Emma Stonex, The Sunshine Man
What It Takes to Write a Killer with Depth and a Victim with Agency
Is a person ever a hundred percent evil? It’s a question that has long troubled humanity, and one that compelled me to write The Sunshine Man. What drives someone to commit a terrible crime? Where does that impulse come from? Is there such a thing as a bad seed, without hope of redemption, or did that seed start off right but somehow lose its way? This isn’t to extend sympathy to a killer – that belongs with the victim, all the time, every time – but it’s to complicate our assumptions about who that killer might be.My novel came off the back of this challenge: to interrogate the notion of a villain without ever losing sight of his victim, and to give that victim the power to change the story.
The idea for The Sunshine Man came to me suddenly. In spring 2023, I’d just ditched a whole other book, one I’d spent three years working on – four drafts, a million words, a plot I turned every which way but never quite came together – and I couldn’t imagine writing anything again. Then the first line of the story dropped into my mind one night when I was on the edge of sleep: ‘The week I shot a man clean through the head began like any other.’ I knew who was speaking and whom she was speaking about. Birdie is a woman hell-bent on revenge, and James Maguire, her sister’s killer, a clear-cut bad guy. Or is he?
From the start, I aligned myself with Birdie – I felt compassion for her and sympathised with her mission, radical though it is – but gradually things started to change. I read every book I could find about boys and men banged up in English prisons in the 1960s and ’70s – the grimness of it, the endless, inescapable cycle of punishment and reoffence – and the more I read the more problematic this idea of justice became. A common thread emerged: every criminal life I learned about was disadvantaged. Each was characterised by poverty – not in the material sense, though often that too – but in the absence of love, care and models to live by. Damaged boys become damaged men. To what extent is this society’s concern as much as the individual’s? A dreadful offence can never be excused. But can we seek to understand why it happened, and in doing so try to prevent it happening again?
I realised that The Sunshine Man would only have meaning if I put up James’s viewpoint as well, and gave this seeming bad apple a more intricate core. Pitting villain against victim in an alternating narration awarded the plot drive and tension, having these rivals play off against each other, from near-misses and high stakes in the present to the tangled intersections of their past. Birdie’s active, unhesitating state sits in contrast to James’s introspection, as layers are revealed, secrets surface, and we realise that these two very different characters are not quite so different after all. Who should we trust? First-person voices make us doubt what we hear – both James and Birdie choose to omit story elements; they contradict each other’s accounts. Which of them is telling the truth? Is there such a thing as unequivocal truth, or is it more often a matter of perspective? As the story races towards its inevitable conclusion, we sense our allegiances shifting, our assumptions being overturned, so that that first line – ‘The week I shot a man . . .’ – starts to feel less like the right outcome and more like the wrong. Does James deserve to be destroyed? Will an eye for an eye save Birdie, or will she wind up losing everything?
Right off the bat, Birdie hurtled through the narrative, hardly stopping for breath. I had never before created a character with such absolute, unwavering focus and grit. Birdie’s adult years have been suffocated by a desperate need for retribution; it’s all she’s thought about, all she’s desired; some days she feels it is all she is. Her revenge stimulus served me a clear and determined jumping-off point after the mess of my abandoned, previous manuscript, and it’s occurred to me since that in writing The Sunshine Man I was in some ways getting my own revenge on the one that didn’t work: I hunted this new novel down just as Birdie hunts down her prey. To prove, this time, it wasn’t getting away from me.
As to whether James should get away from Birdie – that will be up to readers to decide. But while physical evasion is one thing, to escape the ghosts of our past is another, and this, for me, is the true haunting. Memories. Misgivings. Regrets. A killer with depth – but why should we care for his depth? What has he done to earn it? Arguably, nothing; lock him up and throw away the key. But I think there is more to learn from opening that door and listening. We might understand, then, how individuals like this are made, how they impact their victims, and if, in understanding, there lies the possibility of change.
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