PHOTO: Jane Pek, celebrated author of The Verifiers, photographed by Angela Yuan.
Exploring Modern Mystery Narratives And LGBTQ+ Representation
Jane Pek discusses her novels, The Verifiers and The Rivals, blending tech commentary, mystery tropes, and diverse representation to craft deeply human stories in socially relevant genre fiction.
Jane Pek’s stories invite us to interrogate the quiet complexities of modern life, where technology, relationships, and identity intertwine in unexpected ways. With meticulous insight and subtle wit, she crafts protagonists who move through worlds that feel strikingly familiar yet layered with intellectual intrigue. Her narratives straddle a delicate divide between poignancy and playfulness, offering a tender, unflinching look at how we navigate the choices and compromises that define our time.
Born and raised in Singapore, Pek blends an intimate understanding of diverse cultural expectations with the sharp, cosmopolitan pulse of New York City, where she now resides. Her outstanding academic journey spans poetry, fiction, and law, earning distinctions across all realms—a reflection of her ability to inhabit multiple perspectives and disciplines with equal measure. That versatility shines in her writing, where questions of human connection are explored against the vast backdrop of societal frameworks and technological realities.
At the heart of Pek’s work lies her commitment to representation—not tokenistic or overt, but deeply authentic and natural. Through characters like Claudia Lin, who’s a bibliophilic sleuth with a sharp intellect and a striking ability to defy conventions, Pek reminds us that diversity enriches storytelling in ways far beyond mere identity markers. Her novels and accomplishments, bolstered by accolades like the Witness Literary Award and a PEN nomination, signal a bold future of socially relevant, finely crafted fiction infused with heart.
Your debut, The Verifiers, follows Claudia Lin as she begins working at an online dating investigation agency. How did your legal background and tech awareness shape Claudia’s worldview?
In The Verifiers, Claudia is presented as a bit of a tech skeptic — she’s not on social media, and she hasn’t tried any of the dating platforms that her clients use to find romantic matches. This makes her a natural at questioning how people use tech in their personal lives and what the trade-offs might be, and that’s even before she uncovers a big tech conspiracy… As a lawyer, I have to think about issues of data use and data privacy — the circumstances under which organisations can collect different types of information and how those types of information may be legally used.
Philosophically, I’m also interested in how the tech we use affects the way we make decisions, especially with the advent of predictive algorithms that seek to anticipate our desires and streamline the options that we are exposed to (which is in turn a function of the dizzying array of options we as consumers so often have). All of that factors into The Verifiers, although for Claudia it’s a process of discovery as she is exposed to different viewpoints on the role that tech can play in our personal lives in the twenty-first century.
The Verifiers features a lesbian protagonist negotiating family expectations and personal identity. What inspired your choice to explore LGBTQ+ experiences in that context?
I knew from the start that I wanted to write a gay female protagonist. Growing up, I hardly read about such characters in fiction — and definitely not in the fiction of my favourite genres, fantasy/science-fiction and mystery (thankfully, that’s rapidly being remedied — there’s a lot of exciting diverse stories being written in those genres now). I wanted to provide that representation, and perspective — for its own sake. The Verifiers isn’t about Claudia being gay. That’s just part of who she is, which shapes the way she navigates the world, just as other aspects of her do (her being Asian-American, female, a bibliophile, a dedicated bike commuter).
The setting of New York cycling routes appears in The Verifiers. How did your own experiences cycling around the city inform those vivid descriptions?
I love cycling in New York — it’s one of my favourite things about living here. You can get pretty much anywhere you want to go, and it really lets you experience the city close-up, all of its different neighbourhoods, in all its glory and its chaos; I also must admit to feeling superior when I’m gliding past the cars gridlocked in traffic. In writing the scenes where Claudia is on bike, I drew on what it’s like for me when I ride — what it feels like physically (a headwind, for instance, can make things quite miserable), what you notice, how outraged you get by the egregious behaviour of pedestrians, cars, other cyclists, and basically everyone on the road except yourself…
The Rivals delves into corporate espionage and family dynamics. What research or personal insights into finance law enriched that narrative?
To be honest, not too much beyond my familiarity with corporate structures, hierarchies and decision-making from my time spent in the world of big companies and investment law!
Both novels balance classic detective tropes with modern tech commentary. How do you maintain that balance without overwhelming the mystery?
For me, the most compelling part of a mystery is the human aspect — the why. The how can be technically very satisfying, but the why — why people act as they do, the perpetrator and the victim and all the various suspects — is what gives a particular mystery emotional depth. And the questions around tech that I explore in The Verifiers and The Rivals similarly have to do with the human aspect — what the power that we give to our devices and our apps means for how we interact with each other and live our lives, for example, or the ability and the limit of our contemporary technologies to understand us and predict how we will behave. In that way, I actually think of those two aspects of the book as complementary.
Claudia Lin’s characterisation feels grounded yet witty, her voice carrying contemporary echoes of Jane Austen’s keen-eyed and sharp-tongued protagonists. How did Austen’s work help shape your writing and who else do you consider a literary influence?
The Verifiers is a comedy about (among other things) romance in our digital age, and I think any novel seeking to explore romantic relationships, and to be funny about it, does so in the shadow of Austen, who wrote about love and marriage within the social and economic constraints and expectations of her time with such wit and insight. Because The Verifiers is a take on the murder mystery, and The Rivals on the spy thriller, Agatha Christie was an influence on the first, and Graham Greene and John le Carré on the second. A few other authors who were influential for me as I was trying to develop my literary voice would be Virginia Woolf, Truman Capote, and more contemporarily Kazuo Ishiguro and Tana French. I read my first Tana French book while I was revising The Verifiers for the thousandth time, and it was a revelation — I realised this was the kind of murder mystery I wanted to write, where character was paramount and solving the crime mattered because of what it meant for the detective and the people around them.
Your short story “Portrait of Two Young Ladies…” was featured in Summer 2023. How has your short fiction practice informed your novel writing?
I love writing short stories and wish I had more creative space in my brain to do so; everything gets overwhelmed by whatever novel I’m currently working on. I have a tendency to overwrite, and I think writing short stories helps me develop the skill and the discipline of brevity and clarity. In writing programmes, they like to say (or at least they did in mine) that with a short story every line has to be perfect, whereas a novel is more forgiving. I don’t think that’s the case with my short stories at all, but that’s something to work towards!
Finally, what advice would you offer aspiring authors aiming to write socially relevant genre fiction with diverse representation?
I think it would be the advice that I would give any aspiring author, which is what I learned myself in the course of writing The Verifiers: write something that only you could write. That doesn’t necessarily have to mean your particular ethnicity, gender, age, etc. — it could be, just as an example, a long-time obsession with shortwave radio combined with an experience of visiting Antarctica and a complicated relationship with a twin brother. Start with what is unique to you and I believe that, from there, your interest in a particular genre or particular social issues will manifest in the work through structure, plot, character, themes and so on.
