Anne Cassidy

Anne Cassidy

About Author

Anne Cassidy was born in London in 1952 and was a teacher in London schools for 19 years before she turned to writing full time.

Anne has been writing books for teenagers for many years and concentrates on crime stories and thrillers.

Before she began to write, Anne was an avid reader and her favourite kind of books are those that have a mystery of some sort at their centre. She has a passion for crime books, mystery stories and detective novels.

She likes to solve the mystery of a crime but also to find out why something happened, how a crime was committed and the effects of terrible events on ordinary people's lives.

Her favourite crime writers are Ruth Rendell (particularly when she's writing as Barbara Vine), Sue Grafton, John Harvey, Lawrence Block, Scott Trurow and Donna Tartt.

She believes that teenagers inhabit a transitory world between childhood and adulthood. Certainties and expectations are often turned upside down in this period. It seemed, therefore, an ideal point at which to throw a young adult in the path of crime, to see what happens.

Cassidy believed that there was a lack of this kind of books for younger readers and has written a variety of mystery and crime novels for teenagers.

Anne's teen thrillers include Love Letters, Missing Judy and Tough Love and she also penned the East End Murders series. Looking For JJ was published in hardback in February 2004 and released in paperback February 2005.

Looking for JJ tells the story of Jennifer Jones, who is convicted of manslaughter as a ten-year-old. Following six years in a secure unit, she's released under a new identity. The novel looks back at the day when three girls went out on an adventure and only two came back and also at JJ's life afterwards as she tries to avoid being discovered by the press and begins to face up to her notoriety.

Anne's novel Birthday Blues was published in February 2005 and is a gripping story focusing on an abandoned baby.

Looking for JJ won the Booktrust Teenage Prize 2004, and was shortlisted for the Angus Book Award 2005, the prestigious Whitbread Children's Book Award 2004 and also the Carnegie Medal 2004.

Interview

FINDING JENNIFER JONES

HOT KEY BOOKS

FEBRUARY 2014


FINDING JENNIFER JONES, the long-awaited sequel to Looking for JJ, is published this month by Hot Key Books. Author Anne Cassidy talks to us about why it took ten years before she felt she could write the second book and about the future for Jennifer Jones, now aged 19 and living as a student with a new identity.

 

Q: Can you remind us why you wrote the original book, Looking for JJ?

A: I was writing crime books at the time and I read Gitta Sereny's book, Cries Unheard, about the child killer Mary Bell. It was soon after the James Bulger killing by two other child murderers. When you read a book like Sereny's, you realize that you want answers about why this terrible crime happened.

There are no real answers Mary Bell had a terrible childhood but many people have terrible childhoods and don't go on to do something as terrible as this - but the question was still there for me and I thought the answer was probably a mixture of bad experiences that come together with darker coincidences. As a crime writer, you are interested in the psychology of crime and the coincidences that lead to crimes being committed.

When I wrote Looking for JJ, I wanted to find out what had happened to Jennifer, what had made her this edgy, fly-off-the-handle child, and to look at the element of total chance that all come together one day and that make a child do something bad.

I was also aware that children aren't able to retrieve a situation the way an adult can. An adult might say, let's get an ambulance, let's get someone who can help, but my character, Jennifer, was young and assumed the worst, that the girl she had hit was dead, and she ran away and tried to hide it, which children do; they try to hide something that has gone wrong.

 

Q: It is a decade now since Looking for JJ was published; why did it take so long for you to write the sequel, Finding Jennifer Jones.

A: Once I had finished Looking for JJ I was reluctant to revisit it; it seemed to me that it was such a popular book that anything I do might spoil it and it also seemed as though there wasn't any more story there. So I was always adamant that I wouldn't do more.

There were a couple of things that changed that. One of the boys in the Bulgar case was re-arrested for child pornography offenses and at the time it happened, there was a suggestion that he might have experienced abuse as a child although this had never been suggested in court at the time. It made me think that whatever had made the boys do that had never been properly explored and I started thinking about Looking for JJ again.

My book is not about the Bulger case but I wanted to explore the idea about problems that Jennifer had experienced as a child but that had never been treated. She had never revealed the possible abuse she might have suffered had she gone along with what her mother wanted her to do on the day she murdered her friend. That experience had never left her because she never told anyone about it; the problem had never been treated.

The other reason I hadn't written the second book before was that as a writer, I had this terror that people would read the second and not think it was as good as the first. Then two years ago I read for the first time The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier and then I picked up the sequel, Beyond the Chocolate War, which was written ten years after the first book. As I had the ten year anniversary of Looking for JJ coming up, it seemed a reasonable thing to do the follow-up.

 

Q: Having written the second book, do you feel it's very different from Looking for JJ?

A: Looking for JJ received a lot of critical acclaim and I think to some extent that was because I was writing about an issue that hadn't been tackled this way before. Finding Jennifer Jones is a very different kind of story; it doesn't have the surprise and the shock of the first story. This one is simply for readers who want to complete Jennifer Jones' story. I wanted to give them something to enjoy and I think I have done that.

 

Q: Did you need to re-read Looking for JJ before starting this book?

A: Yes, but I re-read Looking for JJ as if I were a student. I took notes of obvious dates and names but also things that were going through her mind, what she was thinking of, so that when I wrote a second book I would be in her mind again. It was a lovely experience, I have not read it for about ten years and I enjoyed reading it again.

 

Q: How clear were you what Jennifer Jones would be like two years on from the ending of the last book?

A: I knew what the 19-year-old Jennifer was like before I started to write the book, which was one of the reasons why I felt I could write it; there was more of a story to tell. She was a very different person. At the end of Looking for JJ, she was a sad character, a bit like a child who needed her carers. She felt desperately lucky to be out and free but then she lost that life, she lost Rosie and Frankie. It became clear to me that she would harden up, that she'd be a bit bitter and narkie about what she had lost.

Teenagers have a great capacity for blaming other people for their situation and that is what Jennifer does; even though she has done wrong, she's still a teenager and she's thinking, 'I did something terrible but it's not all my fault', so I wanted her character to be a bit like that now.

 

Q: Was it difficult to work the back story of the original murder into the second book?

A: I had to revisit some of the back story for Finding Jennifer Jones . Looking for JJ has the discovery of the body of the child and I don't revisit that but I do explore what it was like for the child in the Facility, between the discovery of the murder and the beginning of the court case. I explore her experiences there and the relationship between the girl and her mother - who chooses to save her own skin rather than help her daughter. Jennifer never forgets this betrayal by her mother but we see that she never gives up on her mother, either. I also reflect on what might have happened to have made Jennifer Jones kill so I revisit her past for that.

The hardest part of writing this book was simply deciding to write it, and making the false start with the double narrative. Once I corrected that, it sort of wrote itself.

 

Q: Do you feel that Jennifer Jones' story is now complete?

A: In Finding JJ, Jennifer has to find out who she is whether she is going to be a sad girl who things happen to, or whether she says 'no, this is going to be different for me'.

Many readers were upset with the ending of the first book and lots of people asked why I had ended it like that? I decided that this time there would be more possibilities for Jennifer; it's not necessarily a happy ending but it is slightly romantic and there are possibilities for Jennifer to find happiness.

There is still going to be a huge amount of prejudice against her, whatever she does, but there are always new paths you can take that can give you some joy in life. There are chances for Jennifer to have joy but she has to grasp them; but it doesn't mean she will have a happy life.

When I re-read Looking for JJ after having finished the second book, at that point Looking for JJ felt very unfinished to me. Now I feel like I have finished the story; there will still be problems for Jennifer, but she has the possibility of happiness. I do feel that that's it now for Jennifer Jones although I have also said 'ask me that again in ten years time'!

 

Q: What else are you writing?

A: Dead and Buried, publishing with Bloomsbury in March, is the last in The Murder Notebooks series. The story poses the question of whether murder is ever the right thing to do. When I talk to students about these books, that's what I ask and that's the question that comes up from those who have read the books. I've not started writing anything else just yet, I've got a couple of ideas but for now I'm having a bit of a break.

 

 

KILLING RACHEL: THE MURDER NOTEBOOKS

BLOOMSBURY CHILDREN'S BOOKS

MARCH 2013


The second book in The Murder Notebooks series, Killing Rachel is an atmospheric, psychological crime thriller for teenagers, in which Rose and Joshua continue their investigations into the disappearance of their parents. Within this bigger story is a story about Rose and her schoolfriend, Rachel. The two fell out but Rachel then contacts Rose out of the blue, asking for help.


Anne Cassidy is known for writing crime thrillers, including books like Looking for JJ, and in The Murder Notebooks she continues to explore this genre. Cassidy says, "The first book I wrote (Big Girls Shoes, 1991) was a crime novel and I have stayed in that zone. Crime writing is about life as it's lived and reflects a heightened version of life with a crime behind it. Good crime thrillers are full of mystery and twists and turns, emotions and struggles, and are well written."

She continues to read crime fiction, pointing to some "fantastic" adult crime writing coming through including people like Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), Patricia Highsmith, Ian Rankin and Mark Billingham. "They are my comfort zone, as well as more literary reads like Hilary Mantel's Bringing up the Bodies, which I thought was brilliant."

While Cassidy is known best for her stand-alone thrillers, The Murder Notebooks is a series with two more books to come, bringing the total series to four books. She says, "It's fantastic doing a series where people want at the end of one book to find out what happens in the next book. I had been reading a lot of these myself and watching series like The Wire and Mad Men things that unfold very slowly.

"In YA fiction the story needs to move quickly but I had the idea of introducing a bigger story that would unfold from book to book, but with a more rapid, stand-alone mystery in each individual book."

Cassidy decided that the over-arching story for The Murder Notebooks would be the disappearance of the lead characters' parents. She says, "It seemed to me that the most devastating thing that could happen to any teenager would be someone disappearing from their life, so I started this story in book one where Joshua and Rose's parents simply vanished. The Murder Notebooks are their struggle to find out the truth about their parents."

The first book is called Dead Time and in it, Josh and Rose are convinced that their parents are dead but then something happens to make them think that they might be alive. "Ending a book on a cliffhanger like this might be infuriating for some readers but sometimes as a writer, if you want to do something a bit more indepth, you need to write it over a longer period," Cassidy explains. "At some point all four books will be available and readers will be able to read one straight after the other."

The second book, Killing Rachel, can also be read as a stand-alone story. It involves a friendship between Rose and another girl who lies through her teeth to Rose. At one point she also tells Rose something about her parents, which Rose believes is another lie.

Cassidy says, "When I was a teenager I had a friend who lied about things in her life. Like Rose, I needed that friendship really badly. I was an only child and I went to a school a way from where I lived and I needed this friend more than she needed me and when she found someone else to be friends with it broke my heart. When teenage girls have friends it's almost like a first experience of love outside your family. So in a way that storyline came from my own experience."

While crime thrillers can be tricky to plot, this series was easier than some of her novels, she says, "because the reader finds out about their parents at the same time as Rose and Joshua". She adds, "I rarely know what happens at the end of a book when I begin to write it, but to sell the series I needed to know what happened to their parents and so I had to decide what it would be. I had to plan what the reader would be told in each novel and where I would leave them in terms of what they do and don't know." The characters eventually find out what happened to their parents in the next book, The Butterfly Grave, publishing in November 2013.

Cassidy gives us a clue that the Russians "are crucial" to their parents' disappearance. The parents were police officers who were involved in 'cold case' work, where they investigated older cases, and everything that they find out has a purpose - there are no 'red herrings' plotted in. The villain in this book is a Russian, Viktor Baranski. "Sometimes it is hard to create villains in books without getting into all sorts of problems," Cassidy admits, "so we take them from countries like Eastern Europe rather than regions like the Middle East or India."

The Murder Notebooks series is based in central London which Cassidy felt would appeal to teenage readers. "People like visiting places like Camden and Central London, and I'm from East London myself, I was brought up in Tottenham, so it's a good area for me to write about." However, she has varied the settings for each book "because if every book was set in the same place it would become difficult to differentiate the four books in the series." Rose goes to school in Norfolk, for example, and in book three we head up to Newcastle where Joshua lived for five years.

Cassidy is currently writing a companion book to Looking for JJ, called Jennifer Jones. She says, "I am often asked by my teenage readers what happened to JJ next?, so I started to think about a follow-up." Jennifer Jones will be published in 2014, some ten years since Looking for JJ was published."

Cassidy calls it a 'companion book' rather than a sequel as you won't need to have read the first book to understand the plot, and because the central character is different now. She adds, "I found it nice to read Looking for JJ again but I had to re-read it about five times because you have to remember every single thought that your character had to do with the events and where the killing happened and so I had to read it like a student, making notes about what was said."

When she is writing, Cassidy writes in short spurts. She says, "Im not one of those people who can sit at a computer and work for hours so I write for about 20 minutes and then go and do something else, then I go over what I have written for about 20 mins, editing it, and that is how the rest of the day goes as well. I only write for about three hours a day, unless I am near the end of a book and then I write all day and every day! If I feel my work isn't going anywhere, I will just stop writing."

When she is not writing, she is walking the dog, reading, watching daytime TV or shopping. "That is especially good when I am trying to work out what happens next. So a lot of my relaxation is just about living."

She adds, "My favourite time of the day is early morning, I get up at 6am and go straight to my computer and if I feel quite bright I can work for an hour before breakfast and sometimes the work I do is really good and I will work for the rest of the day like that."


Anne Cassidy's third book in The Murder Notebooks series, The Butterfly Grave, will be published in November 2013.

Author's Titles