The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Stuart Turton on The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Twelve years waiting for the right twistTurton had carried the ambition since childhood, but his first attempt at acting on it, in his early twenties, collapsed under the weight of borrowed material. The gap between knowing what genre you love and having something new to say inside it took longer to close than he expected.
I’ve wanted to write an Agatha Christie-style mystery since I was eight years old, when I used to read them one after another in my bedroom. I tried when I was 21, but it was rubbish. I was just flinging Christie tropes onto the page without adding anything unique of my own.
The concept that finally unlocked the book arrived on a long flight, twelve years after he had shelved the project. He had turned the idea over dozens of times before, always hitting a dead end, and the difference this time was that the structural conceit arrived whole: Agatha Christie’s country-house murder, fused with the time-loop mechanic of Groundhog Day and the body-swapping premise of the 1990s television series Quantum Leap.
my mind wandered back to this book I’d always wanted to write. Usually, when that happened, my thoughts hit a brick wall, but this time the concept was waiting for me. Agatha Christie in a Groundhog Day loop, with a bit of Quantum Leap thrown in.
Long before the plot took shape, a single unanswered question from a late-night conversation had lodged in his mind. He could not resolve it for himself, and that unease eventually became the engine of the whole novel.
In the novel, this theme is prevalent because of a drunken conversation I had with a mate years back: if you met yourself tomorrow, would you like yourself? I honestly couldn’t answer that and thought it would be fun writing a character who had to.
The country-house world Turton chose as his setting was not neutral backdrop. Growing up working-class in northern England, he had encountered that world only as a reader, never as a participant, and the distance shaped his feelings about everyone who lives in Blackheath House.
I was born in a working class town in the north of England, and this world of rich folk in big houses was my Lord of the Rings. It was just fantasy... I couldn’t believe there were people who didn’t need to work at all, because of something their great grandparents did. I distrust those people a great deal, and it comes through in this book.
How he wrote it
Two walls of Post-it notes and thirty draftsBefore he wrote a sentence of fiction, Turton spent three months building a structural scaffold that tracked every character’s movements across a single day in two-minute intervals. The scale of that pre-writing work reflects a problem the book’s premise created: with Aiden Bishop, the protagonist, inhabiting a series of different hosts one day at a time and piecing together the murder of Evelyn Hardcastle, a single continuity error anywhere in the timeline would unravel the whole puzzle.
I planned the entire day in two-minute intervals on a huge spreadsheet, so I knew where every character in the house would be at all times. I had huge notebooks detailing each character’s personality and quirks, which I’d be madly filling at 2 a.m. after an idea hit. And then there were the Post-It notes. I might as well have bought the company that made them; it would have been cheaper. They ended up covering two walls of my office. In total, planning took three months and writing three years, including six months of intense editing.
About seven months into the draft, Turton broke his own plan and paid for it. He had begun adding unplanned ideas that seemed to improve individual scenes, but without the spreadsheet’s logic behind them the accumulation became irreparable. The lesson he drew from scrapping 40,000 words went to the heart of what kind of book he was writing.
This entire book is a magic trick, and it’s an honest one. Every clue is placed in front of the reader. Nobody suddenly appears in a place they couldn’t get to. I realized that if I cheated and somebody noticed, the entire trick fell apart.
Even with the plan restored and the structure sound, getting the pacing right across so many perspectives required a volume of revision that went well beyond standard editing. Turton has described the process in straightforward terms, without crediting any particular breakthrough moment.
I just kept redrafting it over and over again until the pacing was right and the clues arrived when they needed to. It was just hard work. There were over thirty drafts of this book, each one substantially reworked from the last.
When he was stuck, Turton treated a set of literary predecessors as working documents rather than inspiration. He has named the specific writers whose DNA he was drawing on, ranging from Christie’s plot architecture to the atmospheric menace of Mervyn Peake and the noir voice of Raymond Chandler.
Squint at 7½ Deaths long enough and you’ll definitely see the DNA of Agatha Christie, Arundhati Roy, Arthur Conan-Doyle, Mervyn Peake, Franz Kafka, and Raymond Chandler. They were like reference texts... It was like having a brain trust in my study.
The opening chapter was the last part of the book he wrote, after dozens of failed attempts to find the right door into the story. One line survived every version unchanged, and in his Goodreads annotations Turton identifies it as the key to everything that follows.
This line is the entire book. It’s the tone I wanted to strike and the themes I wanted to explore. It’s the dark impulse that drives every character.
The line he is referring to is the one question Aiden asks himself in the novel’s opening pages: “How lost do you have to be to let the devil lead you home?”
The personal thread
What he gave up to write itThe decision to write the book required Turton to leave a well-paid job as a journalist in Dubai and return to London with no guarantee the novel would work. The material conditions of that period were a long way from the 30th-floor apartment he had left behind.
I actually quit a high paying job in Dubai so I could move back to England and write Seven Deaths. It was a bit of a risk, but I knew I had to have a go or I’d always regret it.
In his Goodreads annotations, written after the book was finished and published, Turton connects the emotional state of those years directly to the novel’s opening line. The risk he had taken gave him access to a feeling he could not otherwise have written from the inside.
I’d given up a lot to write this book, with no certainty it would work. At times I felt like I’d thrown my life away, like I’d followed the devil into the darkness.
What he wants us to sit with
Questions he still can’t answer himselfThe body-swapping mechanic, in which Aiden wakes each day in a different host and must solve Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder before the loop resets, could easily read as a clever gimmick. Turton was alert to that risk from the start and set himself a higher target for what the structure had to earn.
From the start, I wanted this book to be about more than just a murder. I didn’t want the body swapping and time travel to be gimmicks. I wanted to use them as ways of talking about more important things. That’s why there’s so much philosophy in this book, and so much concern for who we are underneath our words and faces. What is guilt? What is justice? What’s redemption? What does a good life look like?
When pressed to name his own answer to those questions, Turton refused. His position on authorial intent is not modesty; it reflects a genuine belief about where meaning lives in fiction.
My message was whatever message you take away from it. I genuinely believe that the reader’s interpretation of a book is the primary one, informed by your experience, emotion, psychology and choices. The best thing about novels is that every reader gets their own version of it.
Turton has described the process by which ideas accumulate into a novel in terms that resist the romantic notion of a single inspirational flash. The video-sourced version of this idea, offered in conversation, gives it a texture the written interviews do not quite capture.
Inspiration is a flash-of-lightning kind of word. What happens to me is more like sediment building. [paraphrased from audio]
At the level of pure reading experience, Turton keeps one priority above the philosophy and the structure. He wrote the book while aware of everything competing for a reader’s attention, and that awareness has not left him.
I just want people to have fun. There’s so much distraction in the world today, so many other things people could be doing besides reading my crazy books. Every time I sit down to write, it’s with the reader in mind.