Is ‘The Whisper Man’ Based on a True Story?

Netflix is bringing Alex North’s best-selling novel, The Whisper Man, to life with a film starring Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, and Michelle Monaghan on Friday, August 28. It’s a chilling story, one that follows a widowed writer (Scott) whose eight-year-old son is abducted (Acston Luca Porto), resulting in him turning to his estranged father (De Niro), who’s a retired former police detective.

There’s a connection to a decades-old case of a convicted serial killer, known as the Whisper Man (hence the title), leading to the question: Did he have an accomplice? But where did the inspiration for this come from? Is it based on a true story?

Author Alex North answers just this in a section at the end of his novel. While it’s not based on a real case — though sadly, it could very well be — North was inspired by some details of his own life and put those in the book.

David Lee / Netflix

He wrote that he attended a music festival with his friends when he was in his 30s and, after having breakfast in the hotel (which wasn’t included in the rate for the room), he was called down to pay for it. But the woman in reception told him that he “just checked out” and handled the cost of the breakfast when he gave his name. “I asked her what the man had looked like. She couldn’t tell me. He had been in a hurry, she said, but there was nothing else about him that had stuck in her mind at all,” North wrote. “He had been so average and unremarkable that he could have been anybody — or nobody.” While he was “unnerved,” he was “also excited,” explaining, “The writer part of my brain was thinking, ‘Wow. This is a story.’” (It ended up being a case of the man giving the wrong room number and no name and neither he nor the woman at reception looking closely enough at his details.)

He had the same thought “several years” later. “When I first started working on The Whisper Man, all I really knew was that I wanted to write about fathers and sons. I had in mind a grieving, widowed man struggling to care for his little boy, and that the book should be a thriller, but I didn’t know much about what my main characters would be like,” North wrote.

Then, after moving houses, he heard his son playing in another room and seemingly talking to another person. When he asked, his son told him, “Oh, I’m just playing with the boy in the floor.” He had similar feelings to the ones he had in the hotel: “A chill went through me. But there was excitement, too, because this was a story. Right then, I decided that the little boy in my book would have imaginary friends, and that some of them would become increasingly sinister over the course of the story.”

North also wrote that after his mother-in-law died, his son told him that a woman came into his room and hugged him at night. That stopped after he followed the suggestion that he ask her to. “I am a rational person, and deep down I believe that was simply my son doing what all of us do to some degree: creating a narrative to make sense of his grief and to comfort himself,” wrote North. “And yet a part of me was still asking that question: ‘What if?” Those experiences led to pieces of what North put into The Whisper Man.

The Whisper Man, Movie Premiere, Friday, August 28, Netflix