NICCI FRENCH: TALES OF INTIMATE DREAD
British husband-and-wife team Nicci Gerrard and Sean French have been writing psychological thrillers together since 1996. To date, they have 25 titles to their name. Or, rather, Nicci French does.
So what made them decide on a singular pseudonym rather than having both their names on the cover? ‘We always knew we wanted one name on the cover,’ Sean says. ‘And the reason we went with Nicci French is actually very pedestrian. Years ago, when we were journalists, we had this idea for a thriller based on the notion of recovered memory. You know, where people in therapy recovered traumatic hidden memories from their past. And so, because that phenomenon overwhelmingly happened to women in therapy, the protagonist in our first book, The Memory Game, was a woman. And because a woman was telling the story, it just seemed logical to have a female name on the book.’
After trying and failing to come up with a clever pseudonym, they eventually just settled on Nicci’s first name and Sean’s second. ‘If our first book had had a male protagonist it might have gone a completely different way,’ he says. Not that they have ruled out a future book by Sean Gerrard. ‘We do sometimes think, you know, maybe there is a Sean Gerrard lurking,’ Nicci says, smiling. ‘Maybe if there’s an idea that feels like it needs to have a male narrator or
