Holly Jackson: Obviously, I love murder.

Bestselling author Holly Jackson shares her secrets to crafting a modern crime novel – and how true crime has influenced her.

For the author of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, the process of writing a thriller is as meticulous as investigating a crime.

“I’m obsessed with it,” she says. “I don’t really have a ‘murder board’ because it’s not on the wall, it’s on the floor.”

Each scene in a Holly book corresponds to an index card, which is then neatly placed in columns for each act of the story. The author admits that this “takes up a little too much space.”

While this is great for plotting out a storyline, Holly says opening her office door “a little too fiercely” can literally derail her plot.

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder follows plucky heroine Pip Fitz-Amobi as she investigates a cold case murder. Pip soon finds a co-detective in Ravi Singh, whose brother was implicated in the crime.

Every clue, twist and turn in the story has been carefully discussed by Holly's fans on TikTok; the hashtag for A Good Girl's Guide to Murder – #agggtm – has over 58,000 posts.

And The story has now been turned into a BBC drama by lead writer Poppy Cogan, with Holly serving as executive producer.

The Guardian called the series a “very modern Nancy Drew,” and fans on TikTok have praised the series, stitching their reactions with clips from the new series.

The BBC spoke to Holly about the process of writing her bestselling novel. “Obviously I love murder, fictional murder,” she says.

Holly, 31 years old, Originally from Buckinghamshire, she published her first novel in 2019. It won a British Book Award the following year and has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Although her fiction falls into the young adult category, Holly doesn't shy away from heavier subjects, such as crime. Her debut novel, for example, follows the disappearance and apparent murder of schoolgirl.

Holly says crime content, like the podcast Serial, became a “really useful” tool while writing A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. The book is structured like a podcast, Holly says, adding, “We have transcripts of the dialogue throughout the book.”

In the sequel to Holly's first book, Good Girl, Bad Blood, Pip even creates her own podcast about crime stories.

And Holly says the search tool has quickly seeped into her real life. “I can’t really do anything without a news podcast,” she says. “If I’m walking the dog or doing the dishes, I need news in my ears.”

Over the past decade, crime series have gained international acclaim: Serial won a Peabody Award in 2015 and In The Dark — a long-running investigative journalism series — became the first podcast to win a George Polk Award in 2019. And, according to The New York Times, Serial has racked up more than 705 million downloads.

Even Holly is curious about why crime is such a popular source of entertainment.

“Especially in young women,” she wonders, “is it like an instinct within us that tries to protect us?”

Georgia Hardstark is the co-host of My Favorite Murder, an American podcast that examines historical and modern cases, with one episode covering The Dancing Plague of 1518 and the paper bag killer.

For Georgia, one of the reasons she's so interested in true crime is that it helps her feel less “paranoid” and validates her anxieties about life, she explains.

“It’s constantly at the forefront of my mind: ‘What’s around the next corner? Are my doors locked?’

For Holly, the line between fact and fiction is clearly drawn: unlike real crime cases, she always knows “the ending before she even writes the first sentence.”

“I knew from the start who the murderer was going to be, and the whole plot,” she says. “The hard part is not solving the mystery, but figuring out how Pip is going to solve it.”

In A Good Girl's Guide to Murder, for example, Pip uses her extended project qualification – an accreditation where a student independently researches a given topic – to interview suspects and keep track of clues in the case.

Although Holly uses crime stories as a starting point for her research, she notes that the content, often used as a source of entertainment, is “obviously about the trauma experienced by real people.”

Jessica Jarlvi, a Scandinavian crime writer and lecturer on the Crime and Thriller Writing course at Cambridge University, believes that podcasts about crime stories risk sensationalising the events.

“It puts me off,” she says, “whereas in fiction you don't have to worry about that.”

However, from Georgia's perspective, ignoring real crimes – often involving women – “is sweeping them under the carpet.”

Modern crime fiction readers are “becoming more and more demanding,” Jessica adds.

Holly agrees: “I don’t have passive readers, I have really active readers who are looking to solve the mystery.”

On TikTok, fans of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder are sharing videos of their predictions and suspect lists as they read the book.

In one video, a reader shows people how to annotate the book to keep track, coordinating the colors of sections into “clues” and “conflicts.”

“It forces me to improve my game a little bit more,” Holly says.

Wondering how to watch A Good Girl's Guide to Murder? You can stream the series on BBC iPlayer.