In my debut novel, Under the Hammer, the protagonist Jemma decides that the thing which will make her feel like she is doing good in the world – whilst also helping release some of her boiling rage at being unemployed and dumped by her horrible boyfriend for her best friend – is punishing landlords. While the idea may sound unhinged, Jemma has enough mental clarity to know she is incapable of sourcing landlords to victimise on her own. If she focuses only on ones connected to her, that will lead the police to her door. That is why she uses her favourite hate watch, a home renovation show where people buy horrible properties to renovate and then rent out, as the source of her victims.
The idea for the plot came to me fully formed during a conversation with a friend one day. ‘Woman kills landlords from the telly’ just popped into my head. The conversation we were having at that moment had nothing to do with property, books, nor murder so I cannot explain to you why then but so it was. It was an inconvenient time to have an idea for a novel as I was in the middle of working on another one so couldn’t make any progress on it. The idea stayed with me, but I didn’t write a single sentence of Under the Hammer for another three years.
That other book I was working on went out on submission with my agent and part of the feedback we were getting was that it was not a clean, one sentence, easy pitch. I knew then that Under the Hammer had to be what I wrote next because it was simple to explain and I also had a growing fear that it was so grounded in this moment in history. I worried if I waited the year or two it would take to write something else, that the housing market would shift in such a way that anger directed at it and those you have power within it, would no longer ring true with readers and I’d miss my chance to tell the story.
At least half of the books I read are crime related, I love the genre as a reader but I had never thought I would write a crime novel myself. What I wanted was a vehicle to show Jemma’s frustration at one of the greatest stresses of her life being paying exorbitant rent which goes to her landlord who doesn’t even fix the light in her bathroom that’s been dodgy for months. That this would lead to her then terrorising other landlords who are not her own felt justified to me for both the story and a comment on the state of the housing system. I also wanted to test the morality of readers. Everyone I know has a bad landlord story, they are a group of people that while not all are bad, everyone has enough terrible experiences that mean it’s not out of the question the reader may think the worst ones do deserve retribution but is this the way of going about it? I’m hoping that readers will enjoy thinking about how they themselves feel about Jemma’s actions and am intrigued as to whether they will root for her to get away with it, or hope she gets caught in the end.
Under the Hammer is published by VERVE Books. Samantha will be speaking about the novel at events across Scotland including Waterstones Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow on 19 March, Somerville Books, Aberdeen on 24 March and Blackwell’s Edinburgh on 26 March. She will also be talking about the novel for an online event with the UK Crime Book Club on 23 March.
