Book Review + Writing Prompt: The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins

I first heard about The Blue Hour in October 2024 in an interview with author Paula Hawkins on the So You Want to be a Writer podcast. I enjoyed the interview and remembered the book sounded interesting, so when I saw it over a year later on the end of the shelf at the library, I picked it up.

The premise–a deceased artist who had lived on a remote island, and the mystery of whose bone wound up in a work of her art–was interesting enough, plus I’d read and watched the movie adaptation of Hawkins’s breakout book The Girl on the Train. It had been awhile, so I only had a faint memory of my impression of that previous book, but Hawkins is described as a “nuanced storyteller” of “sophisticated suspense” so I figured The Blue Hour would be another entertaining bit of escapism. For the most part that was the case.

The book includes excerpts from the diary and letters of fictional artist Vanessa Chapman while the story alternates between the perspective of Grace, Vanessa’s friend and caretaker who inherited the house and studio on the island; and Becker, an expert on the artist and a curator at the gallery to which she bequeathed her artistic estate. Maybe it’s to be expected that any mystery/thriller is going to be heavy on plot and light on character, but there are glimpses of something deeper in this trio. 

When Becker is first introduced it’s established that he feels out of place among the “blue bloods” of the art world and there is tension beneath the surface with Grace too. Reading letters written “in Vanessa’s ‘art voice,’ the pretentious one she used to impress people she thought were her social superiors,” Grace wonders, “How could they take themselves so seriously? They were painting pictures for Christ’s sake, not curing cancer…” Yet Vanessa’s artist friend writes that Grace is pitiable, “doling out antibiotics… so joyless!” 

So while there is some depth to them, I did ultimately want more motivation from the characters. It’s established that Becker feels a personal connection to Vanessa’s art because of his dead mother, and he has plenty of complications in his personal life, but he doesn’t seem particularly driven as he moves through the story. Grace, too, seems a bit static, alone on the island when the story begins with Becker coming along to nose through Vanessa’s papers and ask questions about missing art.

Background photo from the author’s Book Club Kit

I won’t give away of the plot, but thinking of mystery/suspense as a lesson in how a story moves forward and keeps us turning pages, I noticed lines like this one at the end of each short chapter that piqued my interest and kept me reading: “On the surface or beneath it, there is always some residue, some mark left when a path divides, when a life becomes a different one.” 

And thoughtful passages like this one from the artist’s diary don’t hurt either:

Women aren’t supposed to look, are they? They’re supposed to be looked at. And if they see something violent or ugly or frightening, they’re supposed to cover their eyes and swoon, they’re supposed to flinch. They’re supposed to look away. They’re not supposed to move closer, to narrow their eyes and peer, to examine and observe and appraise. They’re not supposed to make of horror something of their own.

Photo by Luke Moss on Unsplash

Writing Prompt

The Book Club Kit on Paula Hawkins' website includes a short essay about the author’s creative process writing The Blue Hour. She explains different places from which she drew inspiration: 

• Tidal islands: “What thrilled me about the house on the island was not just that it was picturesque and lonely, but that it demanded of its occupant a certain kind of surrender to the elements. If you lived there, you would be at the mercy of the tide.”

• An exhibition on abstract expressionist Lee Krasner: “I was particularly struck by one part of her narrative when, disheartened by a series of pictures she’d been working on, she ripped them from her studio walls and tore them to shreds… From these fragments, Krasner would go onto make her collage paintings.”

  “Something else from that Krasner exhibition played in my head when I began thinking about my artist, and that was the (now infamous) quote from one of Krasner’s teachers, Hans Hofmann, who remarked on seeing one of her pieces that it was ‘so good you would not know it was painted by a woman.’”

• Walks on the island and Dylan Thomas: “A bone, picked clean. The phrase snagged in my mind, it caught my attention like glass catching the light, I had to stop and look at it a while, turn it around in my head, consider it from different angles. It led me to the Dylan Thomas poem which I’ve used as an epigraph for The Blue Hour, to ‘death without dominion;’ and from there to the idea of legacy, to the importance of what we leave behind.”

“The meaning of Vanessa’s work would be left to others to explain, I realised, but who might those others be? A friend? An outsider? And so the novel starts to take shape: it has a setting and character, and conflict… all that remains is to somehow stitch them together in a way that makes a whole of parts.” 

Where might you find inspiration for a setting, a character, and a conflict? Can you describe a setting that demands “a certain kind of surrender to the elements?” Can you create a character whose work is important yet undervalued or ignored by those in power? For good measure, can you include an item that snags in the mind?