Not Quite Dead Yet
Not Quite Dead Yet
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Holly Jackson on Not Quite Dead Yet
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The darkness was always thereBefore the book had a title or a publication date, Jackson was already signaling a change of direction. Asked in a March 2024 Guardian interview what she was working on next, she deflected with deliberate theatrics, planting a flag without revealing anything.
I’ll just mysteriously say that it might be a slight departure from what I’ve done before.
The departure she was hinting at was adult fiction, a move she had been edging toward for years. Her YA novels had drawn criticism for being too dark for their intended audience, and the shift to an older readership removed that ceiling entirely. The premise she landed on, a murder victim with a single week to identify her own killer, drew on an appetite for countdown structures she traced back decades.
I’ve always wanted to write a book that was set in real-time, the action unfolding in the same time that it takes to read it. This is probably due to a childhood watching 24 when I was too young to do so, and the fact that some of my favourite films have this very limited timeframe and setting: Phonebooth and Panic Room.
Not Quite Dead Yet’s seven-day clock isn’t the same as the eight-hour real-time structure of Five Survive, but the underlying instinct is identical: give the story a visible, shrinking window and let urgency do structural work.
Jet Mason, the novel’s protagonist, is blunt, selfish, and has left a trail of unfinished things behind her. She is also the most sustained version of an argument Jackson had been making in interviews for years before this book existed, one rooted in a frustration with how female characters in fiction are judged.
protagonists are allowed to be ‘un-likable’ and make morally dubious decisions. In fact, I think this makes books far more entertaining and enjoyable, and it is certainly something I want to explore in my books.
lunaslittlelibrary.wordpress.com, “Q&A with Holly Jackson | #GoodGirlBadBlood – Luna’s Little Library”She pushed that argument further in the same interview, connecting the un-likability debate to a specific double standard rather than leaving it as a general craft preference.
don’t even get me started about how this argument about ‘un-likeability’ often seems to be directed at characters who are women and girls. Apparently, men and boys are allowed to be unlikeable without it affecting the quality of the book.
lunaslittlelibrary.wordpress.com, “Q&A with Holly Jackson | #GoodGirlBadBlood – Luna’s Little Library”How she wrote it
Index cards on the floorJackson has described writing A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, her debut, in roughly seven weeks because she was afraid her agent would lose interest if she took longer. Not Quite Dead Yet arrived under a similar compressed timeline, drafted in six weeks according to the Waterstones Podcast episode description from July 2025. Whether the speed is habit or necessity, her method for constructing the underlying mystery does not vary.
For me, I start at the very end. I work out exactly what the solution to the mystery is: the who, the what, the how and why. And then the trickier part is actually working out how the detective character would work out this mystery bit-by-bit, without revealing too much at any one time.
lunaslittlelibrary.wordpress.com, “Q&A with Holly Jackson | #GoodGirlBadBlood – Luna’s Little Library”The physical form that planning takes is specific enough that she has joked about its structural fragility. Each scene gets its own index card, and the cards are organized into act columns on the floor of her office, a setup that collapses if she opens a door too fast.
I am obsessive about it. I don’t quite have a ‘murder board’ because it’s not on the wall, but it is on the floor.
Once the structure is locked, the hardest craft problem is calibrating what the reader knows and when. For Not Quite Dead Yet, where Jet is simultaneously the victim and the detective, that calibration carries an extra layer: too much withheld and the countdown feels cheap; too much revealed and the twist dissolves. Jackson has named this tension as the central pressure of the genre.
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.
The Waterstones Podcast episode description also notes that Jackson worked specifically on finding humor in the face of death while writing this book. Jet’s dark running commentary on her own countdown, the gallows jokes and cheerful refusal to process what is happening, is where that work shows.
The personal thread
Writing what you’d want to readJackson grew up in Buckinghamshire as the middle child of parents who both worked in television production, a background that gave her early exposure to storytelling as a professional craft rather than a mysterious calling. By the time she sat down to write Not Quite Dead Yet, she had completed two degrees in English, built a bestselling trilogy, and written two further standalones, all before turning to adult fiction. Her rule for sustaining herself across that volume of work has stayed consistent throughout.
when it comes to writing, I think it’s important to write something that you know you would love to read yourself, otherwise you’ll quickly lose any enthusiasm for the book.
That same self-directed standard shapes how she thinks about the readers who find her books. Rather than framing her audience as a demographic to be served, she describes them as collaborators in an active genre transaction, people who bring specific expectations and specific energy to the page.
I don’t have those passive readers, I have the really active ones who are looking to solve the mystery.
What she wants us to sit with
The best story possibleNo transcript of Jackson discussing Not Quite Dead Yet’s themes at length is available from the primary interviews about this book. What she has stated clearly, across multiple interviews over several years, is a position about what fiction is and is not for. It is a position that pushes back on any reading that wants a novel to deliver moral instruction.
books aren’t supposed to be instructions for leading a moral life, books are supposed to tell the best story possible.
Jet Mason spends seven days trying to solve her own murder while carrying years of deferred choices and unfinished relationships. Whether that registers as a lesson about wasted time or simply as the best possible engine for a countdown thriller depends entirely on what the reader brings. Jackson’s stated preference is that the engine comes first.