NOWHERE’S CHILD
Francesca Weisman
Penguin, £6.99
The debut novel of criminal law specialist solicitor Francesca Weisman opens with the brutal murder of a beautiful unidentified young woman on a deserted London street in 1980. Detective Smallbone, the jaded, recently separated inspector who investigates the killing, learns that the victim is an up-and-coming model – but otherwise his investigations prove fruitless.
Just as he thinks he has a possible lead, she too ends up dead. As the pressure builds, an unexpected development leaves Smallbone with a sense of enduring unease and guilt.
The narrative leaps forward to 1984 and the story of Kit, an autistic boy living with his secretive young mother. For Kit, the world is strange and unfriendly. He grows up not knowing his father and becomes obsessed with finding him.
The story then jumps back a few years to tell the third story – that of Mark and Miranda, two rootless children growing up during the late 1970s at Hollybush – a children’s home on the edge of a middle- class area of London.
After some to-ing and fro-ing across the years, the narrative ends up in the present day, when Kit finds his way to London. He attempts to make sense of his world and find answers to the questions that have remained unanswered for years. His quest leads him to the semi-retired, now non-smoking detective Smallbone and the 1980 case of a murdered model.
Set in three decades, the novel lacks subtlety and depth, but succeeds in capturing the mood of the times and bringing to life the world of outsiders in the city.
Ms Weisman, who still works full- time as an assistant solicitor at west London firm Shaw Graham Kersh, says: ‘At first they are quite disparate narratives. As the stories merge and become intertwined, you see how all three interlock. When their paths meet, the murder mystery is solved.’
On the characters, she says: ‘The two children Mark and Miranda were inspired by a newspaper article, so that part of the story has a basis in fact. Kit, the bullied boy with Asperger’s Syndrome who is searching for his father and his own identity, was inspired by my brother, who has the condition.
‘The detective story pulls all the strands of the story together – it comes out of my work as a criminal lawyer. I like that method of story telling – there is a sense of suspense and the reader gets involved by trying to work it out. It’s a fun way of writing and I hope it’s fun to read.’
With the peripheral characters, Ms Weisman presents two contrasting images of female solicitors. The first is a hardened defence lawyer, and the second, Smallbone’s daughter Julia, takes the corporate route and lands a job with a top US firm. Ms Weisman says she did not base either woman on herself. ‘I have played the role of the former when I have needed to, and there are elements of Julia’s life that I would like, but she does not represent my suppressed wishes.’
She explains that the title reflects the theme of people displaced from their pasts. ‘They start in the present day with the mystery of who they are, and work backwards trying to work out how they got there and where they came from.
‘During the book, Miranda is described as being a child who came from nowhere, but the title could apply to all of the children who are searching for their own identity. I have represented a lot of kids like them.’
The novel has a tone of disillusionment, but Ms Weisman says this does not reflect her feelings towards life or the criminal justice system. ‘Criminal defence lawyers are still quite idealistic – we have to be, working in legal aid,’ she says. But she admits to sharing some of Detective Smallbone’s scepticism. ‘As a criminal defence lawyer I am constantly operating a “double think” – I believe in what I am doing and in the rights of the individual, but I also recognise that some of the people I work with have done terrible things. Smallbone embodies these contradictions and lets them all out.’
She adds: ‘Although the book is quite dark, it is also optimistic. Secrets cannot be hidden forever, and the violence I hope is relatively non-judgmental – the book is not about rooting out evil, but about finding understanding.’
How did she go about writing it? ‘I planned it carefully; I knew how it would resolved, but not everything that was going to happen. I wrote it quite quickly – the initial story took six to seven months writing in the evenings and at weekends, then I went back over it, refining it – so overall it took about a year.’
Ms Wiseman says she started to write stories as a child, and followed it up with an English degree. ‘I have always written in my spare time and enjoyed writing stories that had a puzzle or mystery.’
But just how does she combine being a full-time solicitor, the mother of a two-and-a half year-old son and an author? ‘With great difficulty,’ she confesses. ‘Life is extremely chaotic but I manage to juggle everything.
‘I suppose it would help if I were organised, but I can’t boast that I’m either terribly organised or energetic. I love writing – it’s a pleasure, not a pain, so somehow I find the time to fit it in.’
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