“I didn’t mean to be a crime thriller writer,” Rose Wilding, author of one (soon to be two) incredibly successful crime thriller novels, tells me as we sit tucked away in a cosy corner of her crowded cafe, “I just wanted to behead a man and apparently that’s a crime.

”The legality of a little bit of murder aside, it’s almost impossible to believe that Wilding wasn't destined for thrillers. The success of her 2023 debut Speak of the Devil, which follows seven women who find the severed head of a man they all had reason to want dead, marked her out as a rising star of crime writing. Now, her second book Cherry is about to hit the shelves, and if writing complex crime plots didn’t sound difficult enough, she’s doing it all while running Brew & Bind, Monkseaton’s cutest cafe and bookshop.

“We opened the bookshop in March,” Wilding says, giving a smile to her partner, currently whipping up some delicious smelling coffees. After struggling to write her first book in a cottage in the middle of nowhere, the chaos of running a cafe is just what her brain needs. “I take so much from little daily interactions with people. No wonder I was struggling to write before - there was nothing going in.”

Rose Wilding has plenty of experience with writing - and with cafes. She loved writing in school, but once she left she didn’t write for a very long time. That is until her Year 11 English teacher happened to pop into the Costa she was working at. “She asked if I was still writing and I said no, and she asked why not. I signed up for my Masters that night.”

Her Masters in Creative Writing is what led to Speak of the Devil. “There was a guy on my course who really pissed me off. He submitted a piece of work that basically said women enjoy rape, and no one else in the class apart from the teacher called him out on it. I was so angry about that and everyone else being complicit that I went home and was like, right, I’m going to behead a man and have all of these angry women standing around him,” she laughs, “He really liked it so I was raging.”

The idea might’ve never become a full novel if it wasn't for Jeanette Winterson, who Wilding describes as her “fairy godmother”. Winterson kept on inviting Rose back to her office hours even once her degree was over, encouraging her to keep writing on that initial snippet and eventually bringing her an interested agent too.

Now Wilding’s second book is about to be published, and it’s every bit as twisty and dark and feminist as her first. Set in 90s Newcastle, Cherry is a tale of obsession, desire and betrayal, following three women whose lives become intrinsically intertwined: one is searching for a missing 90s popstar, one seems to have the perfect suburban life, one is going to worm her way into that suburban life no matter the cost.

“My elevator pitch is mental lesbians and a talking corpse,” Wilding jokes. Although she may say she never intended to be a crime writer, Wilding has clearly got a knack for killing off fictional men. And for writing murderous women.

“Women are so complex and naughty and great. I think with Speak of the Devil particularly I didn’t want to write about this bad man and then these paragon women - I wanted to write complicated women where you can think, oh, that was a bad thing you did, maybe you shouldn’t kill a man, but we can still root for you. That’s the same in Cherry. Maybe some characters you can root for more than others, but all of them have a dark secret to uncover.”

Cherry is full of these twists and secrets, but one of the things I found most interesting about it was its exploration of the dark side of fame, especially in the context of 90s pop culture.

Wilding talks about her own experience with fame in the publishing industry and how it gave her “a lot of empathy for people who’ve had time in the limelight and become addicted to the fame.”

“It was crazy when Speak of the Devil came out. One minute everyone wants to talk to you and everything is going on, then all of the publishing world moves onto the next book and nobody will talk to you for months on end. Which is fine. It’s their job, but you just think was that real? Did that happen? I can’t imagine what it must be like for the actually famous.” She shakes her head, “I think it fucks you up so much. Everything about celebrities and the way they’re constantly trying to stay in the public eye is so interesting.”

The tabloid culture of the 90s definitely makes for an interesting setting when looking at both fame and feminism, although a quick look at today’s tabloids told Wilding that nothing much has changed. The chance to dive into the mind of a character affected by this is one of things that makes Cherry so compelling.

With three central characters in Cherry rather than Speak of the Devil’s seven, you’re able to get even more of that deep dive into these women’s psyche. For anyone else, it might’ve been easier to write a book with only three main characters, but Wilding prefers the satisfying chaos of slotting many puzzle pieces together, and for her, Cherry was a much more difficult novel to write. She puts a lot of that down to her ADHD and how her brain likes to write.

“When I started taking medication it improved my life in every way apart from my writing. I think it just sapped a bit of creativity. That chaotic brain process, even though it makes it difficult to sit down and write, it fuels the mad shit that happens in the book.”

She wrote another draft while off her ADHD medication, and ended up with a book her editor liked much more. “It was so chaotic and they were like this is loads better, this is what we wanted from you, then I just had to refine it and refine it from there. I think not having the medication fixed the book. It’s good to write without them and edit with them, so I’ve got the chaos in there but the focus to be able to edit it.” She gestures to the bustling coffeeshop around us, “I’m freewheeling at the moment, which is why I bought a cafe instead of writing book three.”

Wilding says she’s lucky to have a very supportive agent and publishing team, but it can still be quite daunting going into a very London-based, middle class industry being a queer, working class, neurodiverse author from the North. She embraces it. “At first in publishing I was quite intimidated. I don’t think I was ever embarrassed about having an accent but it’s that thing of ‘oh I’m different to you’. Now I just think, like, fuck it. Another author described me to someone as a geordie dyke and I was absolutely buzzing - I was like, right, that’s me now.”

In terms of her queerness, that’s something that’s in her writing without her even having to think about it. “The people around me are queer, so the characters are. It's not even mentioned, almost.”

“I’m just not interested in having any of these characters struggling within themselves with being queer. I feel like so many queer stories, hopefully less of them as time goes on, are these sad difficult coming out stories, and it’s like whatever. We’ve all had to come out and sometimes it’s hard and you have to come out every day to random people and it’s scary, but it’s also boring. These stories all have their place, but I don’t want to write about that.”

In both of Wilding’s books, there’s little queer love stories embedded in the main crime plot, moments of queer joy that only make the rest of the story that bit more gripping, haunting and suspenseful. But Wilding wants the representation to just feel completely natural. “I just think let’s have queer joy, but let’s also have queer nonchalance. Just let us murder people.”

Cherry will be published on November 5th.