'Girl on the Train' author Paula Hawkins talks about 'The Blue Hour'

It's just shy of 10 years since Paula Hawkins took readers on a thrill ride with "The Girl on the Train," her debut novel about a troubled divorcee who becomes entangled in a missing persons case.

Now she returns with her equally complex fourth novel, "The Blue Hour," an atmospheric page-turner set on a remote Scottish island that had been home to a renowned artist named Vanessa Chapman. When a human bone is discovered in one of her works, the three main characters — Chapman's longtime companion Grace Winters, museum curator James Becker and Chapman's ex-husband Julian — find themselves entangled in a sordid web of secrets and lies. 

Hawkins will talk about "The Blue Hour" (the title refers to the time just before dawn and after dusk when the sun is below the horizon) at Madison Theatre at Molloy University in Rockville Centre on Nov. 1. But first, she spoke to Newsday by phone from her flat in London.

This is your first time coming to Long Island. Do you have any particular expectations?

I kind of don’t. These tours often involve going to places that I’ve never been. That’s one of the nice things about it; you go to places you might not ordinarily visit unless you know someone who lives there.

How appropriate that you’re coming to an island since the book is set on one. Is the setting based on a place you’re familiar with?

It’s not based on a real place, but I had been on a holiday in France when I first had this idea about setting something on a tidal island. I'd been walking along the coast in Brittany in northern France, and on one of these islands there was just a single house. I was intrigued by who would want to live in a house like that. Who would choose to live somewhere where you’re completely cut off twice a day when the tide comes in and it’s a different time every day? When I seriously started thinking about writing the book, I moved the location to Scotland, and the west coast has loads and loads of islands. ... I love that landscape and I could imagine it being the sort of landscape an artist could be drawn to.

It also gives the book a claustrophobic feel. I could see someone like Hitchcock turning your novel into a film, if he was still alive.

Yeah, that would have been great. (Laughs.)

How did you come up with the structure of the novel which is told in the present, in flashbacks and in diary entries?

I don’t seem to be able to tell a story in a straightforward way from start to finish. It’s very typical of me that I will do a flashback. I like to introduce a character, and then when the reader gets to know them a bit, start to show them how a person came to be like this or give them some sort of origin story. I knew Vanessa was going to be dead when the book opened, but I wanted the reader to be able to hear from her directly. Also, I’ve been reading quite a lot about artists and a lot of visual artists do keep journals where they write about their processes and what they’re working on as well as some diary and personal elements as well. That was a really interesting way of talking about Vanessa but also presented an opportunity for another set of conflicts.

I love the title. Is the blue hour a time of day you knew about previously?

It had a different working title earlier on, but I had been reading something and saw this phrase "the blue hour." And then I looked it up and I thought, oh, that would be perfect because there are key moments in the book that happen at dawn and dusk. And a lot of the book is about what we see and how we misperceive things. How we can mistake an enemy for a friend. ... And the title feels kind of artistic and fits in with some of the other themes I was talking about. So it was just one of those lucky accidents.

Are there plans to turn "The Blue Hour" into a film?

Nothing concrete as far as I know. My agent is talking to people and everyone’s hopeful, but I don’t have any news as yet.

Were you pleased with the film of "The Girl on the Train?"

I know people complained that they didn’t want to see it set in the U.S. they wanted to see it in London. That wasn’t a big deal for me. One of the reasons that book worked so well is because that voyeuristic impulse feels so universal. That aside, I think they [the filmmakers] stayed really true to the darkness at the heart of the story. The performances were fantastic. ... I don’t think it was what people imagined. It wasn’t the grubby train trip into London, but it was very cinematic, so I liked it very much.