My second novel, Let the Bad Times Roll, opens with a cancelled dinner party: the guest of honour is missing and the ingredients for a decadent three-course meal of charbroiled oysters, seafood gumbo and bananas foster have turned to rot in the hostess’s fridge. In lieu of a birthday celebration for her brother Daniel, Caroline organises an investigation: she invites three of his closest friends over to discuss his potential whereabouts, plus a psychic who claims to have spent time with him four thousand miles away in New Orleans. Richard, an old friend from university, whips together a gumbo, and as the meal congeals in their bowls, they share information, swap stories and use a series of tarot readings to unlock memories.
In an early draft, Daniel actually had a seat at the table – a seat that remained empty for the duration of dinner. A ghost at the feast, his absence was originally defined by a clean plate and an empty wine glass. I loved this image, but I just couldn’t make the timeline work, and I quickly realised his status as a missing person had to be established at least a week earlier in the London narrative for the pieces of the puzzle to fit together neatly. Instead, his presence looms over the table in the memories of each guest – those that are shared with the room and those that remain private, locked in the minds of each person at the table. Much like a funeral, the guest that binds everyone together is conspicuously absent.
I thought a lot about conspicuous absences while crafting Let the Bad Times Roll. I wanted to create a missing persons narrative in which the missing person felt very present, because I love a presence that’s articulated through its absence – there’s something almost oxymoronic about it.
‘Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything’ is one of my favourite quotes about loss, taken from A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis. In fact, it’s so dear to my heart, I have it tattooed like a ribbon tied around my right arm. I like the way it describes the ever-present sense of an absence. A great (albeit less melancholy) example of this in literature would be the Gothic novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, in which a young woman struggles to fill the void left by her new husband’s late wife. Rebecca de Winter’s absence in Manderley is so overwhelmingly present, the new Mrs de Winter finds herself trapped in an imagined past: a past in which a happy marriage ends in tragedy.
Or take one of my favourite paintings, David Hockney’s A Bigger Splash: it’s a pop art piece that captures the aftermath of someone diving into an LA swimming pool. The figure is absent from the frame, already submerged in a rush of chlorinated water, but the disruption of their departure – the dramatic spray in an otherwise tranquil pool – is the focal point. You were here, and now you’re gone, and the lack of you is overwhelming. Like a caesura – a grand pause in an otherwise loud song: the quiet moment in ‘Sabotage’ by Beastie Boys, ‘Waiting Room’ by Fugazi or ‘March of the Pigs’ by Nine Inch Nails: a deafening silence defined by the sudden absence of sound. See? Oxymoronic.
In his absence, five versions of Daniel exist at that dining table, a different man through the eyes of each guest: a beloved brother to Caroline, a lazy film student to Richard, a potential bandmate to Max, a hedonistic festival goer to Sage and, for psychic Selina, a brief but intense travel companion. Each diner believes they know Daniel best, as each carries a secret about the missing man that they only they know. Or so they think.
It was a challenge to craft a character that could be so many things to so many different people, with a rich internal life and nose for trouble, while remaining consistent for the reader, but without Daniel’s presence, he could only exist in the novel as fragments of other people’s stories.
Selina’s story is at the heart of the novel though. I wrote Selina’s account of her trip to New Orleans first, and then built the framework of the dinner party around those beats. I had fun playing with the ways in which Selina’s description of the time she spent with Daniel simply doesn’t ring true for Caroline, Richard, Max and Sage, and each piece of incongruous information encourages the others to share their own understanding of Daniel. She’s the only character that speaks directly to the reader, but she too holds information back, twists the truth and lies by omission. Rather than shedding light on Daniel’s whereabouts, she casts shadows of doubt.
Ultimately, Let the Bad Times Roll is a novel about absence, memory and manipulation, set between an intense interrogation in London and the heat haze and jazz bars of New Orleans. It asks: how well do we really know the people we love? And would we believe a stranger’s account of a loved one’s behaviour if it seemed out of character, or are we blinkered by the assumption that we alone know them better than anyone else? We all have our little secrets after all – dreadful things we’ve said or shameful things we’ve done. Strange desires, dark thoughts, idiosyncratic quirks we know might change the way our loved ones view us. How well can we ever really know one another, can we ever truly know what our loved ones are capable of, and can we ever trust the kindness of strangers?

Let the Bad Times Roll is published by Hodder on 2nd April