The Quest and the Question

The secret architecture of Killing Eve, and how you can use it

In 2014, I self-published a novella called Codename Villanelle. It was, by any metric, an unlikely candidate for success. No publishing house behind it, no marketing or publicity budget, no blurb, no buzz. Yet within a few years it had been reborn as a BAFTA-winning television phenomenon watched by tens of millions and given birth to a publishing industry of its own. How? What seed was planted in those early pages?

The fact is that none of it was accidental. From the first page of Codename Villanelle, the Killing Eve novels are driven by two interlocking narrative engines. Engines so fundamental that they’re worth examining by anyone who wants to write compelling fiction.

The Quest

The first engine is Eve’s story. When we meet Eve Polastri she’s what many of us secretly fear we are: intelligent, restless and wasted. She’s a mid-level functionary shuffling paper in a world that has failed to notice how extraordinary she might be, and how many of us haven’t felt that? Eve’s trajectory is the classic quest arc, but given specific and thrilling shape. She’s hunting a criminal, but also her own unlived life. Villanelle - beautiful, fearless, catastrophically gifted - is everything Eve has suppressed in herself.

This is what separates the quest in Killing Eve from ordinary thriller plotting. Eve’s concerned with national security, but she’s also after something she can’t quite name: the feeling of being fully alive, of operating at the outer edge of her own capacity. Every step she takes away from the corridors of bureaucracy and toward the bloody, glamorous and terrifying world of Villanelle is a step toward her own becoming. The reader (and later the viewer), is propelled not just by suspense but by vicarious longing. We want her to catch Villanelle, but we also want her to become the person she’s capable of being.

For fiction writers, this is key. The most compelling quests are never just external. They’re internal too. The thing being hunted in the physical world mirrors the thing being sought within.

The Question

The second engine is Villanelle’s story (and at the time, a dozen years ago, this took quite a leap of faith on my part). Villanelle is a psychopath. The novels are clear-eyed about this: she experiences no guilt, no conventional empathy, no moral friction whatsoever. This is how she can do what she does with such efficiency and style. She’s not a tortured soul, or redeemable in any ordinary sense. She’s a predator, pure and simple.

But here’s the question, posed quietly at first, and then with gathering urgency. Can she feel? Can the architecture of a psychopathic mind accommodate love, or anything like it? Can Villanelle, who has always taken everything she wanted and felt nothing afterwards, want something that she cannot take, and be changed by the wanting?

The question is electrifying precisely because it has no comfortable answer. It doesn’t resolve into sentiment. It doesn’t domesticate Villanelle or defang her. It opens a door where there was supposed to be none, and once that door is open, you can’t stop reading. You need to know whether she’ll walk through it, and what will happen to her if she does. Can she have it all? The kills, the couture, and a human connection?

Why These Two Engines Work Together

Separately, each of these elements is strong. Together, they are irresistible. The quest gives the narrative its forward momentum; the question gives it its depth, the thing that haunts you when the book is closed.

Eve and Villanelle exist in tense, elegant opposition. As Eve becomes more dangerous, more alive, more herself, Villanelle becomes - against all biological probability - more human. The pair are moving toward each other not just physically but existentially, and that convergence - thrilling, doomed, darkly romantic - is the true subject of the Killing Eve novels.

To writers, I’d say this: plot alone won’t create obsession in your readers. Look for a quest fused to a question. Give your reader someone to follow, and something to wonder about. Make the wondering profound and unresolved. Then trust the collision.

Killing Eve: Medusa, the sixth novel in the series, is out now.

(photo: Pierre-Axel Cotteret)