In safe hands

TEACHER turned writer Anne Cassidy has had offers to film her Whitbread Children's Book Award shortlisted novel Looking For JJ in the past. Until those being asked to back the project heard what this book for teenagers is about - a child who kills another child.

"I had a Canadian film company interested, but it's such a controversial story," she says. "Over time they got to telling people about it and as soon as they said, it worried them enormously. I thought it was the kind of book that might find some independent producer brave enough to do it. I knew it would take some guts."

Which is where Marcus Romer, artistic director of York-based Pilot Theatre, enters the scene. He's adapted the book for the stage, with the production having its world premiere at York Theatre Royal this month.

Looking For JJ, published in 2004, tells of a child killer who, six years after the murder, is released from custody with a new identity and a wish to make a new life for herself. But can she or others ever forget and forgive the past?

Cassidy, a teacher in London for 19 years before turning to writing full-time, recognised that Pilot was a perfect fit for making the book into a play. "My skill is as a novel writer and the whole business of making the story three dimensional on stage is not something I feel confident to be part of," she says.

"I decided if I was around looking over their shoulder, it might inhibit them. After being contacted by Marcus and he had this huge passion for the story, I felt it was in safe hands.

Initially, she wondered how the book would transfer to the stage because "it takes people inside and outside, spans a number of years, and has a very violent heart to it - I could see how a movie would do it, but not how they could do it on stage."

The play, like the book, has the potential to arouse strong feelings as Cassidy wanted to get inside the mind of a child killer rather than look at the effect on the victim's family and friends.

"It was a story that stayed with me for a long time. Like everyone else, I was appalled by the murder of the Liverpool boy in the early 1990s and, at the time it happened, I read a really interesting book about the Mary Bell case," she recalls.

"I was really fascinated by the difference in these two cases although the main question was what circumstances could lead a ten-year-old child to do something so appalling. It stayed in my mind for years."

The book is a complete fiction. She started with the question of what might motivate a child killer, then invented a 17-year-old teenager with a dark secret in her past who's released from prison. Her own emotional reaction to the subject may have coloured her writing, she admits.

"The things that tend to come out of my books is that they are quite emotional. There's a sense of guilt, of having done something and wanting to be forgiven for it to ease the guilt.

"I did get lots of stick for the book. A lot of press picked up on the Jamie Bulger case. Some people felt the book was one-sided because it's told from the point of view of the killer. I don't go into the victim and their family.

"I did suffer questions about this and my argument was that it's a work of fiction not a discursive essay. I've written lots of books about the victims of crime, and this one I wanted to look at from the killer's point of view."

Writing the book was difficult, she found, because the subject was potentially sensational and the one thing she didn't want to do was sensationalise it.

"I was looking at the motivation of the little girl. You ask why Mary Bell did what she did and not even Mary Bell herself could answer. I had to present a set of reasons that may have contributed to the murder of one child by another child. All these cases are individual and complex."

Looking For JJ found the young audience that she was aiming at, as well as receiving several awards. She thinks that adults often underestimate teenagers, whom she believes are hungry for big issues like those she deals with.

"There are books that are accessible but quite demanding of them, and I like to think that's the kind I write. The lovely thing is that they tell you what they think. Quite often they'll say, 'I didn't like the end of your book' or 'it ended too quickly'. That's because my books tend to end where the stories can still go on because life doesn't end neatly like that."

Cassidy has strong views of the current climate that focuses on teenage crime and lumps all teenagers together. "We have this thing about feral children and shootings and stabbings. It's all put under the teenage thing. I would suggest every one of these crimes has complex reasons for why they did it," she says.

Her next book, Forget-me-not, promises to be equally controversial as it centres around the abduction of a child. She wrote it 18 months ago, long before current events put a missing youngster in the headlines.

Cassidy's own son Jack, now 22 and a communications and media student, has been an influence on her work. "I've been writing books for 17 years now and he's grown up during that time," she says. "He's in many of the books I write and his friends and the things he did. So a lot of my characters over the past ten years have had little bits of him in them.

"He did read Looking For JJ. When he was younger, he used to read more of my books. He's a big influence on me in many ways."

As a teenager herself, she didn't read many books because there weren't many aimed at her age group. She moved from Enid Blyton and, for three or four years, didn't read anything until she discovered James Bond. "I read all the Ian Flemings and then the big, sexy American books by writers like Harold Robbins," she says.

She's written some 20 novels for teenagers and still has plenty of ideas for new ones but wonders how much longer she can go on speaking to teenagers.

"I think there's going to be a point where I try an adult novel," she concedes. "After many years of writing without much recognition, in the last two or three years, I'm in demand and I may get to a point where I feel I have said all I can say about being a teenager."

Looking For JJ: York Theatre Royal, from September 28 to October 6. Tickets 01904-623568 or www.yorktheatre royal.co.uk