In April last year, the final episode of the BBC drama Killing Eve was broadcast. The series was adapted from my novels, initially and brilliantly by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and with Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh in the lead roles of Villanelle and Eve. All in all, it was a spectacular ride.
Phoebe passed the reins to Emerald Fennell, more recently the writer and director of Saltburn, and further teams succeeded Emerald for the third and fourth season.
These later seasons went in a very different direction from the novels. In the final seconds of the show, having finally shared a kiss with Eve after three-and-a-half years of elaborately perverse courtship, Villanelle is summarily killed. This doesn’t happen in the books. The third novel concludes with the couple living anonymously in St Petersburg, having lost everything except each other.
Villanelle, for all her winning ways, is a homicidal psychopath, and transgressive characters often come to a sticky end on the screen. There’s a long history in film and TV of the same treatment being meted out to one or both members of same-sex couples, a trope known to LGBTQ+ audiences as Bury Your Gays. Killing Eve’s fanbase was, and is, acutely attuned to such issues. I know this because many of them have contacted me. The Killing Eve universe is their escape, they tell me, and Villanelle their heroine. Not because she murders people, but because she’s powerful, she’s her own creation, and she goes through life doing exactly as she choses.
The TV series ending, in which Villanelle is shot by a sniper and falls dying into the Thames, came as a shock to emotionally invested fans, and they were not slow to voice their feelings. Social media lit up with their distress, not for days, but for weeks. All over the world, makeshift shrines to Villanelle appeared, with flowers, heartfelt messages, stills from the TV show, and copies of my books. A group of fans crowdfunded a billboard in central London, protesting at “the trope”. As Villanelle’s creator, this was weird, touching and extraordinary, and I felt I had to react.
In an article in this newspaper in April 2022, I promised that Villanelle would be back, on the page if not on TV screens. I was acting on impulse, but it felt right. It’s taken longer than expected, however, to deliver on my promise. I already had a novel to write, with a tight deadline, and we were moving house. I caught Covid, and for a time lost my memory, a rare and frightening symptom of the condition.
My novel #Panic was optioned by a Hollywood studio, and a pilot written. Our first grandchild was born, our dog died, time passed.
I knew that to steer a new Villanelle adventure through the conventional publishing channels would be a long process. It would be at least a year before it appeared in hardback (a format not historically favoured by Killing Eve fans), and another 18 months until paperback publication. Nevertheless I started to write the book, which I titled Killing Eve: Resurrection. Should I self-publish on Amazon, I wondered, where Killing Eve first appeared as a series of novellas? There would be a nice circularity about that.
Then, with fine serendipity, I ran into a writer friend who asked me what I knew about Substack, where he was thinking of serialising a spy story. I knew very little about Substack, but a couple of hours’ research was enough to tell me that the online publishing platform was the right home for my own book. Vitally, I could offer it for free, which I felt I owed readers in return for their loyalty.
Founded in 2017, San Francisco-based Substack has attracted an array of high-profile writers including Chuck Palahniuk, Patti Smith and Salman Rushdie. Like them, I would write my book in instalments, with readers commenting along the way. The process would be more organic than conventional publishing, and give me, as Rushdie put it “a slightly more complex connection” with readers. “I’m just diving in here, and que sera sera, you know. It will either turn out to be something wonderful and enjoyable, or it won’t,” he told the Guardian in 2021.
Killing Eve: Resurrection picks up in St Petersburg, where Eve and Villanelle are laying low. Money’s short, the flat’s small, and the path of true love is not running smoothly.
Eve is going quietly bonkers, concocting meals out of left-overs, and Villanelle is complaining bitterly about everything from the rancid smell in the stairwell to being forced to use supermarket own-brand conditioner. Then an innocent-seeming encounter leads to catastrophe.
I’ve posted three instalments so far, and I’m enjoying the process. Writing a novel like this is fun, a series of sprints rather than a marathon. And it feels so good to return to my mismatched heroines.
One of the lessons the wider Killing Eve project has taught me is how much the relationship between writer and reader (or viewer) has changed in the past decade. To create memorable characters today is to invite shared ownership, because the growth of fan-power – fan-fic, fan-art, social media opinion – ensures that those characters will live multiple lives in multiple dimensions.
It’s in that spirit that I’m bringing Villanelle back. The story will continue unrolling over 2024. “I read the first sentence and literally started to cry,” one subscriber wrote, and that’s good enough for me.
