Rosa Silverman grew up in Leeds and built a career as a news journalist but always wanted to write fiction. Her debut crime novel, The House on Otley Road, ties these three threads together.
The Otley Road corridor, running out through Headingley, may not seem obvious territory for a crime novel. But then, as Rosa Silverman points out, it’s the unexpected darkness beneath a familiar surface that provides the hook for her first published fiction work: “I think Leeds really lends itself to great storytelling. And it kept coming to me – the idea of setting something there. It’s very much part of my past, and my present.”
Rosa was three when her family moved to Leeds and she attended Roundhay School and then Allerton Grange before going on to read French at Oxford. Post-grad, she pursued a career in news journalism with a particular interest in stories about post- industrial Britain and its communities.
Now based in London, she’s a senior feature writer for The Telegraph reporting on social and political issues, but her parents remain in Leeds, and she maintains a strong attachment to the city. The House on Otley Road feels like a kind of homecoming. The novel follows Journalist Kate Marsden as she attempts to discover the truth of what happened to a group of students two decades earlier. The narrative splits between 1999 and 2019, alternating between the two timelines as the events and secrets of one era resurface in the other.
Rosa cites David Peace, the Yorkshire- raised writer whose Red Riding Quartet delved into an underbelly of malice and menace in the county’s recent past, among her influences: “I hadn’t read much contemporary fiction set in Yorkshire and then I came across David Peace and I was completely blown away by the way he rooted his stories in that setting and the darkness he brought out of it. He was definitely an inspiration.”
That inspiration can be felt in the period setting of the novel. The late 1990s are close enough to feel familiar but distant enough to represent a genuinely different world:
“It was the last era when young people could experience life without the internet and smartphones. In the 2019 sections, the characters are on their phones constantly. You don’t get any of that in 1999. I wanted to draw on that contrast.”
Rosa’s choice of protagonist lightly subverts crime fiction tropes while working in some autobiographical parallels. Kate Marsden isn’t a detective, she’s a journalist, and Rosa drew on her own experience as a news reporter. The similarities she describes between investigative journalism and fictional crime-solving feel intuitive: “The best reporters are the ones who keep chasing the story like a dog with a bone, exploring every avenue it leads them down.
That’s exactly what Kate does.” Rosa feels journalists have a particular freedom that makes them useful protagonists: “You have the ability to go anywhere and speak to anyone. Knocking on doors, on the off chance that someone’s there, and that they’ll tell you something. That’s how it works.”
Rosa’s description of her writing process makes it seem like an exploratory, improvisational endeavour, guided more by instinct than rigorous strategising: “I’m not very good at planning. I have a rough idea of where the story is going, and then I just start writing and it comes out.” Working in a genre which often requires meticulous placement of puzzle pieces, planted clues, and managed revelations, this may seem like a bold approach. But the embrace of spontaneity has its own benefits: “Even writing scenes of high drama and tension can be really exciting because I’m waiting to see what’s going to happen and what my characters will do.” Rosa wants the mystery to lead readers forward while leaving enough clues that, looking back, they can see how it was all set up: “If I’m reading a crime novel and I work out who the killer is too early on, that’s disappointing. I want that mystery to carry me along.”
The House on Otley Road by Rosa Silverman will be published by HarperCollins on 18th June. Follow Rosa on Instagram @rosasilverman.
