When Paula Hawkins wrote The Girl on the Train it felt like the last spin of the dice.

Hawkins, a freelance financial journalist until the 2008 recession, had subsequently written four fictional rom-coms under the pseudonym Amy Silver, the first a commissioned book about the misadventures of a shopaholic derailed by the credit squeeze.

When the last one, a darker story of the reunion of five university friends, tanked, Hawkins borrowed money from her father, an economics professor in Zimbabwe, to spend a year writing what pleased her – a psychological thriller with an alcoholic-turned-sleuth who believes her blacked-out memory holds the key to a woman's disappearance.

Finances got so "close to the wire", says Hawkins, she was forced to shop the partially-written manuscript to publishers and only got to pay her dad back when international rights were auctioned for a six-figure advance.

"I can't say that had this not worked that I would have given up on the idea of writing another novel for ever and ever," Hawkins says from New Zealand, on route to the Sydney Writers' Festival where she will discuss the ingredients of a page-turner and the role of difficult women in fiction.

"I was feeling terribly badly about the whole process and low about myself as a writer and I was kind of thinking I should get a proper job in journalism but I didn't especially want to. It did feel like if this book didn't take off then I've got to leave it and accept the fact that it's not going anywhere for me as a fiction writer."

Hawkins is surprised as anyone else The Girl on The Train has become a bestseller in the United States and Australia, has drawn favourable comparisons to Gillian Flynn's blockbuster, Gone Girl, and been embraced by Hollywood. In October, the film adaption, with a soundtrack by Kanye West and starring Emily Blunt as the drunken Rachel Watson, is due for cinema release.

"I was optimistic about it," Hawkins said. "I thought I had Rachel's voice and I felt the idea was a strong one and the concept was something that people would relate to. That voyeuristic impulse is a very universal thing so I thought it would click with readers, but, no, I didn't think it would take off like it did. It's been quite extraordinary."

The book's appeal lies in its intriguing premise and its manner of creeping suburban fright, and is the latest offering in the growing sub-genre of domestic noir. Divorcee Rachel rides the commuter train to London each morning glimpsing into the backs of houses on the street she used to live with her ex-husband Tom.

She becomes obsessed with a couple two doors up who seem to have the life she wants back. The bare bones of the idea occurred to her as she made the daily commute as a financial journalist with the London Times.

"We all sit on commuter trains or look at our neighbours and wonder what is really going on," says Hawkins. "It's quite titillating that these houses look normal from the outside and you have no idea what might be carrying on inside them."

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, about a wheelchair-bound man who witnesses murder from his top floor apartment, was "very much" in her head when writing The Girl in The Train.

"I love the atmosphere of Hitchcockian films, that sort of paranoia and self-doubt that his characters often have when they wonder if they are going mad or if they have seen what they really thought," she says. "So much depends on perceptions and fleeting moments."

The Girl on the Train shifts perspective between Rachel and Anna, the woman who supplants Rachel, and serial adulterer Megan, the neighbour Rachel idealises.

Hawkins wrote Rachel as a "proper drunk". "I wanted to write about an alcoholic because I think alcoholics are not the kind of sanitised version we often see on the screen or in books where they are loveable old rogues."

Having visited the Hollywood set for the forthcoming film adaption, Blunt may not be the overweight slovenly Rachel of Hawkins' imagination but her casting is inspired, says the author. "She's got incredible range, obviously she's a beautiful woman and is not quite as described in the book but the way she carries herself, the way she moves is absolutely perfect, she'll be excellent."

The Zimbabwe-born Hawkins passed on the screenplay. "I've never written a film, I don't know anything about writing a film andI decided it was best to hand it off to somebody else because I wanted to get back to writing books."

Hawkins takes issue with British feminist literary scholar Jacqueline Rose who argued in the London Review of Books in September that both Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train had turned the abuse of women "into a treat".

"If you look at my book, the men come off slightly worse than women," Hawkins responds. "I think Rachel is a sad and depressed person but she is a believable person and we see her, over the course of the book, fighting her demons and becoming stronger.

"I've seen the criticism of Gone Girl, that it is misogynistic because Amy Dunne behaves really badly, but I find that odd. Can we only write about women who behave well? That's almost a sexist argument, that we portray women who are perfect mothers and wives. As a novelist you are trying to write about characters who are believable, male or female."

Midway through writing the second book, Hawkins says she feels far more pressure this time than when she was an unknown writer without a publishing contract. The next won't be out until next year , Hawkins said, and will feature two sisters living in a fictitious town in England 's north, carrying conflicting recollections of childhood. And yes, she says, expect murder and mayhem.

For Paula Hawkins' festival appearances go to swf.org.au

She appears at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on May 24. wheelercentre.com

Linda Morris is on Facebook and Twitter @LindaMorrissmh