The death of Madeline Duchamp.

You’d think after twenty books I would have gotten used to killing off characters, wouldn’t you? Sure, some are more difficult to write, but others, well, aren’t.

I think I learned very early on, writing the first book in fact, how important it is to be careful. I received some criticism for the murders in the first book, primarily because it concerned the violent, horrendous death of two young girls. I’d write ‘un homme qui attend’ without any sort of plan, all I knew was that for the plot to work (Hugo being called back to France) the crime had to be one of the most horrific imaginable, which is why I chose to write what I did. It is horrible and I realise it triggered some people who read it and I’m intensely sorry about that (though if you’ve watched any kind of Nordic Noir stuff I think my stories are pretty tame in comparison). But I did learn the importance of what I write and how it might affect people, so I was conscious of that moving forward.

Creating a character just to kill them off is easy enough, it’s establishing the links to the other characters and the reason for the murder is more tricky. Some characters are fun to write, some are ‘just’ characters and it’s really as simple as that.

This blog came about because right now I’m on the final draft of ‘Hugo & Madeline’ before it goes off for its polish and I’m dealing with an odd situation in it. Madeline dies. It’s no spoiler for me to share that, not really, because if you go back as far as ‘un homme qui attend’ and the very first chapter we discover that Madeline, Hugo’s grandmother, died when he was only eighteen years old. We also discover she was a cold, distant woman who took Hugo in when his parents didn’t want him. However, it soon becomes clear that it’s not that simple because she appears in his memories over and over throughout the books (and believe me, that wasn’t intentional, it just happened). It was odd. I really liked this complicated character who had never actually appeared in any of my books other than in anecdotes.

Around the time of the tenth Hugo book (Prisonnier Dix), I think I began searching for something else, primarily because I didn’t want to get bored of writing Hugo. I’ve written before about the genesis for the Coco spinoffs, but I’ll just say that she, like Hugo, came out of nowhere and demanded to be written.

The idea for a Hugo prequel book was also unexpected. The thought had never occurred to me but then one day, I thought, what if there was a story about Hugo’s early life which touched on his developing sexuality and the world of investigations he would finally walk into?

‘Hugo & Josef’ was the result and it made sense that Madeline would be a major part of that story and for the first time I really worried about doing a character justice. How do you make a cold, distant woman loveable in a way that she obviously was to Hugo? Again, in the end, it was easy. Madeline walked onto the page and grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and I never looked book.

Telling the story of Hugo and Madeline has been truly a great joy. After the success of the first prequel I decided to do a follow-up, but my husband, a fan of trilogies, nagged me to do a first. In the end, I’m glad he did. ‘Club Video’ was also a lot of fun to write, primarily because it gave me a chance to further establish the relationship between Hugo and Madeline. Oh, and if I’d never have written ‘Club Video’ then we’d never… oh, I’d better stop there (future potential spoilers wink wink).

And now the prequel trilogy is complete and Madeline is dead. As I said earlier, writing about her death was incredibly difficult and actually a bit emotional. As with her timeline already being established, I also couldn’t really have her death being anything too outlandish because if it was, surely Hugo would have mentioned it in passing in one of the other stories? No, I had to think carefully about how to finish the story in such a way it would feel authentic and yet still tell a good story. Time will tell if you’ll agree or not whether I succeeded, but I hope you find that Madeline’s death story is befitting of this marvelous woman who I’d love to meet even though I’d be slightly terrified of her.

I hope life is treating you all well, more updates soon. Thank you again for all the love for the latest release (Chemin de Compostelle). Summer is coming, which means we might just have a rather chaotic Parisian flic with blue hair about to unleash a new mystery for you all to solve.

Until then,

Gxx