How to Solve Your Own Murder
How to Solve Your Own Murder
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Kristen Perrin on How to Solve Your Own Murder
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A genre switch born in lockdownPerrin had spent years building a career in children’s fantasy before the pandemic pulled her back toward the Agatha Christie novels she had loved during her bookselling years in Seattle. The genre shift was not a repudiation of her earlier work so much as a recognition that she needed a different kind of project to get through.
I’ve always loved mysteries and I’d been writing in children’s fantasy for a number of years, and craved something that felt a bit like coming home... during the pandemic I felt drawn to projects that felt comforting to me. (I know it sounds strange that solving murders could be comforting, but the Agatha Christie fans out there probably know just what I mean!)
Wanting to write a mystery was not the same as having one to write. Perrin knew she needed an angle that refreshed the classic village-detective setup rather than simply repeating it, and the architecture of the book took shape as she worked out what would make the dead great-aunt useful rather than merely absent.
The initial idea was for a crime-solving duo of a great-aunt and her niece, but the great-aunt was already dead. I thought, what if one woman’s contribution to murder solving comes through a collection of notes and archives? I felt like this could be a new spin on the classic ‘village busybody’ trope, but I needed a good reason for Frances to have been amassing all these secrets on the people around her.
Once the archive conceit was in place, Perrin still needed a psychological engine to explain why Frances would have spent decades gathering compromising information on her neighbors. The answer arrived as a chain of two questions, each one tightening the premise further.
And that was the spark for the fortune-teller idea — what if she’d been collecting dirt on people because she was absolutely convinced someone was going to kill her? And then I thought, what’s an unconventional reason for that? And the idea that a fortune-teller told her her fate, and then sixty years later that fate came true, was born.
That sixty-year gap between prophecy and death became the engine of the dual-timeline structure the novel is built on.
How she wrote it
A scrapped draft, a relocated heroineThe book that reached readers bore almost no structural resemblance to the one Perrin originally drafted. She had written deep into a version of the story before her agent stopped her, and the single change her agent recommended — where Annie grew up — cascaded into a wholesale rethinking of the character’s place in the plot.
I wrote nearly half the book as a YA novel, where Frances’ niece Annie (one of our main characters) was actually a New Yorker who had to visit her estranged great aunt in England. I scrapped that draft when my agent (quite rightly) advised me that not only would Annie work better as someone in her early 20s, but that she should be from London. Once I had Annie growing up in Chelsea, so many ideas grew from there.
Even after the restart, Perrin’s outlines kept losing their authority the moment she sat down to write. She describes this not as a failure of planning but as a sign that a scene has found a better solution than the one she anticipated.
I outline my books carefully, and every time I sit down to draft, I always end up drifting away from my plans. In some instances, I get to a planned scene and completely throw my careful notes out the window, but it’s always for a reason that I find energizing.
The dual timeline, which moves between Annie’s present-day investigation and young Frances’s past, carried a specific character goal: Perrin wanted to show how Frances became the paranoid, secret-hoarding woman Annie reads about. The diary and the archives are not just plot devices; they document a personality being slowly reshaped by a single conviction.
I wanted to show readers that the paranoid elderly Frances we hear about at the start of book one wasn’t always who she was. I liked the idea of taking a character through a whole evolution, and showing the reader how the events of her life changed her personality over time.
Perrin came to writing adult fiction after a children’s career conducted almost entirely in translation, her middle-grade books published in German, Polish, and Dutch but not yet in English. Watching the adult debut cross into new languages carried a meaning her domestic readers would not have guessed.
The book will be translated into quite a few languages, and every time I see a new cover for it, I feel amazed that it’s going to reach people all over the world. As my children’s career has been entirely in translation (my middle-grade books are currently only available in German, Polish, and Dutch), having my work translated holds a special place in my heart.
The personal thread
Annie adrift, Frances transformedAnnie’s willingness to investigate a stranger’s sixty-year-old murder is not, at the outset, a moral impulse. Perrin was deliberate about giving her protagonist a more self-interested starting point: the case is an exit ramp from a life that has stalled.
At the start of book 1, Annie is at a point in her life where she’s a bit adrift, and the idea of unearthing family secrets in a big house in a village she’s never been to sounds like an adventure and a way out of her own stagnation.
What changes Annie’s motivation mid-investigation is not a new clue but a voice. Frances’s diary turns a dead woman into a person Annie actively wants to defend, and Perrin tracked that emotional shift with the same care she gave to the puzzle mechanics.
Annie starts off trying to solve Frances’ murder simply because she’s been dragged into this strange inheritance competition as a result of Frances’ will — but her motivation changes quickly when she discovers Frances’s diary. From that point, Annie gets to understand more deeply what Frances went through when her friend Emily disappeared, and more about who Frances was as a person. Soon, Annie’s working hard to solve the murder because she wants justice for Frances. She comes to appreciate and like her through the words Frances left behind.
What she wants us to sit with
Fun first, then the feeling that followsWhen asked what she hoped readers would carry away from the book, Perrin put pleasure before theme. Her answer is also a precise description of the reading experience she was trying to engineer: a mystery that rewards attention without punishing the reader who just wants to be swept along.
First and foremost, I want readers to enjoy their reading experience. I’d love for people to have fun, but also to be surprised in places, and maybe have a few places where they feel clever because they noticed a detail that turned out to be significant later. Getting sucked into the mystery to the point where you can’t help but try to puzzle things out before the end is always my favorite feeling when I read, so I hope to be able to deliver that. And if there are a few emotional beats that resonate with people too, all the better.