In an interview on the Irish books podcast "Natter" with Kate and Michelle, Sam Blake explores what drives good people to commit terrible acts as she discusses her latest psychological thriller. Inspired by the disappearance of Suzy Lamplugh, the novel, "Your Every Move", revisits a 40-year-old missing persons case while examining the disturbing psychology of stalking and the fragile line between victim and villain.
What motivates good people to do bad things is something that fascinates author Sam Blake, who points out that there’s often a "very fine line between victim and villain".
“I’m really interested in that question of what would make you murder, what would make you be the villain, what buttons would need to be pushed for you to go and do something like that, because it’s actually quite a fine line… There are times when you can completely see why or how something might have happened the way it did.”
This author's journey began when her husband set sail on an eight-week trip across the Atlantic in 1999, leaving Sam home alone with the idea for a book. Seventeen years, many hundreds of thousands of words, and five draft manuscripts later, the debut novel "Little Bones" hit the bestseller list in Ireland in 2016. This was the first in the very popular Kat Connolly trilogy.
An incredibly prolific writer, Sam now has eight best-selling standalone thrillers and two young adult thrillers under her belt. Six of her books have been shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Crime Novel of the Year and "Something’s About to Blow" up won YA /Teen Novel of the Year in 2024.
Apart from her writing, Sam (the pen name of Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin) somehow finds the time to act as a mentor to hundreds, if not thousands, of aspiring and published writers through her work with Writing.ie, Inkwell, and Writers Inc. She is chair of the Board of the Society of Authors in the UK, and the founder of the Murder One Crime Writing Festival in Ireland.
Her latest book, "Your Every Move", tells the story of Irish estate agent Rosie Kinsella, who loves her job selling high-end properties in London, but when she's targeted by a mysterious stalker, her amazing life is turned upside down.
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Who is "Michael", and why does he seem to think he and Rosie are in a relationship? How does he know where she lives and where she works? And how has he managed to take photos inside her house? Rosie's colleagues and friends rally round to protect her. But who can she really trust?
The impetus for the story came from Sam’s own memories of the disappearance of 25-year-old estate agent, Suzy Lamplugh, after leaving her London office in July 1986 to meet a client. Despite extensive police investigations and public appeals, no trace of her has ever been found. Lamplugh was declared legally dead, presumed murdered, in 1993.
“I remember this really clearly,” explains Sam, “because I was in school at the time and she disappeared on the 28th of July, and we would have broken up for school around the 14th. So it was just the start of the summer holidays. I was at home watching the television, and her parents were on 'Good Morning Britain' on the BBC and ITV. They were everywhere. And I remember Michael Burke [the newsreader] on the television saying we still don't know anything about what's happened to Suzy Lamplugh because she disappeared completely.”
Sam was speaking to writers Kate Durrant and Michelle McDonagh on the Irish books podcast "Natter with Kate and Michelle", produced in association with Bookstation, Ireland’s fastest-growing and best-value bookseller, and Irish Central.
She continues: “She had an appointment in her diary to meet a guy called Mr Kipper at a house in Fulham and she completely vanished. This was in the days before CCTV, before mobile phones, all of those things so it was an absolute mystery what happened to her, but her parents then became very active in the whole area of stalking and women disappearing and women having issues like this. And they set up something called the Suzy Lamplugh Trust. And now in the UK, if you have a problem with stalking and you Google it, the first thing you find is the Suzy Lamplugh Trust.”
A devotee of property shows, like "Selling Sunset", Sam was just starting to think about her story for "Your Every Move" when she realised it had been 40 years since Suzy had disappeared. Her research for the book took her deep into the psychology of stalking and the different types of stalkers, something Rosie, an Instagram influencer, explores in her posts.
In her role as Chair of the Society of Authors, the union for writers in the UK, Sam has been active in fighting to have copyright laws recognised so writers are remunerated for work scraped by AI. She is one of many authors worldwide whose identities were stolen to produce fake AI-generated books in her name.
She explains: “I actually got an email from a reader in Australia to say did you really write this? It doesn't look like one of your books. We went to investigate, and Amazon then unhooked the books from me, but obviously, a lot of damage had been done at that point. It was adding insult to injury because not only did they pretend to be me, but the AI that they built these stories on, the large language models that are used to train AI, have been trained on writers' work.
"So 70 million authors’ work, 80 million academic articles, and ten of my books were taken and have been scraped by AI… As well as working with the other creative industries to get that copyright law respected, moving forwards we need much stricter rules about AI and training AI models as well. So we (the Society of Authors) are working really really hard on this.”
You can buy "Your Every Move" by Sam Blake at BookStation.
Listen to Sam’s interview on Natter with Kate and Michelle now at Acast, Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to follow us on Instagram @natterwithkateandmichelle or Facebook.
Check out the whole podcast here:
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