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22 Oct 2025
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22 Oct 2025
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It was while enjoying some spare time in his ‘train room’, a huge hideaway housing a railway network of miniature trains and surrounding pint-sized trees, grassy knolls, buildings, bridges and other tiny ephemera, that bestselling novelist Linwood Barclay came up with the idea for his first horror, Whistle.
“I’m a model train nut,” says the Toronto-based thriller writer with more than 20 critically acclaimed novels to his name, including No Time For Goodbye, a Richard & Judy Summer Read winner in 2008. His books have sold more than seven million copies globally in more than 39 countries.
“I have a huge layout in my basement and I thought, when toys are used in horror stories it is usually dolls or ventriloquists’ dummies or a rocking horse, or maybe a mechanical monkey.
“I looked at my own model railway, which has hills, mountains and trees and thought, ‘Ok, so how would you build this with body parts? Those supports could be bone, those grasses could be hair, those little flagstones could be fingernails’ … I thought, ‘how do I infuse these toy trains with evil?’ To me, they needed to go through this test track.
“The challenge was, could you make a toy train evil without being silly? I didn’t want it to be silly. I wanted it to be really creepy.”
There are some bone-chilling moments in Whistle, which tells the story of Annie Blunt, a children’s author and illustrator whose husband’s untimely death leads her to seek a fresh start with her young son Charlie in a small town in upstate New York.
When Charlie finds an old train set in a locked shed in the grounds of their new house, Annie finds something unsettling about the toy and hears strange sounds of a train at night, even though there isn’t an active line for miles.
The train obsession came from Barclay’s father Everett, a commercial illustrator in advertising who built his son a model railway when he was five.
When photography replaced illustration, his parents bought a caravan park in Ontario, which the young Barclay ended up running at 16 when his father died. But the train interest lived on.
Barclay, however, hankered to be a writer and pursued a career in journalism, working for the Toronto Star, firstly as a reporter, then news editor and later humour columnist. In 2006, he left to work exclusively on books.
Now 70 – he celebrated his landmark birthday by buying himself a pair of Alfred Hitchcock-themed socks – he still has most of his Dinky Toys from childhood and when he was first married and looking for a house, he didn’t worry about a fitted kitchen, he was too busy checking out the basement potential for his model railway.
“In our current house in downtown Toronto, I have a room that’s about 18 square feet and the entire room is filled with this one very elaborate model railway. There’s something about miniatures that has always appealed to me.
“As a writer, when you spend your entire day imagining a world, it’s nice to unwind by making one with your hands. It releases all that tension.”
As for the sideways move to horror, he says: “It’s a little diversion, a side trip. If it sinks like a stone and nobody likes it, I’ll just do something else.”
His pal, the legendary writer Stephen King, was the first person to read Whistle, written in a rare move away from his trademark twisty thrillers.
Barclay’s books often have a macabre touch. In this one, a body devoid of bones is discovered, a dad is blown up by his own gas barbecue and other sinister happenings should have readers on the edge of their seats.
He says he’s more drawn to horror films than books but isn’t a fan of gore and would never watch a Saw movie. The content in Whistle is probably as far as he would go, he agrees.
“You just need to give the readers enough to make your impression but I don’t need to describe the severing of every limb and every bit of sinew.”
Away from the crime and horror, Barclay, who dedicates each of his books to his wife, Neetha, to whom he has been married for 48 years, is a family man with two grown-up children and grandchildren who live nearby.
“We’re always binge-watching something, or going to the movies or theatre. We’ve just finished the first season of MobLand with Tom Hardy and Helen Mirren. It was fantastic.
“There’s so much content out there. We’ll give the first episode of a show six minutes, and if you haven’t grabbed us by then, we’re out. I feel that has an impact on the way I write too.
“Twenty years ago, you might read a book in the evening or on the weekend, and now Netflix will drop a new show, all eight episodes all at once, and you’ll binge them through the whole weekend – that’s when someone used to read a book. That’s now the competition.
His novels have always been more successful in the UK than the US and options for screen adaptations have too often come to nothing, although two of his novels have been made into series in France, while one movie was made in Canada.
But his writing remains prolific. He produces one book a year and believes his novels are so popular in the UK because he writes about ordinary people who wind up in extraordinary situations.
“They’re not ex-military. They’re not crime scene investigators, they are just regular people who get caught up in something. That adds to the tension. People wonder, if I was in that situation would I find some inner strength to deal with it?
He’s already working on his next novel, which will not be a horror. Sometimes, ideas will be sparked by a news story; other times he’ll just wake up with a thought in his head. And while he may have reached 70, Barclay has no intention of retiring.
“I think about it every once in a while but my wife will say, ‘What will you do if you retire?’
“Then I look at authors I’ve admired – James Lee Burke, who is in his 80s, Stephen King, who is 77, (John) Le Carre, 89 when he passed.
“If you worked in a bank, you couldn’t wait for retirement. But I think people who create things, whether it’s music or art or books, as long as you’ve got ideas, you want to get them out.”
Whistle by Linwood Barclay is published by HQ, priced £20. Available now
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