Interview by Kate Kellaway 

Joël Dicker: ‘I lost a bit of control of my life’

He has already sold 2m copies of his debut thriller. But that reality has yet to sink in, the 28-year-old Swiss author tells Kate Kellaway
  
  

 'Publishing sensation': Joël Dicker, photographed in London last month.
'Publishing sensation': Joël Dicker, photographed in London last month. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer Photograph: Karen Robinson/Observer

Joël Dicker is wondering whether he is a writer. "I'm not sure yet – I need to keep improving." It's an unexpected remark from the 28-year-old whose bestselling thriller, The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, is such a phenomenon that he now finds himself more a dazed passenger than a driver, watching as his book pulls out into the fast lane and he becomes the man behind a publishing sensation.

We meet at the National Gallery in London and, over coffee, I tell him I found his book compulsively easy to read – at 624 pages, a page-turner. It has sold 2m copies in France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands, already picked up literary prizes in France, and will be published in 45 countries and 37 languages. It's pleasingly plotted, seems to have been written at speed, and concerns what it is to be a young writer in a cynical publishing climate. There's also a mystery involving, with a wink at Nabokov, the murder of a 15-year-old nymphette, Nola, who, it emerges, had an illicit love affair with the writer's older mentor: Harry Quebert.

Dicker grew up in Geneva in a close Jewish family – his mother is a bookseller, his father a teacher of literature. He has always loved storytelling and remembers his first attempt, a Tintin adventure involving a Pritt stick (Tintin met a sticky end).

After leaving school, Dicker studied law: "I didn't feel the holy fire. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. An office job in the Geneva parliament gave me time to write." But four novels were rejected before he struck lucky. And he knows why: they were drafts: "I finally understood my biggest mistake was not allowing myself to rewrite and re-read." For although his thriller seems written in a flash, the opposite is true. "I changed everything three or four times." At the beginning, there was no murder – it was about the relationship between two writers. It's a story set in the US (Dicker spent his childhood summers in a holiday house in Maine).

The book's success began at the 2012 Frankfurt book fair. It has been an extraordinary experience for Dicker, watching it fly: "I lost a bit of control of my life but it's good it happened while I'm young. I have a girlfriend but don't have kids."

It has been an exercise of trust, watching the book disappear into languages he does not speak (the book's original language is French). Unsurprisingly, there is competition for film rights. I ask Dicker to play at being casting director, and he picks Dianna Agron as Nola, Ryan Gosling as the young writer and Clint Eastwood as influential elder. Mentors matter to him. The novel Dicker would most like to have written is Albert Cohen's Belle du Seigneur. Then he adds, wisely: "Every writer I read and like influences me."

 

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