 |
|
| Sophie Hannah | |
Sophie Hannah is the author of numerous contemporary thrillers, a series of mysteries featuring Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, and several self-help titles, one of which inspired her podcast by the same name, How to Hold a Grudge. No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done (Sourcebooks Landmark, January 20, 2026) is a contemporary whodunit about a family on the run from the law, determined to save Champ, their beloved dog. Hannah lives in Cambridge, England, with her husband, children, and a dog named Chunk who is, among other things, the inspiration for the Lamberts' fictional dog.
This book is wild--and very different from some of your other novels! How do you talk about it when folks ask what you're working on?
I have two different ways of describing it. Depending on how I feel, sometimes I'll start with the more mysterious one, and then go to the more detailed one. But my initial pitch is: it's about an ordinary family that does the unthinkable.
That generally makes people go, "Oh my god, I have to know what they do. What do they do?" And then I will often say, "Well, actually, I can tell you what they do, because what they do isn't really the reveal, or the solution--what they do is what sort of starts off the action. What they do is they go on the run to save the life of their dog."
Really, for me, the emotional and conceptual heart of the book is that most families just would not do this. I think that 99 out of 100 families, if not 100 out of 100 families, it just wouldn't occur to them, or even if it occurred to them, they'd just think it could never work. I love the idea of Sally Lambert, in particular, just being willing to do the unthinkable, and being willing to do anything to save the life of the dog.
It's also a book with a message: dogs are members of the family. So just like you'd do anything to save your husband or your wife or your child? I feel the same about the furry members of my family. I'm always shocked when I occasionally meet or hear about people who treat their dog as a kind of optional element of the household. Like if a family moves house, to somewhere it wouldn't be quite as convenient to have a dog, and they just give their dog away. I find that absolutely scandalous. I mean, are they even human?
Also, I just love fugitive stories. My favorite is The Fugitive with Harrison Ford. I loved the idea of writing a fugitive story. My working title, a sort of nickname for the book as I was writing it, was "The Furry Fugitive." My other nickname for it was "Gone Dog." (I found a way to work both of those into the book, too, because they were cute and fun.)
But the actual title landed somewhere different.
I also love the long title. I think it highlights the idea that while absolutely no one would do this, these people are, in fact, doing it.
One of the things I was thinking of when writing was that it couldn't be a fugitive story exactly like The Fugitive, because in that, Harrison Ford is a convicted murderer. He is being pursued by the authorities for good reason. When you're a family with a dog that may or may not have bitten somebody, if you go on the run, no one's actually going to come after you. The police don't care that much. They're not going to devote any time, manpower, or resources to tracking down the Lamberts. But at the same time, the Lamberts cannot go back, because the minute they go back, it all starts up again. The policeman turns up at the door, et cetera, et cetera. I just loved the idea of writing a fugitive story where no one is chasing the fugitive. And yet, the fugitive still cannot return home.
It's not quite a satire or a send-up of the fugitive genre, then, although in some ways it is quite comical.
Right, and with deep feelings involved. The fear that the dog will end up being killed by the powers that be, and the passionate desire to save this life of a family member. That is all deadly serious and deeply felt. And at the same time, there are some profoundly absurd elements to what's going on.
There's a reference within the book itself to this thing called the absurdity impediment, that often when absurdity is present in a situation, people fail to notice the seriousness of it. I'm trying to say to people, yes, this might look absurd, but there are deep feelings here. There is a battle between good and evil going on. And just because it's a bit ridiculous doesn't mean we shouldn't take it seriously.
That is actually present in a lot of my writing, and I got it from studying Iris Murdoch's fiction at university. Murdoch was a very serious novelist and moral philosopher and would use her novels to act out little morality plays. She was profoundly serious about her fiction writing. And yet, what was often happening at the plot level was utterly absurd.
One of the criticisms of Murdoch is that her plots are so unrealistic and nobody behaves like that. It's true that generally people don't behave the way they do in her novels--or indeed as the Lamberts do--but what is also true is that if we weren't trying to put on a respectable, normal surface appearance (and if people could read each other's minds), then Iris Murdoch is actually very realistic.
And Sally Lambert is a character who in many ways is not afraid to reveal her absurdities, right?
Yes. She doesn't even think about whether it's strange or not. She names her houses, because to her, a house, once it's yours, is a member of the family, and so it becomes not an "it" but a "he." No further justification needed. She's quite intuitive, and she does her own thing. She kind of lives in her own imaginative world, as well as in the real world.
I'm often asked why I write about such strange, dysfunctional people. The answer is because they're flipping everywhere. I can barely believe the ridiculousness and awfulness of many people. Not all people--loads of people, I think, are great. But more often than one might suspect, I meet people and I think, you are, in some way, utterly bonkers, or utterly monstrous.
If I tried to write about normal characters, I just wouldn't feel I was writing realistically, and when I write books like Lamberts, and people think, "This so quirky and weird," I'm like, "This is my real life. These are the kind of people I meet, this is the kind of person I am myself."
You've also written six novels now featuring Christie's famous detective, Hercule Poirot. Given some of the Christie-ish elements of Lamberts, did this feel very different to write?
It was quite different. I enjoyed writing this book a lot; it felt like the book I most wanted to write, and I was writing it mainly to have fun myself, doing it for myself, because I just loved the idea of the book and just wanted it to exist. And I wanted to write a book for people who love dogs as much as I do. It felt a bit like, if every writer could put only one book they'd ever written into a time capsule to represent them, this is the one I'd pick. --Kerry McHugh