Inside The Hobby
A conversation with award-winning author Lisa St Aubin de Terán about her newest novel, The Hobby. By Zaida Martin.
Following the paperback release of her first crime fiction novel, The Hobby, award winning author Lisa St Aubin de Terán reflects on how the story came to life after real life inspiration hit. Interspersed with extracts from the book.
Lisa: I was waiting in an airport in Europe, and there was a big screen in the lounge with satellite television. As I was sitting in this lounge, there was an interview with a detective from Scotland Yard anti-paedophile unit. He was being asked, ‘What was your most challenging case’. And this man talked about this case, about The Hobby, and how he had come across a box of what seemed to be fairly innocuous photographs. And looking at them, he felt, intuitively, there's something big here, something really dark.
“DI Custer’s work was not supposed to get personal. He was supposed to leave each case at the office. But that wasn’t how it was for him. On the contrary: it was all personal.”
Lisa: And nobody felt it with him, just he felt it.
“My verdict is: nothing there, Lieutenant Colonel. Not anything that I can see. But are we about to witness one of your “astonishing” hunches again?”
Lisa: And so he pursued it in his own time until he reached a point when he could get his colleagues involved. He described, in detail, what in fact are the first chapters of The Hobby.
“It was while standing at the sink, watching Michelle doing handstands, that Amber noticed there was something funny about the man across the way. Funny peculiar.”
Lisa: She called the police, and the police went round just to sort of caution the man, to say please stop looking out the window. They didn’t go to arrest him, the guy hadn’t actually committed a crime, he was just making a young mother feel uncomfortable.
“And Amber, who had never called the police in her life…and who dreaded getting busted for her discreet but illegal stash of marijuana, suddenly stopped swatting flies off their food and dialed 999.”
Lisa: It was only by chance that all this stuff about the fan club of the child star came to the attention of the anti-paedophile unit. But there was nothing there at the start, and I found that very intriguing.
“There was nothing tangibly criminal… but he had the growing conviction that there was something there, some hidden crime he could sense but not see.”
Lisa: I had to catch my flight, so I didn’t hear the ending, but years later it was still sticking in my mind, this whole thing the detective described. It just told me, you’ve got to write this. It was odd for me, I've never written crime fiction.
One thing that I did with The Hobby which was important to me having thoroughly researched the subject was that when one talks about paedophiles, there is not just one paedophile. There are different types, and one thing that I did in The Hobby was to try and identify different types and show how they form and grow and function in society.
My characters are different, you’ve got someone who adores little children but is not an active paedophile. When he starts the fan club, he in no way thinks of abusing these children, but knows people of a completely different yolk who immediately saw the opportunity to prey.
“Think about it, Hilly, and be honest with yourself. Think how you feel when a little girl at the Club falls down and cries and you pick her up and sit her on your lap. You comfort her and that feels good; but there’s something more isn’t there?”
Hilly shook his head vigorously.
“No!”
“Yes there is. I’ve watched you. You get that ecstatic look on your cherubic little face and you love it!”
“It’s not like that!”
Lisa: But then you’ve got the characters who loves children and want to take advantage of them all the time, and will…I think it’s really important for people to see how the whole grooming process happens, because by not seeing it, everyone is vulnerable to it. A lack of understanding of how that functions makes us victims.
The Hobby is quite complicated, it’s coming with all sorts of different strands. It hasn’t reached its readers yet, but I think it will and when it does I think it will throw light on a subject that has been hidden away in a little dark hole.
“The public had to stop sweeping the issue under the carpet and help. It was an issue too nasty for most people to contemplate, but it had to be dealt with. Like the hairs in the Underground tunnels, the likes of Harrison and Wittan had to be hoovered off the rails or the subway trains would crash.”
The Hobby is now available in paperback through Amazon, Waterstones, and all other booksellers.
