For her eighth birthday Bella Mackie’s father, Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian newspaper, bought her a subscription to a true-crime magazine. It was a weekly partwork series that came with a free binder. “It had the goriest, gruesomest details and I was sitting there at eight, going ‘this is so brilliant, I love every detail’.” She laughs. “I don’t know what that does to your brain at eight.”
I might have an idea, I suggest, for that child grew into an author who gleefully kills off characters in increasingly unusual and imaginative ways. In Mackie’s new novel What a Way to Go, crooked financier Anthony Wistern is impaled on an ornamental spike in his own lake at a party. The murder methods used by Grace Bernard in Mackie’s 2021 debut How To Kill Your Family include a choking death in a sex dungeon and hacking into the controls of a sauna to cook a woman.
“I like the surreal ways, the silly nonsense ways,” Mackie says. “I used to have a game with my family where we would say what would be the perfect way to murder someone. And you can only do that if you’re the kind of person who would actually be such a coward and could never do it, so it doesn’t mentally disturb me to think about it.”
She didn’t have big expectations of How To Kill Your Family. “I got a small advance. I don’t think they thought it was going to be a big seller. I was thinking if I sold 10,000 copies, that would be amazing.” Amazing and then some: her sharply-observed, stylish revenge comedy went on to sell 1,260,000 copies. Fans would have loved a quick sequel, but she didn’t want to write one. What a Way to Go took two years. “I wrote a first draft that was 130,000 words. I then sat down with my editor and her editor, and they very kindly put their hands on my shoulders and said, ‘this doesn’t work’. They were very nice about it, and very gentle, but basically they said, you’ve written two books in one, and it’s not funny. I’d written it because I was in the grips of pandemic sadness and anxiety. It took 10 to 11 months to write another book; effectively a completely different one.”
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That first draft may not have been funny, but the book she eventually wrote certainly is. What a Way to Go, a witty and entertaining mash-up of class, wealth and crime, opens with Anthony Wistern’s death. His four greedy and inheritance-obsessed adult children immediately fall under suspicion of having offed their not-so-dear dad. Their mother Olivia is also a suspect: she had been planning to leave Anthony, and his death saves her the trouble of having to tell him so and deal with the fallout. Oliva is ice-cold, her wit that of the driest martini. Of her husband, she thinks, “great men have egos the size of planets but skin as thin as silk, and you learn to your cost that the combination is always a disaster”. Olivia has spent her adulthood with a man who is serially unfaithful yet whose money funds the lifestyle she desires. As Mackie says, “That’s quite an interesting dilemma for someone: to hate their life but also be unwilling to give up any part of their life.”
When she began writing the novel, she was intrigued by the role of the super-rich in contemporary pop culture and entertainment. “People were watching a lot of Succession and Selling Sunset and Made in Chelsea ... We like seeing what they do and how terrible they are in real life. As a society everyone has a real hankering for rich people to get their comeuppances, and that doesn’t necessarily look like jail or public opprobrium. Quite often it looks like they lose their money, are shunned by their friends.”
What a Way to Go is narrated by three characters, Olivia, dead Anthony and “the Sleuth”, a young true-crime fan called Jade. After his impalement, Anthony wakes up in a processing centre. Imagined by Mackie as a cross between a budget hotel and a bureaucracy-obsessed office of a minor government department, this is where the newly-dead go while their eternal resting place is being determined. Anthony can’t move on to his final location until he remembers exactly how he died, and who was responsible.
[ Bella Mackie ‘It’s a fantasy, no woman is allowed to be like this anyway’Opens in new window ]
Unfortunately for him, he was so drunk at the party that he can’t recall a thing, so he’s stuck in the South Gloucestershire Processing Centre until he figures it out. His new day-to-day is grim and boring, and he hates it. His only enjoyment comes from sitting down in front of a TV monitor to watch his wife and four children try to leverage their inheritance while squabbling viciously with each other.
“I knew I wanted to have Anthony’s voice, and the only way that would work was to either have flashbacks or I’d have to invent somewhere else he could be,” Mackie says. “So the funniest thing for me was to put him in a world that is completely alien to him, a situation he can’t spend his way out of. He can’t sweet-talk anyone. He’s stuck in the most boring, banal, unbeautiful, terrible place. That enabled me to tell his version while also watching him getting more and more frustrated and annoyed and bored and thwarted. That was my favourite bit to write. Afterwards I thought I could write a whole book just in the South Gloucestershire Processing Centre because I enjoyed being there so much.”
‘I’m not trying to be moralistic about it, but the character I’ve written is delusional’
In the novel, Mackie’s interest in true crime is exemplified by amateur detective and conspiracy theorist Jade. Mackie uses Jade to point out the madness behind many online sleuths, and her concerns about what she sees as the current race to find the worst or most disgusting details of a story. “I am interested in how true crime went from public hangings to the penny dreadfuls of the Victorian era, and then up to the modern age; the binders, the tabloids and then documentaries. Now it’s people on TikTok coming up with their own theories about things. Anyone can do it. It can literally just be on your phone.”
She references the social media frenzy last year when Nicola Bulley vanished while walking her dog in Lancashire and, more recently, the disappearance of British teenager Jay Slater in Tenerife in June. It troubles her that so many people were unwilling to accept the simplest explanation – a tragic accident in both situations – was true, instead believing in all sorts of horrendous theories and naming supposed perpetrators online with no thought given to the consequences for them or the victims’ families. As Mackie’s character Jade observes, “watch enough crime documentaries and you’ll see how thin the veil is between civilisation and savagery”.
“True crime now is almost whatever you want it to be, and there’s a huge danger to that. I’m not trying to be moralistic about it, but the character I’ve written is delusional. I can understand how she starts up, but she’s cherry-picking information basically, and chasing that high of hits and likes. You have to create more sensational headlines in order to get more views. Even if the truth is getting away from you it doesn’t matter as long as you’re taking the audience on a journey. I think that’s where we are with a lot of true crime, and I find that really weird and distasteful.”
As an adult, Mackie realises that her intense interest in crime did affect her anxiety levels. “I have rampant anxiety and I write about murder. There you go!” She has OCD and tends to, as she lightly terms it, “obsess over things”. When she was 29 (she is now 41), her husband of eight months left her. Despite being so depressed she was barely able to leave the sofa, one day she decided to go for a jog. “It helped so much with my anxiety to begin with, now it’s a way of life.”
In 2018 she married BBC Radio 1 presenter Greg James and published a memoir Jog On: How Running Saved My Life. The pandemic hit her OCD hard, and she became so anxious she couldn’t let her body rest. In 2020 she ran between 11 and 14km daily, clocking up an unbroken streak of 365 days. She no longer jogs daily, but running remains a grumpy but much-loved friend. “It’s like I’m in a long-term relationship and sometimes we don’t like each other, but we’re still going to trudge along.”
Mackie is now working on her third novel, which she hopes will be “easy breezy” by comparison with the process of writing What a Way to Go. Fans will be pleased to hear that it too features characters who are equal parts awful and likable. “I don’t know why,” she says cheerfully, “but that’s the thing I keep trying to do.”
What a Way to Go, by Bella Mackie, is published by the Borough Press
