How I’d write Covid: The Thriller

Like 98.3 per cent of humanity, I’ve spent the past 12 months reading dubiously precise statistics, staring listlessly into space for hours on end, and, most poignantly, wondering if I am an extra in a movie about a pandemic. This last intuition only worsened when I watched Contagion — the 2011 Kate Winslet/Gwyneth Paltrow pandemic movie — and it felt like I was simply watching the TV news (again), right down to the scenes of giant stadiums ominously filled with empty hospital beds.

The sensation that I am living through a real-life thriller is particularly acute for me, because that’s what I do: write thrillers. I used to write globe-spanning, Dan Brown-esque airport thrillers under the name Tom Knox; recently I have investigated my feminine side, and I now write grip-lit domestic noir thrillers — mainly about sensitive people trapped on drizzly islands — under the nom de plume S.K. Tremayne.

In short, I have a lot of experience writing thrillers, and with some success, so I know what makes a good one: what will sell, and what will not. And the primary criterion for a successful thriller is a gripping and believable plot.

When I say believable I mean this: logical within its own world. Your thriller can be set on Neptune, in a colony of iguanas who adore chocolate — that’s not a problem. But every event has to follow plausibly from what came before, and wild coincidences are absolutely forbidden. If you shove in a major coincidence, e.g. the king of the Neptune iguanas hurls his three-ton creme egg out of the window and just happens to squash the villainous insectoid chocolate-stealer from Mars, readers will do the same: they will throw your book out of the window.

It’s this primary rule about thriller–plotting— no coincidences! — which got me thinking about Covid-19 as a human story, and as a plausible thriller.