Wide Awake and Writing: Louise Mumford
Mar
Bestselling thriller writer Louise Mumford can’t sleep – and it’s made her one of crime fiction’s most compelling voices. The author from Rhiwbina talks us through her career to date – and why she sets her stories in Wales
There is something fitting about the fact that Louise Mumford, one of Wales’s most acclaimed thriller writers, has never been able to sleep. Insomnia, she will tell you cheerfully, has been her constant companion since childhood. And rather than fighting it, she has turned those restless hours into the raw material for a string of page-turning, chart-topping novels.
“When I was young, I didn’t really see the point of sleep,” she says, laughing. “Why would people do that and miss out on all the marvellous things that could happen whilst they were dozing?” Years later, at house parties, she would be the one still awake at 4 a.m., tidying the kitchen and rifling through unfamiliar bookshelves while the rest of the world slept. Now, she watches her husband drift off within minutes of his head hitting the pillow and calls it a magic trick she will never learn.
That sleeplessness found its literary home in Louise’s debut thriller, Sleepless, which centres on Thea, an insomniac who hasn’t managed more than three hours a night for years. When an advert for a sleep trial appears on her phone, promising to transform her life, Thea signs up. It quickly becomes clear the trial has far more sinister ambitions than simply helping her rest. Its premise (big tech manipulating the most vulnerable parts of our biology) clearly struck a nerve with readers. Sleepless became a UK Amazon Kindle Top 50 bestseller and was selected as the Asda Karin Slaughter Killer Read for July 2021.
But before the bestseller lists, before the agent and the book deals, there was a summer afternoon in Suffolk in 2019 and a literary festival that stands out in Louise’s mind. The Primadonna Festival, founded by a group of remarkable women including Sandi Toksvig and Lisa Milton, Executive Publisher at HQ and Mills & Boon, was in its very first year.
“I came prepared: the first three chapters, a pitch, and a synopsis tucked under my arm. I got a brief one-to-one with Lisa Milton and she liked what she saw.
“Without the festival, my writing career would simply never have got off the ground,” Louise says. Around the same time, literary agent Kate Shaw at the Shaw Agency came calling, and Louise, aware of the importance of professional support, signed with her. “I was always certain that I wanted an agent, despite having got my book contract on my own. I wanted to make my writing into a career and have the advice and support an agent provides.”
What followed has been a run of consecutive successes: Kindle bestsellers The Safe House, The Hotel, and The Festival. Most recently, her Audible Original The Coffee Shop Detectives was read by comedy legend Alison Steadman. It shot to number one in the Audible Originals chart and reached number five in the entire Audible listening chart. She now writes full-time. “Which is a joy!” she adds.
Louise now lives in Rhiwbina Garden Village in Cardiff, having recently survived a renovation that, she admits, consumed far more time and energy than either she or her husband anticipated. Wales bleeds into her fiction in ways both atmospheric and deeply researched.
Her third thriller, The Hotel, unfolds in a crumbling cliff-top hotel near Cardigan Bay. It was inspired by a real Victorian-era proposal to build a ‘New Brighton’ on that stretch of the West Wales coast. Louise wove in the true story of the struggle to establish a Cardigan train station, a delay that proved ruinous for her fictional hotel owner, Reginald Morwood, who shoots himself in his top-floor study after the expected railway guests never materialise. Centuries later, his ghost lures four eighteen-year-olds to the ruin on a fateful night. It’s the kind of setting that thriller writers dream of – historically grounded, geographically specific, and genuinely eerie.
“I always like to use Welsh settings if I can,” says Louise, “because they are every bit as atmospheric as anywhere else in Britain, and it’s always good to shine a light on specifically Welsh places.” She is part of Crime Cymru, the Welsh crime writing collective, and helped bring Wales its first international in-person crime fiction festival, Gŵyl CRIME CYMRU Festival, to Aberystwyth in April 2023.
Louise had spent fifteen years as a teacher before making the leap to full-time writing, and that background has shaped her craft in ways she didn’t entirely expect.
“It gave me the ability to write anywhere and at any time. It’s a skill,” she notes wryly, “honed by years of squeezing marking into stolen minutes between lessons.” As for character inspiration, she says:
“I certainly met my fair share of characters, both in the students and my fellow colleagues!” But she insists she hasn’t drawn directly on real people, partly out of an interesting quirk. “I can’t use a character name attached to a person I know in real life, even if it’s the most perfect name for that particular character.”
Her process is more intuitive than many readers might imagine. She doesn’t plot heavily in advance. Instead, she writes, and the story, as she puts it, “clears like mist” ahead of her chapter by chapter. Once the first draft exists, out comes what she calls her Board of Power: a whiteboard covered with chapter summaries, coloured card, and gel pens. “The bonus of this,” she adds, “is I get to play with coloured card and gel pens for an afternoon!”
Character, she argues, is the engine that powers everything else. “You can have the twistiest story imaginable but if your characters are two-dimensional and unrealistic then the reader won’t really care.” The inciting incident, that opening jolt that propels a protagonist out of their comfort zone, is non-negotiable. But the twists, she insists, need to wait until the reader has genuinely invested in who they’re following.
Her fourth thriller, The Festival, is set in mid-Wales at a fictional event called Solstice, a hybrid of Green Man and Glastonbury festivals. The book taps into something she finds genuinely fascinating about mass gatherings.
“That sea of people can be moving and communal,” she explains, but tip the balance and it becomes threatening with remarkable speed. “Force lots of people into close quarters and add alcohol and drugs to the mix and you quickly get anti-social behaviour alongside the revelry.” The crowd offers cover. It offers anonymity. And it offers the possibility of transformation – people acting entirely out of character, with impulse overriding sense. “Who knows what kind of person is lurking in the crowd, waiting for their chance?” she asks.
That sense of reinvention and looking at things differently extends to Louise’s own career. The Coffee Shop Detectives has marked a significant pivot away from dark, propulsive thrillers to something lighter, warmer, and comedic. She admits she wasn’t sure she could pull it off. “I really didn’t know if I could write in a lighter, humorous tone.” Alison Steadman’s performance in the audio version clearly helped: the result is a number one hit that has introduced Louise to a whole new audience of listeners.
For writers hoping to follow in her footsteps, Louise’s advice is characteristically no-nonsense. First, finish the manuscript. “You can improve upon something, but you can’t do much with nothing.” Then, and this is the part she says that tests your patience, put it in a drawer for at least a month. When you return to it, you’ll read it as a reader rather than as the author, and that distance is revelatory.” The middle of a book is where most writers struggle, she warns:
“Openings crackle with energy, finales gather momentum, but the middle can go soft. Beware a flabby middle!” she laughs.
“And then finally, and perhaps most importantly,” she adds, “find someone who will tell you the truth. Not the friend who’ll say it’s wonderful regardless, but the reader who will deliver the hard news that you might not want to hear. Value those people,” she says.
It’s the kind of practical wisdom you’d expect from someone who once juggled a full teaching timetable, a renovation project, and a bestselling fiction career.
And all while the rest of the world was fast asleep.
The Coffee Shop Detectives, read by Alison Steadman, is available now as an Audible Original (no credit required).
Louise’s full backlist is available online at louisemumfordauthor.com or on social media at
@louisemumfordauthor
