Chris Chibnall isn’t as well-known in America as he probably should be. The former Doctor Who showrunner is probably most famous for (finally!) casting a woman as the series’ iconic Time Lord, but he’s also responsible for the genuinely excellent crime drama Broadchurch, the first couple of seasons of Torchwood, and more. Now, he’s taking things in a new direction—writing fiction.
We had the chance to sit down with Chibnall to chat about writing his first novel, how his experiences in television informed his book, the communal nature of British pub culture, a few tidbits about the forthcoming sequel, and lots more.
When Broadchurch first came out, I had some offers from publishers, going, “Are you interested in writing a novel?” It’d been sitting in my head for a long time, and I thought, so when I came out of Doctor Who, I wrote myself a little bucket list of things that I would like to do, creative challenges for the next bit. And really, the top of the list was to try writing a novel.
It was really daunting. I had an idea. I did some sample chapters.I went out and did some work on spec first, and got about what’s ended up being, I think, maybe the first 10 chapters, the first 50 pages of the novel. I wrote those first to see whether I enjoyed doing it, see whether the idea had legs, and find whether I could do it. I showed those to my agent, who then showed them to a few publishers.
The other big reason was, I haven’t written in that form. And I’d really wanted to write in that form, because it’s, in so many ways, the purest form of writing. If you’re a screenwriter or a showrunner, your writing is as much a map as it is an object in itself. It’s not really an object in and of itself. It’s a sort of manual, a map, and a letter of request.
Paste: Other people have input on show stuff, and it’s not solely yours, at least in the way that I’ve heard it told.
Chibnall: No, not at all. That’s the joy of it. It’s a collaborative act, and it gets improved and changed, and that’s great. I just thought, oh, wouldn’t it be a great thing to attempt something where it’s just me, and the words and the reader, and it’s all on me, and to see whether I could do that—whether I enjoyed doing that.
Paste: Did you already have the idea for Death at the White Hart? Was that sort of the place you started from, or did you get to this story through deciding you wanted to write one?
Chibnall: It’s always tricky to answer a question like that, because in the midst of time, you’re never quite sure.
Paste: I suppose it’s not like a light goes off above your head that’s like, AN IDEA!
Chibnall: I was talking to somebody about this the other day. An idea, it’s like a shard, and then other shards magnetize to that shard. David Lynch talks about catching ideas, and it always does feel like that. I often think about the way he talked about processes; you catch an idea, and it’s never fully formed.
I definitely knew I wanted to write a novel. I thought I wanted to be in a genre that I was really familiar with, comfortable with, and really loved. Then the image, the sort of opening image of the novel, with the guy being found in the middle of a deserted road, tied to a chair, and with deer antlers on his head, I was like, “That was the image that came to me while I was driving home along a very deserted road in West Dorset.”
I do that drive quite a lot. It was that sort of thing of driving home very late at night on a deserted road thinking, “oh, there could be anything up ahead”. Then it was like, “Oh, if it was this thing, what would that mean?” All of these things happened gradually around that moment.
Paste: Which let me tell you, I can absolutely already see on television!
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Chibnall: It’s a nice hook, and it’s a nice image. Also, it’s a question, so that’s what’s great because that then gives you a straight way into the story, you go, “Well, oh, my goodness, who is it? Who would know that person? What do they do?”
Paste. As you were putting all the shards that would become this book together, what was kind of your North Star for what kind of story you wanted to tell?
Chibnall: I think there’s a little constellation of North Stars, honestly. I wanted it to be a real page-turner. I wanted it to be one of those books you pick up and hopefully go, “Oh, just another chapter. Just another chapter”, and it keeps people up a bit later than they should be. I wanted it to feel full of interesting characters, and characters whose lives reflected the way that life is one, but in small ways. In terms of how all of our lives have changed and developed in the last 10 or 15 years.
It feels like all of our lives have been utterly disrupted, and nobody’s really talking about it or has noticed it. Everybody’s talking about things that are happening at the top of companies. Nobody’s talking about the person in the town who is now being tracked in the number of packages that they have to deliver within a certain amount of time, and the stress that that can bring to life. I wanted it to be about that, and I wanted it to be a really satisfying whodunit.
I also wanted it to have a really great, compelling central character, the lead detective, Nicola, and I wanted her to feel very real. Those combinations, that combination of genre and authentically real in terms of setting, in terms of emotion, in terms of characters, so that you get the delight of both.
Paste: I will tell you that I think I finished it in about a day and a half, so goal achieved.
Chibnall: Come on! I’m thrilled. We talked a lot about that during the editing process. Obviously, I’ve never paced a novel before, and the pacing difference between that and, say, a series or an episode of TV was really interesting. I really love it that you say that, because those are my best reading experiences and memories, where you go, “I have to shut the world out and live in this world for a moment and just go away.”
It’s magic, and it’s transportation to another realm. That’s what I really wanted, that you could just kind of lose yourself in the book.
Paste: I think one of my favorite things about the book, to tag onto something you just said, is the setting. Because the setting to me really feels like another character in a lot of ways. There’s this communal experience of the pub that’s at the center of this story, and it’s really key to the town’s identity, the community’s life, the experiences of the people who live there. I would love to hear about why that was important to you, and kind of how you visualized Fleetcombe a little bit. I know you live out that way, right?
Chibnall: Yeah, out the window right here—-
Paste: Oh, it looks really lush.
Chibnall: Yeah, it’s really green today. [laughter] I live in a market town in Dorset, which is the model for the town of Bridie in the novel. We’ve been here over 20 years now, so I really know and love the area, and I think the way people’s lives are in this area reflects a lot of how people live their lives in Britain, and I think across the world nowadays. That felt like something I wanted to write about.
You’re right about the pub, the pub as a metaphor for the country, for Britain now, and the identity of the country, but also about the pub is the center of a community, the center of village life, and the fact that here, the pub is under threat in a huge way, reading something about it just this week, saying this year, it’s projected to be, a pub will close every single day in the U.K.. There are a lot of pubs in the UK, but something is changing really profoundly and quite quickly.
The pub, or I guess the village, or town bar, or whatever that is, as that meeting place for people is so key and important, and conversations, and dynamics, and relationships happen in pubs that don’t happen anywhere else. I don’t know, it used to be when I was younger, I would watch my dad or my relatives, and all that kind of stuff. If they wanted to have a proper conversation about something, they would go to the pub. It wouldn’t happen in the house. It would happen in the pub.
Definitely that’s true of men of a certain generation over here, but I also think it’s important to consider what is the role of the pub in modern-day society, and how important it is to these villages now, was definitely part of it. Also, a lot of the other resources within these communities are closing. Where is the shared space where people can meet and have a laugh, and have a cry, and confess, and have a joke, and just relax, and also have a repeated sense of community that you know who’s going to be there, that you have a sense of rhythm to your life.? Those spaces are super precious and are absolutely evaporating before our eyes, and being replaced by more harmful digital spaces.
It was really to talk about that, and it was also a lovely crucible, and so that’s the sort of thematic, emotional, and psycho geographical reasons for it. Then on a basic level, a pub landlord who has lots of regulars, and he’s just had a boisterous night the night before, and he hears everybody’s secrets. He knows a lot. So it’s a really great setting. “Okay, there’s going to be a lot of suspects who would want to kill the pub landlord.” It was sort of delicious on every level. I’m really glad you raised that.
Paste; Well, because one of the things I love the most whenever I come over to the U.K. is… we don’t really have, in America, like the concept of the local in the same way. Do you know what I mean? I have a particular bar that I go to with my friends on occasion, but it’s not down the street from my house, or where I just tap in every day after work. I love the culture of that. And I do think it’s really necessary. I think you’re right about that.
Chibnall: Even as I speak to you now, I’m like, “Later on, I’m meeting my friends for one drink down the local.” It’s a thing about the rhythm of life, isn’t it? It’s that point of congregation in a society, particularly in the U.K., where religion is less prevalent than it used to be. These meeting points are really key to preserving that sense of community.
Paste: I also like that it kind of lets you have an intersection of people—not just different from walks of life, but from different classes, places, and all kinds of people that you probably wouldn’t interact with in your life unless it was the pub. This is a lead-up to asking in all of these suspects, did you always know who the killer was going to turn out to be, or did you sort of waffle about it?
Chibnall: I had a sense of who my money was on, so to speak but I think the interesting thing, you can write these things, and I think it’s the same with any type of writing, is you have a plan for where you’re going, but also, your ears are open and your antennae are up or whatever. You’re always thinking, what are they now saying? What am I being told that I actually didn’t know?
Then a character can walk into a chapter and start talking, and you think, well, I don’t know who this person is or what they think they’re doing, but they seem to have an awful lot of information and opinions, and I didn’t know all of this stuff earlier. Oh, I might have to revise my opinion. It’s funny, because as a writer, particularly in the genre, but I think in most genres, you are a detective of your own story.
You are learning it as you go, even if you’ve planned it out really rigorously. Unless you, I guess some writers just stick to the plan, but it’s always the moment you’re bringing people in, and hopefully your characters do start talking to you.
Paste: You’d be surprised, the number of people who tell me about writing their books, who say that their characters talk to them and tell them what their story should be, despite whatever their original little Post-It note plans may have been.
Chibnall: That’s the exciting bit, isn’t it? That’s not a problem, that’s a delight! That’s when you know that the recipe is simmering and bubbling because it has a life of its own. I’ve done an adaptation of an Agatha Christie novel for Netflix, which is going to be on later this year—it’s very good. It’s got a beautiful cast. It’s very lavish. It’s funny, it’s a delight. And she–Agatha—I did lots of research into her as I was adapting her, and I was doing that while I was writing this novel. I was taking one apart and putting one together, and it turns out that she didn’t settle on the murderer in her process until she was about 70 to 80% through.
Then she would read it back and go, “Oh, interesting. I didn’t realize this.” Often who was the most unlikely or who was whatever, but you discover things, it’s the sort of incredible thing about writing, is that you are on the voyage of discovery too. All of those analogies about what it’s like to write, and how much do you plan and how much are you just flying by the seat of your pants—actually, it’s like you’re riding the animal, and sometimes it’s a very calm and docile horse, and sometimes it’s a bucking bronco. That’s hour to hour, that could change.
Sometimes that animal takes you down a route that you think, I really was not expecting to be here. I think it’s a real privilege when you get to listen to that material and go, “Oh, this character is now telling me something that I cannot ignore.”
Paste: That sounds so cool. And also why I am not a fiction writer, right there.
Chibnall: [laughter] Yeah, it sounds good in those moments, but most of the days are like, banging your fists on your head, going, “Why can I not find it? Where have all the words gone?”
Paste: Well, that’s a feeling I recognize, but just different kinds of words. [laughter] You said finding a really strong central character was important to you. Tell me a little about how you see Nicola and her story, and where you think she sort of fits in the overall pantheon of the kind of detectives tend to lead a story like this.
Chibnall: It’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought about her in terms of airquotes “the Pantheon”, I know.
Paste: I thought, “Is Pantheon a dramatic word? Probably. I’m going to use it anyway.”
Chibnall: Yeah, but it’s a good one! I think it’s really good. What I wanted to do was create a character who, A, was brilliant at her job and was a great detective, is a great detective, but who is also facing a crisis of her own within the novel that affects her ability to do the job. What she’s experiencing in her personal life has an impact on her confidence and ability to handle this case.
I am just forever interested, as so many people are, and the intersection between work and life. It becomes more extreme, of course, when you are doing a really crucial job, I can’t speak to, say, trying to track down a murderer, and prevent them from doing it again, but none of us can leave our lives at home when we go to work. We do our best. I wanted to create a character who was fully rounded in that sense.
In the novel, she’s just arrived back in Dorset after a couple of decades being away in Liverpool. I wanted to meet her at that point where she is having to confront the events and decisions of her own life, while also excavating the lives of all the people around her. I wanted to make sure she was brilliant, and compromised, and a real person with a husband and a son, and just to feel that she is a character who you will hopefully want to come back and read more about above and beyond this book.
Paste: I think what I like about her—I feel like I watch a lot of British procedurals, and I feel like the trend at the moment is these sorts of very dour, very tortured, very kind of grim leads. It’s so often the same detective in every show who has some sort of deep, dark, personal trauma that they’re trying to excavate. I really like that she is not that, that she is fighting to stay in the hopeful version of her life.
Chibnall: That’s a great way of describing it. I think she’s at a sort of crossroads in terms of how she proceeds in her life. I really wanted to give her a sense of humor, and also partner her up with a younger detective who also has a sense of humor, so that you get that sense of a workplace dynamic and that specific feeling when you meet a colleague and you go, “Oh, my God, okay, this person, I kind of get them and they kind of get me, and this job is not going to be so grim after all.”
She’s not tortured, but she’s completely, she’s hopefully a real person, trying to do her job well, and also in a world, in a workplace world, where all the resources are being taken away from her. Again, I wanted her to feel very 2025, where everybody is having to deal with all of the structures and all of the funding that a lot of us have lived with and relied on for our adult lives, are suddenly being ripped from under us. The only way that society is going to continue to function is through the efforts of human beings who are basically going to go above and beyond. She has a number of things to face, and one of which is a structure that isn’t really a working structure anymore.
Paste: There are definitely multiple breadcrumbs for more books in this universe. Are you already thinking about that?
Chibnall: I’m already writing! I’ve stopped writing Book Two to talk to you!
Paste: Gasp! Oh my goodness. Where is Nicola going from here? Are there more deer head deaths?
Chibnall: There are not more deer head deaths, and it’s not set in Fleetcombe, the second book. But it is still in West Dorset, so it’ll be her and Harry Westlife on their next case together.
Paste: I love their dynamic, by the way. They’re really very likable (okay, adorable) together.
Chibnall: I’m pleased! I really love them too. Actually that’s why I wanted to continue this as a series of books, becaues their dynamic has a long, long way to go, I think.
Paste: This may be more of an observation than an actual question, but I think what I love is that in a different kind of book, you just would’ve immediately been like, “Oh, well, they’re going to get together and have an affair,” or whatever. But her marriage and the issues Nicola is having there gets a lot of equal work and time, which I don’t know that I’ve seen very often in this space.
Chibnall: That’s really about trying to keep her authentic. She’s definitely got a little feeling of attraction towards Harry, and she’s definitely got some issues to resolve in her marriage.
Within the first book, she is wrestling primarily with what is going to happen to her in her life outside of work. Those things take time, thought, and are contradictory. I want to give all the characters lots of contradictions, because that’s how I experience the world, and people, and myself.
Paste: Speaking of three-dimensional characters, I love all the weirdos that live in this town.
Chibnall: You’re talking about my people.
Paste: I mean, I’m also a weirdo. It’s 2025, and I’m wearing an Oasis T-shirt while talking to you..
Chibnall: That’s fashionable now. Listen, they’re playing in about two hours in Manchester. You’re trendy.
Paste: Did you have a favorite member of this vast supporting cast? I can’t decide if the aggressive farmer is my favorite or the owner of the competing bar.
Chibnall: I love them all in different ways. I think loving every character, even when you know they are potentially capable of terrible things—that’s a real delight. Deakins the farmer is one of my favorites. He’s certain, and that’s what I love about him. He’s like: “This is what I do. I don’t know about the rest of you. You can orbit around me.”
I loved them all genuinely, but I really loved writing the character of Shannon, the nine-year-old girl. What I tried to do is make sure there was a range of ages and perspectives and experiences across the novel, so that every time a character came up for me when I was writing, my reaction was “Oh good, they’re back”. Hopefully, it’s the same when you’re reading it, and particularly because it’s telling the story from their perspectives a lot of the time.
What I found delicious again was just being able to have a catalog of unreliable narrators who also you’re going to feel sympathy for, but you’re also thinking, but one of these, if not more, has killed him. How is it working? Hopefully, that’s part of what keeps you turning the pages.
Paste: I know you’re adapting Death at the White Hart for TV too.
Chibnall: I am, yeah.
Paste: How is that? You’ve written for TV so much, but is it weird when it’s your stuff you’re meant to be adapting? Is that harder to do?
Chibnall: No, because I have a strong sense of disrespect for the author. [laughter]
Also, I am absolutely able to go, “That’s fine. That doesn’t matter, that bit, or this would be it.” Or now, I’m like, “Oh, there’s a better way to do that,” or, “This will work better on screen,” so I don’t have to feel like I’m asking anybody’s permission when I’m adapting it for the screen, because it is very much a different thing.
I think actually having also recently adapted the Agatha Christie, it was great to have gone through that process of adaptation before doing my own book. Learning how you can find the essence and keep the essence of something, even though sometimes you have to change it because of the nature of the form. So far it’s early days. We don’t even film until the middle of next year, so far it’s been really enjoyable. What a treat. I feel very lucky.
Paste: Do you have any dream casting for anybody?
Chibnall: I actually don’t, and I didn’t have any people in mind when I was writing the book, either. Even now, when I’m writing Book Two, I don’t have people in mind. I just see the characters. That’s something that’s slightly different to screenwriting. Sometimes I do have a… Well, sometimes they’re already cast, and sometimes you go, “Oh, yeah, it’s that person.”
But, no, I don’t, and I’m really looking forward to that process. We will have a brilliant casting director. I can’t wait for the first lists to come in, to get somebody else’s perspective on who these characters are or will be. But I’m not really locked into anyone at the moment.
Paste: I always end with the same question, which is one part me being nosy about adding things to my own to-read list and one part genuine curiosity—what are you reading right now? What kind of genres do you like to read when you get the time?
Chibnall: Oh, gosh, what do I like to read. Really, anything. I have just finished reading the Spamalot Diaries recently, Eric Idle’s diraies about making the Spamalot musical. It’s a really great, thin little volume, but just lovely to see the process that he went through. I’ve just got Sally Rooney’s latest. It’s just beautiful. That is a book that I want to shut out the rest of the world. The way she writes, but also her understanding of people who are living now is unparalleled. I’m reading that. What else have I been reading? I’m looking over to my book pile….
Paste: I love that you’re a multi-book reader. So am I. So many people are so adamant about only reading one book at a time. I’m reading six books at all times.
Chibnall: I think you’re in different places and different moods, when you’re deciding what you want to read. I love Mick Herron’s books. I’m really excited that he’s got a new Slow Horses book coming out. They’re really wittily written. Lovely, and they’re real proper page turners as well. David Nicholls. Do you know David Nicholls? British writer? You Are Here, his latest novel, is also wonderful.
Death at the White Hart is available now, wherever books are sold.
Lacy Baugher Milas writes about Books and TV at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB
