Chris Whitaker: ‘I sometimes wonder if the road I went down was linked to this violent act that happened when I was a kid’

Some authors’ personal stories are even more dramatic than the ones they commit to paper. Chris Whitaker’s path to writing did not take the usual gentle route of a childhood dedicated to reading. Rather, writing emerged as a desperate bid to cope with PTSD, depression and addiction after a series of traumatic life experiences.

‘When I was 10, my parents divorced and new people came into my life,” says Whitaker says over video from his home in Hertfordshire. He’s a young-looking 42, casual but with very neat edges, and the kind of excellent hair usually only found on members of boy bands. He’s recalling the night when his mother’s then-boyfriend broke 10-year-old Whitaker’s arm.

“I had a whole night where I had a broken arm and I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone or get any help. It was a really long night. After that, there was a divergence in my life. I don’t like thinking about fate and all that but I sometimes think about the road that I went down and I wonder if it was linked to this violent act that happened when I was a kid.”

It’s this kind of before-and-after moment that Whitaker explores in his compulsive new novel, All the Colours of the Dark. The book tells the story of best friends Patch and Saint, a boy and girl growing up in the 1970s in a small American town called Monta Clare. When Patch is abducted, he is held in a dark basement with a young woman called Grace. With only each other for company, he falls in love with her, but when he escapes, there is no sign of Grace. The police believe Patch’s mind was playing tricks on him but he embarks on a 27-year quest to find the truth. Saint, meanwhile, embarks on a shadow journey to find justice.

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It’s a genre-bending epic that is part love story, part mystery and crime novel, part bildungsroman, as well as a philosophical inquiry into whether one moment in time can change a person’s whole life. Whitaker says he used his experience of having his arm broken as a child as the basis for Patch’s time in the basement.

“I know what it’s like to cry out and have no one help you. I think something changes when that happens. I think you become – I don’t know if it’s harder, but I certainly was quieter after that. I don’t think I put it together until I was writing this book because I went all the way back to childhood and discovered this sliding-doors moment and then I began to string everything together. I started to wonder about my brain and if it was rewired then.”

It definitely wasn’t for fun but it definitely became a problem. It was always a way of escaping or of feeling nothing

—  Whitaker on turning to drugs

It was a different traumatic experience that led Whitaker to writing. When he was 19, he was mugged but refused to hand over his phone to his attacker, who then stabbed Whitaker three times. “I think I had a problem with feeling like a victim because I was powerless as a 10-year-old. I flat-out refused [to hand over the phone]. It didn’t feel like a conscious choice. The knife went through one side and came out in a different place,” he laughs now in apparent disbelief. “I still have some terrible scars.”

After the attack, he struggled to cope. “There’s a kind of toxic male thing where you’re expected to get on with it and dust yourself down. I remember talking to my dad and my friends, and there was a slap on the back, get-on-with-it attitude. I just remember feeling really depressed and really down. I kept playing it over in my head and wondering why I had acted the way I did and wondering why I couldn’t function afterwards. I know now that it was PTSD but I didn’t know it then.”

He couldn’t eat or sleep and turned to drugs and alcohol. “It definitely wasn’t for fun but it definitely became a problem,” he says. “It was always a way of escaping or of feeling nothing. It was the worst time. Twenty-odd years later I still worry about feeling like that again. It keeps pace with everything good in my life. It’s just there in the background reminding me not to get complacent.”

Eventually feeling suicidal, he decided to put his thoughts down on paper, ostensibly to explain to his parents how he was feeling. He realised the process of writing down his feelings gave him some relief. A trip to the library led to the chance discovery of a self-help book that promoted writing techniques to help with trauma. “It talked about a technique where you write down what happened, but you change the people involved to fictional characters, and change the location to the last place you were happy and change the outcome to something you feel comfortable with.”

It was this process that would eventually lead him to writing books for a living.

By his 20s, Whitaker had turned his life around and was working as a stockbroker in London. But the culture of the city brought him back to drugs and alcohol. When he broke his trading limits and lost £1 million, he spent the next five years paying his bosses back. By his early thirties, he was finally out of debt and earning good money again. So why wasn’t he happy?

“I thought once I pay off the debt I’ll be okay but I wasn’t okay. I read a book called The Last Child by John Hart and he talked about how he had given up a really successful law career to become a writer and do the thing that made him happy. One day, I was called in and offered a promotion and I just quit there and then because John Hart had inspired me.”

Whitaker’s wife was pregnant at the time and he was the sole earner. Did she find John Hart equally inspirational? Whitaker says he can’t repeat what she said. “You won’t be able to print it. She wasn’t impressed but she was also relieved because when you live with someone and there’s something wrong with them and they finally open up, it’s a weight off your shoulders as well.”

Writing for trends, thinking about where it’s going to sit on a shelf - that is the enemy of creativity. That’s the quickest way to mess something up

—  Whitaker on moving away from crime fiction

They sold their house and car and moved to Spain, where the cost of living was cheaper, and Whitaker wrote his debut novel, Tall Oaks, which came out in 2016, followed by All the Wicked Girls in 2017. By the time his third book We Begin at the End was published in 2020, Whitaker’s expectations of success were modest. But the book became an instant New York Times bestseller and won numerous prestigious awards including a Theakston Crime Novel of the Year and a CWA Gold Dagger Award. “All of a sudden I felt there were lots of people waiting for this book,” he says of All the Colours of the Dark.

Despite an American book tour that will keep him busy until Christmas, he is already working on the next novel. “It’s called The Timekeeper and it’s a love story without the crime, a bit like The Time Traveller’s Wife meets The Fault in Our Stars ... if I can do it,” he says, laughing.

Is he worried about moving out of the crime genre that has been so successful for him? “It’s the last thing I ever think about – writing for trends, thinking about where it’s going to sit on a shelf – that is the enemy of creativity. That’s the quickest way to mess something up.”

It’s not something he’s likely to have to worry about any time soon. All The Colours Of The Dark is poised to become an instant bestseller – it is Jenna Bush Hager’s July book club choice for the Today Show in United States and it is already being adapted into a multi-series television show by a production team including Sue Neagle, former president of HBO.

Does he ever think about what might have happened had he not experienced those traumas in his young life, had he not, as a result, discovered writing?

“Sometimes I imagine an alternate me and the life I would have had, probably happier in some respects, but I might not have found writing, which is what I feel like I’m supposed to do. I might not be able to write the stories that I write because I might not be able to empathise with the characters, but it’s tough because sometimes I feel not that present.”

He still finds writing an essential escape. “If I go too long without sitting down and escaping, I feel it mentally. I feel really stressed and in trouble. If I hadn’t gone to the library and borrowed the self-help book and started writing, none of this would have happened. I don’t know what would have happened.”

All the Colours of the Dark is published by Orion