From Memoir to Murder

Lisa St Aubin de Terán ventures into crime fiction

By Zaida Martin

Award-winning novelist Lisa St Aubin de Terán has carried the haunting idea behind her latest novel since childhood. With an impressive list of memoirs and fiction inspired by her life in Venezuela, she has now stepped into the darker territory of literary crime fiction. The Hobby (first published in November of 2024, and now releasing as a paperback) is a dark and psychological police procedural that follows Detective John Custer through an increasingly tangled web of crimes covered up by the fan club of a 1940s child star.

Before her work with crime fiction, however, came her latest memoir, Better Broken Than New: A Fragmented Memoir. Published in 2024, Lisa looks back on the twenty years she spent in a remote part of northern Mozambique. There, she explored her heritage and established the Teran Foundation in 2004, which now helps support local villages in northern Mozambique in everything from community projects, to education and health initiatives. 

A rather long way from her normal genre, Lisa reflected on the major differences between her experiences writing memoirs and the process of The Hobby in a phone call interview.

“Writing a novel is very spontaneous, in a way, so, once I start writing a novel it just flows and I just have lots of fun writing,” Lisa explained. “I love writing novels, and it comes very easily to me, whereas The Hobby was quite hard, which is shocking. It was a good challenge.”

Lisa goes on to describe the main hurdle with this new genre, and the largest difference from her experience writing memoirs, saying, “I normally don’t do any research at all when I write my novels – I just write them. But for this one, I needed to do quite a lot of research, and I found a lot of research shocking. Looking into things like the activities of organizations like PIE, I thought, is this true?”

From the late 1970s to early 1980s the Paedophile Information Exchange, otherwise known as PIE, was a British activist group that openly campaigned for the legalisation of paedophilia and affiliated with the National Council for Civil Liberties. The horrifying public organisation, as noted by Emma Hamilton in her recent review from Buried Under Books, is a main source of Detective Custer's drive for justice throughout the novel. 

Lisa continues by saying the entire journey was an education as well as a working process beyond any memoir, as she looked into the failings of the government that went deeper than she could ever imagine. She says, “Writing about that subject of paedophiles is something that was difficult, but at the same time I felt because we don’t talk about it, because it is taboo, it is allowed to continue at a pace and rate that it really shouldn't and wouldn’t if we did talk about it.” 

From childhood, Lisa has understood the dark side of child abuse and sex crimes. Her mother worked with children who were victims of abuse, often by family members or very close in some way. “I got quite close to a few of them and discovered a world very different from my own,” she explained, “where children aren’t safe when they go home, and where the adults who are supposed to protect them are abusing them.” 

She explained that the children she had met and their stories had always been in the back of her mind, and resonated with her when the news story that inspired The Hobby came to light. 

“One of the differences was, The Hobby was hard work,” said Lisa when asked what her main experience in writing literary crime fiction was like. “I’ve never had to do research, and writing in such a different genre you have to discipline yourself as a writer to create a plot with forward movement.”

Despite the challenges that came with writing outside of her usual style, Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s venture into crime fiction reflects what The Guardian has called an “enviable narrative gift”. By challenging herself and readers to confront the silent reality of abuse and institutional failure, The Hobby demonstrates how fiction can inspire change in even the smallest ways. 

The Hobby will be available in paperback on 21 May, 2026, through Amazon, Waterstones, and all other booksellers.