At Home with Christopher Bollen

Christopher Bollen’s apartment in Paris is perched in a building overlooking Shakespeare & Co. It’s about as classic a spot as any for an expatriate writer to find himself in. A huge vase overflows with pink delphiniums on the table. The sun is shining and, just across the Seine, the church bells of Notre-Dame ring out for midday. In the street under his window, crowds of tourists amble around the entrance to the famous bookshop.

Christopher has been living back and forth between Paris and his home in New York for the last few months. His sixth novel, Havok, which came out in December 2024, is just about to be published in French by Calmann-Lévy. He’s also just finished his seventh novel, written before he moved to the French capital although set there, and due to be published next year. He’s currently deep in the process of editing and rewriting, and trying to finalise a title.   

“I went to visit a tarot card reader and she told me I would write nine novels, and something terrible would happen while writing the tenth and I would never finish it.”

Once, while still working primarily as a journalist, he was given an assignment to write about the Gilded Age houses of Newport, Rhode Island. “I know nothing about Newport, so I don’t know why they sent me,” Christopher begins. “But at the hotel I was convinced by the owner to visit Newport’s leading tarot card reader. And I don’t really believe in any of that, but he nagged and nagged and convinced me. I’d never had my cards read before, but at one point during the reading she said, ‘You will write nine novels, and something terrible will happen when you’re writing the tenth, and you’ll never finish it.’ I, at this point, hadn’t written any novels. And I’m still not sure if she meant I was going to die, or maybe I’ll start a completely new career, but in my head I’ve really begun to think that I’m only going to write nine novels.”  

His first, Lightning People, came out in 2011, but it was with his second, Orient, that he began to find his voice and style more concretely, establishing him as a writer of luxuriously set, psychological thrillers. With his tarot reader’s deadline, he has two more novels to say what he wants to say with the medium.  

Before embarking on a life in fiction, Christopher had been working in the fashion industry. He spent the first part of his career working as a journalist in New York, before becoming the editor-in-chief of Interview Magazine, a position he held for two years.   

“I loved Agatha Christie growing up and consciously use all the conventions of the thriller in my books. Crime cuts through class in a way few narratives can. Thrillers investigate life deeply.”

“As a teenager in Ohio, reading Interview Magazine was like being exposed to an advertisement for New York City itself, and I loved it,” Christopher explains over coffee, once Notre-Dame’s bells have stopped ringing. “I never intended to work in fashion magazines, though. I studied Literature at Columbia, but didn’t feel confident in writing fiction then and magazines felt like a way into that. I began when very young, and eventually I realised I had a great resume for a job I didn’t really want—I always wanted to be a writer. To me novels always meant escape, adventure, interiority, a meaningful life.”  

Some of Christopher’s literary influences might seem quite obvious — Agatha Christie, Patricia Highsmith, Henry James — but there’s a resolutely contemporary spirit to his fiction.  They are thrillers, they deal with murders and mystery, they are set in closed communities in exotic places, there are curious outsiders with enigmatic pasts. Importantly, they are unashamedly thrillers, with all the killings, chaos and twists that entails. They are not trying to reinvent the genre or subvert it, but celebrate it, and find some modern relevance within the genre. 

“I’m embarrassed to say that I once thought thrillers weren’t serious literary endeavours and I had to give myself a certain amount of permission to write them. Orient, for example, is a straight-up murder mystery, even if in my head I wrote it as a literary novel. I loved Agatha Christie growing up and consciously used all the conventions of the thriller in that book. Crime cuts through class in a way few narratives can. Thrillers investigate life deeply.”  

This is especially true for his latest novel, Havok, the inspiration for which came from a holiday in Egypt, and witnessing an elderly American woman berating a waiter. “The entire story arrived at once,” he recalls. “It felt like a gift.”  

Havok is about the relationship between Maggie, a meddling 81-year-old American, who has lost her husband and daughter, and is living out her retirement in luxury hotels, where she interferes in the relationships of other couples, seeking to free one party from what she considers a bad match. Her nemesis in Egypt is the eight-year-old child of one of the other guests, who starts to interfere with her interfering.   

The novel initially sets itself up as quite straightforward, especially as the body count gets larger, but, and without spoiling anything, Christopher presents you with one kind of mystery, before revealing, at the end, that we’ve spent the past 300 pages trying to solve the wrong puzzle. 

“You have to make sure you really stick the ending,” Christopher says. “If you’re writing literary fiction you can have an ambiguous ending, and it can be really existential and still satisfying, but with a book like this, you have to have that resolution.”  

“It is nerve-wracking because you have to solve it. And I do not solve it ahead of time. I paint myself into a corner on purpose and then try to figure out how all these pieces can come together to form an ending, but you know, that's also the fun of it, and that's how I keep the book feeling alive when I’m writing it.” 

The success of it comes from Maggie’s voice and perspective, which suffuses the story. You’re very intimately in her head and seeing the world through her eyes, but only towards the end do you begin to realise how much she’s been withholding from you, and how unreliable a narrator she is. She’s a very keen observer of the world, but there is also a lot that she won’t interpret, and in the gap you are left to work out things for yourself.  

“I loved writing that character,” Christopher explains. “In my previous novels, and also in the next one, I’ve always written a lot of characters who are more or less like me, their race or sexuality might change, but they have a similar understanding of the world that I share. But with Maggie, it was really freeing to write from her perspective. It allowed me to go completely wild.” 

“Some novels are gayer than others.”

He’s currently finalising edits of his next novel, set in Paris, featuring two Americans, a 23-year-old male prostitute, and a 47-year-old ex-male model. He felt it was the right time, finally, to bring in some of his history with the fashion industry to his work in fiction, although he would like to make clear that he doesn’t have any experience with male prostitution. “There's no worse tragedy than to be a former male model,” he continues, “That was a fun way to think about someone's psyche.” There’s a murder, of course, which brings the two characters together.  

“Some people say that every writer just writes the same novel over and over. I know that is not true, but I think every novelist does seem to go back to some inherent questions and I do see similar themes in my work.”   

“I love a murder. They really strap a motor to the story. You have to keep it moving once there’s been a murder. You can’t slow down.”

“In my books it often seems to be about someone running away from a dark secret. There’s always a stranger in a strange land, I’m always writing about other places, and people passing through these foreign cities. That's definitely a big theme of the work. And I think, well, some of my novels are gayer than others, but that’s definitely there too. Then there’s always a murder. I love a murder. They really strap a motor to the story. You have to keep it moving once there’s been a murder. You can’t slow down.”