Having recently attended a varied and entertaining writers’ festival, I picked up this book hoping for a similar experience, albeit one that I could take on the bus. Only slightly put off by the clichéd yet fitting title, I dived in to test out another cliché: that truth is stranger than fiction.

Personal history makes up the bulk of each essay, detailing how each author first became interested in writing, what ignited that passion for crime fiction. As an aspiring writer, I found comfort in knowing that these paragons of the written word weren’t born into their craft, published before they could walk. They were regular people who found a passion and pursued it relentlessly until they achieved success. If that’s not inspirational, I don’t know what is.

And yet, after the first half dozen or so essays, it all starts to feel a bit repetitive. A friend of mine once watched a dozen different versions of Alice in Wonderland in a row, and this to me felt like a similar experience. Even if you absolutely loved that story, how many times could you sit through the same basic plot before it bored you to sleep? As such, while the individual essays are each compelling reading, I had to push myself to keep going all the way to the final page.

Fortunately, the anecdotes add diversity that helps to make up for this. Bizarre and incredible, these are the kind of tales that if I encountered them in a work of fiction, I’d disregard them with a sarcastic, “Yeah, right.” From Leigh Redhead’s darkly humorous account of a strip club patron who nobody realised had been dead for eight hours, to Leah Giarratano’s chilling encounter with a psychopath, and even Marele Day’s fascination with the history of her furniture, each of these authors has undertaken real adventures in the making of their fictional ones. I guess truth beats fiction after all.

Each essay ends with a list of each author’s personal rules for writing. While there is little consensus on whether it’s better to plan or blindly surge forward, to invest in writing courses or learn by doing, there is one rule that every one of these authors holds dear. It is a rule that any aspiring writer will have heard countless times over, one which, like a good plot twist, seems obvious only after you hear it: The only way to be a writer is to write.

As a reader, If I Tell You… I’ll Have to Kill You gave me some great stories, and a long list of suggested novels to check out. As a writer, it left me somewhere between motivated and nagged to get off my bum and write (hence this review). While I can’t say reading this anthology was one of my absolute best reading experiences, I would recommend it to anyone with dreams of becoming a professional author.

Owen Atkinson