Sean French and Nicci Gerrard - single-minded writers

Writers Sean French and Nicci Gerrard tell MICHELE HEWITSON what makes their marriage so thrilling.

Nicci French and Sean French are Nicci French. Well, sort of. The English journalists are a married couple who write very successful thrillers under the not-very-well-kept-secret pseudonym.

It would, in any case, be nigh on impossible to go on with the subterfuge, given that publishers generally like their authors to show their faces to promote their books.

Which is why Gerrard and French are in town: to do publicity for their fourth release, Beneath the Skin.

In any case, the pseudonym was never intended to mislead. To begin, with, says French, they had no idea that they would ever get a book published: "It really was a kind of weird secret experiment."

And somehow, says Gerrard, "to have two names on the cover would get in the way of actual reading."

They didn't want the distraction, Gerrard jokes, of the reader attributing the "Barbara Cartland" bits to the female member of the writing duo (there aren't any; these two write too cleverly for that.)

One thing will stay a secret between them: who wrote which sections.

You can see that the two minds might make a formidable writing machine. She is tiny, tidy and intense. He is slightly crumpled, in a comfortable way, and intense. They are both, they say, natural-born worriers. They also both talk like the clappers. In that seesaw fashion common to well-matched couples, they talk over the top of each other, apologise, challenge and debate. It is something like the way they write the books: on their individual computers, editing each other as they go. Now that, as any writer will tell you, is a process that involves an enormous amount of trust.

The nature of trust, as it happens, is a topic they have an abiding interest in.

Killing Me Softly, the third Nicci French novel, is now a film with Joseph Fiennes and Heather Graham (due for release in Britain later this year). Gerrard wrote, in a piece about watching the making of the film, that it was written as "a secret, intimate exchange - particularly so since the the novel's subject was erotic intimacy and trust."

Killing Me Softly is the story of Alice who trades in her quiet, decent life and quiet, decent boyfriend for a man who catches her eye on a crowded street. She shrugs off her old life as easily as an old cardigan, and embraces a world full of risk and half-truths.

It is a story about the consequences of falling in love with a stranger. And, of course, mostly we do fall in love with people we hardly know and that sensation is as exhilarating, and can be as dangerous, as jumping out of a plane without a parachute.

"I think most women know what that feels like," Gerrard says, "even if they don't act on it. When you fall in love, it's an odd thing, isn't it? You sort of lose control, you let yourself trust somebody you don't know."

The Nicci French books deal in a genre that grows increasingly gruesome. And curiously, this is at a time when more thriller writers than ever are women; when more of the protagonists are feisty, pseudo-feminist figures fighting crime and misogyny with forensic science and lipstick.

You open the back cover to find a flattering photo of a beautiful blond woman who looks as though she'd throw up if she found a dog hair in her rocket salad, and discover that she's written a book about a serial killer whose signature is necrophilia (it's called Birdman, by Mo Hayder, if you really must know.)

Gerrard and French's books are, by contrast, imbued with the ordinary, with domestic details. The thrills are grounded in reality: you could open your front door one day, step out into the street and meet your destiny.

Gerrard: "I really think that what we do is look at what's important to us. It's not about bombs falling from the sky, or strange, fiendish plots. It's everyday dilemmas, things that worry us."

French: "What you don't want to do is push it so that it becomes slightly pornographic. We don't want to write things where you take female characters and do horrible things to them."

Bad things do happen in their books - of course they do, they're thrillers. But then bad things do happen to people on their way to the shops. There is no way of predicting, no way of stopping the random acts of bad luck that the universe throws at perfectly nice people living their blameless lives.

We operate, says French, on the principle that "it's going all right. That you're safer than you really are. That you're more in control of it than you really are. There's an idea that it's going to be all right because you've been good and because you've been sensible, whereas it's usually because you've been lucky and actually you're always just a moment away."

In Nicci French land there is a stalker outside the bedroom window, watching you live your life before he takes it. A skeleton in every closet, or back garden, which will come back to haunt you. Somebody, somewhere out there wants to control your destiny - and make it as nasty as possible.

In seems appropriate then, to ask these dealers in psychological thrills, this lively couple who have the knack of knowing just what it is that lives in your head and comes out at night to keep you awake, what their greatest fears are.

Gerrard says it is of something happening to the children (they have four, ranging in ages from 7 to 13; two are from her previous marriage).

It's not an answer French is prepared to accept. There must be, he suggests, something more telling. She'll own to being scared of being left; she used to be frightened of failure.

French's fear is of heights. There's a balcony off their Auckland hotel room on the 23rd floor. "I constantly fantasise, I have an image of falling off. And the mad thing is that every so often I have to creep out onto the balcony and look right over."

It's a bit like reading a Nicci French book, really: it scares the hell out of you, but the mad thing is that you have to go on turning the pages to find out who fell, and whether she was pushed.