I was reading the paper one idle Saturday afternoon when I came across a piece which held me utterly spellbound from beginning to end.  It was a feature article by the journalist Nick Davies that caught my eye – and it charted such a compelling tale of one family and the bizarre deception that had unfolded within it that afterwards I couldn’t get it out of my head. So one day I sat down, and taking the barest bones of the real story, embarked on a psychological thriller about Annie Wray and what happens when her twelve-year-old son Dan goes missing. In his absence his heartbroken mother waits and hopes. And then one day a social worker rings with astonishing news and overnight everything changes. It was a tale of secrets and lies that I hoped might inspire in the reader the same fascination to get to the nub of the truth that I felt when I first read the original story. Looking back, I can only explain the desire to write Deceptions as a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder – a compulsion that wasn’t sated until the final proof copy went off the printers.

The novel is riddled with deceptions of all kinds, but principally it’s about self-deception, a psychological state which has always intrigued me. How is it possible that we can know something, yet keep that knowledge from ourselves? It struck me that the story would be more intriguing if I could tell it at one step removed. I wanted the reader to have to peer over the shoulder of a character who had a vested interest in establishing the truth, yet is continually kept from it at arm’s length. So Deceptions is told from the point of view of Annie’s lover, Julian Poulter, a man educated at an elite boarding school and whose lack of self-knowledge makes him a deeply unreliable narrator. I found stepping into his shoes very liberating. Indeed, though he holds views that are in many ways counter to my own, over time I grew genuinely fond of him.

Julian’s unreliability as a narrator proved an absorbing technical challenge. For it is Julian who, despite his blinkered perspective, is the reader’s filter for everything that unfolds. It becomes increasingly apparent that his own agenda is almost certainly corrupting his interpretation of events. We learn that he is emotionally repressed, that he has in many ways resented Dan, yet is so sexually and romantically obsessed with Annie that he is ultimately ready to try and will himself into a state of myopia about what is occurring.

The process of writing often strikes me as dangerously close to schizophrenia. An intense on-going conversation with yourself. Before I began writing novels I was a television director, which entailed working with a tightly-knit team – so the intense isolation of sitting alone all day, for weeks that became months and ultimately years came as a shock and was something I had to learn to adjust to. When faced with a particularly knotty and apparently insoluble plot problem I took to walking round the local park debating the issue out loud. And I soon learnt that it was best to hold a phone to my ear when I did so if I was to avoid unduly alarming passers-by.

There were many knotty and apparently insoluble plot problems and many drafts along the way. I even changed the narrative from the first person to the third and back again, not once but twice – a wearisome process that involved re-writing almost every sentence and nearly drove me to the brink of madness. Francesca Main and Suzanne Baboneau, my editors at Simon & Schuster, gave rigorous and perceptive notes that galvanized me to keep pushing forward. And when the story felt ready I began to road test each new draft by giving the manuscript to various friends and family to read and comment on. I found this process incredibly helpful, either because (if I was lucky) someone might put their finger on something I had been trying to duck, or because their fresh eye would spot surprising omissions or inconsistencies. Engaging with reader feedback in this way became an invaluable tool for combating the blindness that progressively overcame me during the three years it took to write the piece.

The original story had occurred in America but I relocated it to England where I thought I would have a better chance of making the details of my invented version believable. For I knew the novel would stand or fall on how convincingly it was framed, since at the heart of the story is a deception so astonishing – so frankly improbable – that it would only ever hold a reader’s interest if he or she believed the context in which it occurred. So I set out to try and make sure that the inventions did not feel like inventions. When I showed an early draft to an Assistant Chief Constable who specialized in missing children, he was audibly chuckling when he rang to offer his feedback. “Let me just say, that if those were my staff, I’d bloody well fire the lot of them…” he said. It was only as I began to add his detailed account of how he would in reality conduct an investigation into a missing child that I began to feel the fabric of the novel perceptibly tighten and come to life. I soon discovered, too, that the more this realism informed the circumstantial details, the easier it was for me to frame an imaginative response in the characters that felt authentic.

When there were areas that resisted me, that despite my best efforts continued to feel made up, I would have to admonish myself that if I as the writer didn’t believe it, there was absolutely no chance I would ever convince a reader. On very dark days I would cover my face with my hands and groan out loud. No one is ever going to believe such a far-fetched tale. On these days I had to speak sternly to myself. It wasn’t a question of whether it could happen. It was, after all, based on a true story. The question was how could it have happened. I had set the story in an area by the river close to my home and I went there often to walk the dog and to dream. I visited the local comprehensive posing as a prospective parent in order to better evoke the school Dan attends. A neighbour whose twelve-year-old wayward son was causing her much anxiety was generous with her accounts of their battles. I went to talk to an agency in King’s Cross that helped homeless children. And little by little, bit by bit, the wooliness of detail receded.

At half term my son Finn, by now aged seventeen, took the finished book on holiday to read for the first time, only to discover to his amazement that the book is littered with details lifted directly from his life. His pet gecko Chip was immortalized amongst its pages, along with an old friend from his primary school. The style of clothes he favours was the same. Even the words of Dan’s diary aged twelve looked oddly familiar he said, eyeing me suspiciously. But I wasn’t about to be drawn. “A writer never reveals her sources, Finn,” I answered airily, tapping the side of my nose. “All I can say is that some of it is fact and some of it is fiction. Rather like a patchwork quilt…”

Deceptions by Rebecca Frayn, is published by Simon and Schuster is out now priced £12.99

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