Criminal instinct

SUSAN HILL CAN’T THINK WHY ANYONE should be surprised that she has suddenly discovered a criminal bent, "although I do think I turned to crime because I like to surprise myself".

The 62-year-old author fixes me with her hazel eyes. We have tucked ourselves away in the corner of a bar of a smart London hotel, where there is no chance of anyone eavesdropping. Hill’s briskly delivered words, if misinterpreted, might just rattle the ice cubes in neighbouring gin-and-tonics.

"I know more gruesome ways to kill people than is good for me," she says, explaining how she recently visited websites she never wishes to go into again

- in the name of research, of course. The award-winning, Booker-shortlisted novelist, who has constantly played with genres in some 18 works of fiction, has now reinvented herself as a crime writer. The first of a planned trio - "it’s definitely a trio, not a trilogy" - of detective stories, The Various Haunts of Men, confirms Hill’s status as a mistress of literary disguise.

The three books will be filmed for ITV, which is obviously still searching for the next Inspector Morse. They may have found him in the enigmatic Detective Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler - tall, blond and handsome, with eyes "dark as sloes" - which makes a nice change from the melancholic middle-aged men with receding hairlines and expanding waistlines currently populating the genre.

Serrailler is the reason Hill is sitting here discussing the depths of human depravity. She is as deceptive a woman as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple - with whom she holds no truck. She has little time for country-house mysteries and body-in-the-library fictions. "They’re just mental puzzles," she says, dismissively. "It’s the psychology of crime that absorbs me."

Sitting there, in her floral print skirt and sensible sandals, with her neat bob, Hill looks every inch the matronly countrywoman that she is, in town for a few days to shop and lunch with friends ... and to discuss the themes that have long engaged her: love and death, good and evil - "the things we all write about, whether we’re Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment is, after all, a crime novel - or Ian Rankin, whose books I adore".

Hill says she spends a lot of time thinking about evil. "We’ve a young family friend who is a forensic psychiatrist. She’s worked at Broadmoor and on death row in the States, and I’ve talked to her a lot about whether murderers are mad or bad.

"So I was on the boil with a detective novel. Then Soham happened. I became very involved with the murders of Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells because a friend is very much part of that parish. I e-mailed him a lot about it, even before Ian Huntley was arrested. I was absolutely devastated by the fact that these children had simply vanished. For me, here was absolute evil and it really got to me.

"Huntley, according to my psychiatrist friend, is not mad. The whole affair just reeks of evil and, for me as a writer, there was so much to think about that I knew I had to write about evil now, although I was very careful not to write about anything resembling Soham. In my second book, however, a child does disappear and is never found, because that happens and it’s the worst thing imaginable."

Married to the Shakespearean scholar Stanley Wells since 1975, Hill’s richly ordered domestic life in Gloucestershire contrasts sharply with the lives of muddle and darkness that she writes about so convincingly. She has won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Award (for the elegiac The Bird of Night and I’m the King of the Castle, respectively) and her books have been on school study lists for years. Her classic ghost story, The Woman in Black, was adapted for the stage and has been running in the West End for 18 years. All of her books, whatever the genre, are recognisably set in Hill country, a darkly violent land often imbued with melancholy, betrayal and bitter disappointment.

In contrast, the woman herself is a bright, practical Yorkshirewoman. After creating a fine body of work early on in her career - she wrote her first novel, The Enclosure, at the age of 15 - she stopped writing fiction for almost nine years in order to have a family in her late 30s. She and Wells have two daughters, Jessica, who is 27, and Clemency, 18.

Although she still wrote non-fiction books, such as The Magic Apple Tree and her memoir Family, as well as numerous articles and reviews and contributing scripts to The Archers, she deliberately chose not to spend her days closeted with imaginary people in her study in their 18th-century farmhouse.

Instead, she threw herself into the bustle of village life and the activities of the Women’s Institute, baking bread, making jam and growing vegetables, then landscaping an enormous garden, with the 650,000 advance for her sequel to Rebecca, Mrs De Winter, in which she effortlessly mimics the style of Daphne du Maurier.

But now, she says, she has this great rush of post-menopausal energy. Her children are grown, her husband has retired - "although you would never know it since he’s still lecturing and writing books" - the trees are all planted and she has the luxury of time. "Although I’ve rather run out of genres with which to experiment. Can you think of one I haven’t done?" Sci-fi? "No, I’m not interested in other galaxies." Magical realism? "Definitely not - it’s so boring after the first few pages; I’ll have to stick to crime."

She’s not just writing. There’s her charity work - she has started importing surprisingly glitzy handbags to raise money for her local hospice - and the publishing company, Long Barn Books, she owns and runs. She has published works by authors such as Jeanette Winterson, Antony Jay and Joanna Trollope, and had a bestseller this year with the Duchess of Devonshire’s Counting My Chickens.

Her next publication will be Alphabet of Greed by posh food writer Tom Parker Bowles. She set up her own imprint because she wanted to emulate her heroine, Virginia Woolf, "a very practical, down-to-earth woman", who published books from her front room when she set up the Hogarth Press. "I like the idea of a woman running a small business and getting her hands dirty."

Rummaging in one of the aforementioned, diamant-studded handbags, she announces that she’s already finished the second Serrailler novel, The Pure in Heart, in which the shadowy sleuth is more centre-stage. She is already mulling over the plot of the third of her trio.

While we talk, she often mentions her literary hero, Graham Greene: "He divided his own work into fictions and entertainments, a useful distinction. It doesn’t mean that the entertainments aren’t serious - his always were - so I would put The Woman in Black, Mrs De Winter, my three children’s books and these crime novels into entertainments.

"But my short stories and my early novels, such as Strange Meeting, are my fictions. Of course, I see these books as superior to the ghost stories, say, or the Gothic pastiches. I would go to the scaffold for either Strange Meeting or my last book of short stories, The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read. I would defend that little book to the death. Each story came to me complete, a gift.

"That doesn’t mean that the crime novels are not serious. I don’t want people to think I don’t mean anything I write. I always want to address serious moral points, to raise serious issues in my work."

You have to ask: has Hill done a Dorothy L Sayers (she famously fell in love with her fictional sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey) with sexy Simon? "Oh, definitely," she exclaims. "He’s rather gorgeous, isn’t he?" So, over coffee, we play fantasy casting of the TV series. Unfortunately, being women of a certain age, we can’t see beyond Martin Shaw, who is, sadly, too old for the role.

"We need to find a new young, blond Adonis," says Hill, in her no-nonsense way - and the ice cubes rattle furiously.

The Various Haunts of Men, by Susan Hill, is published by Chatto & Windus, 12.99.