Books | France’s most successful author makes detective stories that you can enjoy: “You can immerse yourself in my books like a movie, and I’m proud of that”

Paris

It is now that’s unusual. One and the same author has remained the number one book seller in France for twelve years straight.

Former economics teacher Guillaume Musso, 49, has written a novel a year since 2005 and a couple before that. Musso’s books have sold around 45 million copies including all formats, have been translated into 47 languages ​​and have been made into movies, TV series and comic novels.

Now Siltala publishes Musso’s first Finnish translation, a novel published in French in 2018 The girl and the night (Fin. Anna Nurminen). It has sold almost 1.5 million copies.

“They say there are three rules to writing a successful novel, but no one knows them,” Guillaume Musso says with a grin in the premises of his French publishing house Calmann Levy in Paris.

“For me, the most important thing is to escape from reality into fiction, and the need to tell stories is part of human nature. As I was writing, I thought about whether the story would entertain me as a reader first. If that happens, I think it will entertain others as well.”

Entertainment is not a swear word for Musso, on the contrary. His novels combine thrillers, detective stories, romance and interpersonal twists. Sometimes there is also a touch of the supernatural.

“Many have said that you can immerse yourself in my books like a movie or that they have started reading books again thanks to my novels. I’m really proud of it. I work a lot for the flow of my books. I’ve always been a bookworm myself, and I defend everything that supports reading printed text amidst the digital temptations of today.”

Literature did not come into Musso’s life unexpectedly. As a child, he used to hang out with his two brothers at his librarian mother’s workplace in the Antibes library on the French Riviera and read for fun. Of the brothers Valentine nowadays also writes detective stories, and Julien teach French.

Musso’s real passion for literature started when he was 12 years old during Christmas at his grandmother’s house during a power outage. Bored, he browsed the bookshelf and found by Emily Brontë Humming Ridge. It was going.

“As a teenager in the 1980s, I was suddenly in telepathic contact with a writer who lived a century earlier. There was something forbidden about it. I realized that with the help of books I could access the minds of others. The author always shares a part of his madness with the readers,” says Musso.

When Musso won a writing competition at school at the age of 15 Hitchcock’s From the back window inspired by his short story, he discovered the joy of writing and began to consider it as a career. After high school, however, he first moved to the New York of his dreams and sold ice cream. After finally returning to France, he followed in the footsteps of his finance director father and chose to study economics and taught economics after graduating.

“I have both my parents, both dreaming and intuition and reason and reality. Reading and writing have always been fun and a pure hobby for me. That’s probably why I’ve never had the dread of a blank piece of paper or a lack of inspiration,” says Musso.

“The most challenging thing in my work is after twenty novels to go again and again to gather material for fiction from the library of my own memories.”

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“Writing is work like anything else. Although I enjoy it, it’s also a lonely and painful job.”

Various years, Musso taught during the day and wrote at night until he suffered a burn out in 2007. After that, he chose to write. Now, on weekday mornings, she takes her 9- and 5-year-old children to school and goes to write in her study in the publishing house’s premises.

After lunch, he walks to the right bank of the Seine and writes until seven in the evening in the studio he converted into a study in the 8th arrondissement, whose window overlooks the rooftops of Paris.

Musso always writes in the same familiar rhythm as a craftsman.

“First, I do the so-called Plumbing, that is, I design the architecture of the story, the plumbing. The tension has to be precisely built to the millimeter, like a watch.”

Musso does background work for half a year and always collects the material himself. After that, he stops writing for about 7–9 months, after which he edits the text for about a couple of months.

He makes writing bestselling books sound relatively simple, and to some extent, it is.

Musso says he is quoting Haruki Murakami, that writing is easy if you give it the means. The familiar rule also applies to writing: to be good at something, you have to work 10,000 hours for it. And if you want to write, you have to devote time to it.

“I want my children to see me go to work as a writer. Writing is work like anything else. Although I enjoy it, it is also a lonely and painful endeavor. But every time I manage to squeeze the vague jumble in my head into a sensible form, I feel an incredible sense of satisfaction. Anaïs Nin has said well that I hate writing but I love being a writer,” says Musso.

For Musso a successful novel, like a love relationship, requires synchronicity, finding the right moment for the story or the partner. He says that he also studies himself by writing.

“The girl and the night I had set my novel in the United States first, like my previous novels, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t until I dared to move my hometown on the French Riviera to the scene and immerse myself in the memories of my youth that the story began to come to life. Since then, all my books have been set in France,” says Musso.

Now published in Finnish The girl and the night – novel, a writer living in America returns to his hometown on the French Riviera for a class reunion, and secrets kept for decades are slowly revealed. The book is full of plot twists, tension, human relationships and southern French landscapes, as well as references to literature, music and movies. A TV series based on it appeared last year in France.

There seems to be something particularly French in Musso’s novels.

“I write hybrid novels that are categorized differently in different countries. For example, the French know my style, and all they need to say is that the book is ‘un Musso’ and everyone understands what that means.”

“When The girl and the night appeared again in Britain and America, it was called the sophisticated and literary part of the French, probably also because people are not killed on every page. In France, my books would never be described in the same way,” Musso says and laughs.

Musso doesn’t care so much what is thought of his books in the high literary circles of Paris. He loves to write and read thrillers, because through them you can deal with social problems in an entertaining way – or not. It is also allowed to have fun with these books.

“Like a writer I appreciate To Patricia Highsmith it’s also important to me that my characters are psychologically ambiguous. As a writer, my goal is to understand and not judge them,” says Musso.

The year 2023 is the first for Musso since 2005, when no new book is published by him in France. The decision was his own. Musso wanted to spend more time with his family, help the firstborn with homework after school and be present as a father.

Now he shows off his phone the funny fictional picture books he made with his children and his theater teacher wife, which tell about his family. He makes them for fun, of course, and only for his loved ones to read.

Does a successful author plan to stop writing at some point?

Makes Musso smile. Follow the announcement: The new “un Musso” is already in the works. About half of it, or 200 pages, has been written, and it is scheduled to be published next year. He can’t say much more about his likely future hit book.

But Musso reveals that he has stories in store for the next ten years. At least.