Thirty-eight-year-old Franck Thilliez lives in a small town in the north of France. He was a computer engineer before he began writing, but it was his love of cinema that inspired the novel Syndrome E, a scientifically minded thriller about two detectives investigating the sudden onset of blindness after a viewing of an obscure film from the 1950s.

He wrote every weekday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. for five months to get his U.S. debut down on paper. But the research for the “complicated story” was long lasting and far ranging