Harriet Tyce: 'No jury in the land would be able to crack The Traitors'

It's been quite the year already for Harriet Tyce. Fresh off an iconic stint on The Traitors where she put the cat among the pigeons in an explosive episode, Tyce has now returned to the day job – writing crime novels.

Her first, Blood Orange, was published in 2019 and immediately climbed charts and placed her firmly in the batch of exciting crime writers to watch out for. But it's her latest novel Witch Trial, which is out today (Thursday 26 February), that's got the most attention.

"It's always an exciting time [around publication]. I have to say this time it's like it's on steroids. It's been amplified so much," Tyce tells Radio Times a couple of days before her novel is published.

Witch Trial tells the story of two girls who are on trial for the murder of their best friend, Christian. As the trial begins, the story is uncovered through the eyes of the jury who can barely comprehend the story they're being told – and when it takes a supernatural turn, it makes us question everything.

"My editor at the time suggested I write a book about teenage serial killers. I wasn't so much interested in a serial killer, but a teenage defendant stuck in my head," Tyce explains about the origins of the novel.

"I had become very interested in the idea of jurors, in what each individual person brings to the jury room. And the third bit of the puzzle that was missing was the supernatural element, which came from going to see a production of The Crucible.

"I've never done anything with a supernatural element before and I've always been terrified of that kind of thing. It was frightening but it was an interesting frightening because I was looking at subject matters I knew nothing about – and that always brings a level of excitement as well, to embark on a completely new topic."

A dark puzzle set in Scotland, supernatural presence and an unlikely bunch of people coming together to determine if someone is guilty or not? Sounds an awful lot like Tyce's recent turn on The Traitors.

She laughs. "The mad and crazy thing is that I handed in a near-complete first draft on Halloween of 2024 and I put my application in for The Traitors in mid-December! There were six weeks clear water.

"I mean, I've obviously loved the show from the beginning and I'm fascinated by its tropes and the whole Gothic supernatural – of course at some point it was going to play into a book.

"While 'zeitgeist' is an awful word, I think there have been a lot of books and films which are part of that, so it's not actually that spooky a coincidence that I'd write a book that falls on some of the tropes. The weird bit is that I actually got onto the show."

The Traitors cast do act as a would-be jury as Tyce thoroughly explores in Witch Trial throughout the show with the Faithfuls desperately searching to find those pesky Traitors - though her fictional characters get a lot more evidence than they do on the TV show.

"The thing about the roundtable is that all you can go on is your best instincts - your best instincts when we have no actual evidence can be very, very tough... no jury in the land would be able to perform on what you actually have to go on in The Traitors because there's just nothing.

"It turned out I had a good gut instinct, but I don't think gut instinct is good enough when it comes to actually finding someone properly guilty of an offence..."

Tyce is keen to keep playing in the supernatural space, perhaps with a follow-up to Witch Trial. And her Traitors experience is already seeping into her authorial world, too.

"I was fascinated by how real it became to me; it was my life. We were all living in it. It’s incredibly clever, the way they set the scene and keep you in an isolated space where you don’t have to think about anything except playing the game.

"You know perfectly well it’s a game – of course it’s a game – but when you’re there day after day, it does feel a little bit life or death. I’m quite interested in the idea of what happens if you don’t snap out of it."

It’s been a very rich year for Tyce – and, if her readers are lucky, many of those experiences will find their way into a future thriller.

On my bookshelf with... Harriet Tyce

The book that made me want to be an author... was reading a series of books by Dorothy L Sayers, featuring Harriet Vane. Detective fiction and crime fiction are brilliant.

The book I wish I'd written... was David Nichols's One Day. The thing about it is that it's genius in its simplicity – something is just such a brilliant idea and you can't think how nobody had thought of it before, but they didn't and he did. That would've been great. And the adaptation was so painfully done; I cried buckets watching it.

The book I'd recommend to anyone... is Rivals by Jilly Cooper in order to get people to transcend any snobbery of genre. It's just such a cracking read, it's so much fun – and again, we can see from the brilliant adaptation.

The books I'm reading right now... are the diaries of Helen Garner (it's made me very nostalgic for a world before phones when we wrote letters!). I'm a judge for the Crime Writers' Association so I'm reading lots of collections of short stories by crime writers, and a book called Blank Canvas by Grace Murray. It's about a girl at college who has told a lie that her father is dead. It's very good but it's written by someone who's just a year older than my son, and that is bothering my deeply!

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