sit with
The reader who refuses to be passiveThe book’s structure, in which Pip’s evidence arrives as transcripts, logs, and documents rather than narrated summary, was built to keep the reader working. Jackson described the readership this structure attracts as a specific, more demanding type, and she frames that demand as a welcome pressure on her own writing.
I don’t have those passive readers, I have the really active ones who are looking to solve the mystery.
Her belief that readers want to detect rather than watch detection is the premise behind the whole project. Pip’s teenage limitations, no badge, no subpoena power, no forensics lab, were not constraints to work around but opportunities to engineer solutions the reader could imagine executing themselves.
One of my favourite parts of writing was coming up with ways that Pip could turn everyday tech into crime solving tools as – being a teenager – she doesn’t have the full resources of a police force.
Jackson’s confidence in her protagonist’s demographic was not contingent on market logic. She saw a teenage girl investigator as generative rather than limiting, and her answer to anyone who expected that choice to narrow the book’s possibilities was direct.
I didn’t see having a teenage girl as the detective as a challenge at all. I saw it only as a strength with so many possibilities to explore.