A grisly find . . . and a faceless enemy . . .
Could there be a link between two women? One missing, one brutally murdered? Is there a connection to a fantasy website called Shipworld which features a supernatural hero with a sinister, faceless nemesis called
The Shroud Maker?
Will history repeat itself once again?
Looking
back I guess I’ve always been a writer, scribbling away in secret; poems, short
stories; even a couple of very bad and rapidly abandoned novels in my student
years. I always had a vague dream of
being published but it wasn’t until my youngest child went to nursery and I had
empty hours to fill that I realised that it was what I wanted to do for the
rest of my life.
Ever
since childhood I’ve been addicted to mysteries, starting with Enid Blyton’s mystery
stories then graduating to Agatha Christie and all the other greats of crime
fiction’s golden age. I always had my
nose in some tale of murder and mayhem so when the time came for me to begin
writing seriously, I suppose it was inevitable that I’d turn to crime.
Writing
became something I felt I had to do; a compulsion if you like. I needed to get words down on that page and I
needed to tell a story that would intrigue people and keep them guessing to the
end. I loved creating suspense and
laying false trails. In short, when I
began to write crime fiction I felt as if I was coming home.
The Lure of the Past
I
wanted to write about contemporary crime and examine present day preoccupations
and people. But I also had a passion for
history and a deep interest in archaeology (I’m often to be found in some muddy
trench or other) so I couldn’t decide whether to give my first book a purely
historical setting or go for a modern day police procedural.
However,
my dilemma was soon solved when I hit of the idea of combining a modern day
mystery with one from the past. This
worked so well that in each of my Wesley Peterson books since, a parallel
historical mystery runs alongside the present day investigation. I make life hard for myself by choosing a
different historical period in each book but I confess that research is one of
my favourite parts of writing. The only
problem is that once I become engrossed in a period, it takes a lot of
discipline to put those history books down and start writing.
Waiting for Inspiration
Every
book is different. Sometimes it’s the
historical story that comes to me first and sometimes the modern day
narrative. There’s usually something
that triggers the idea for a story, such as a chance remark, a newspaper story
or the discovery of an intriguing event in history.
In
my latest book The Shroud Maker my
trigger was the sight of a young woman walking down a wooden jetty and
clambering aboard a sleek white yacht moored on the River Dart in Devon. An unremarkable event you might think, apart
from the fact that she was wearing a long flowing skirt and carrying a violin
case. I began to wonder what she was
doing there. And then my mind wove a whole
story around her fictional counterpart and the result was a disturbing tale of
murder and obsession. Add to this
Devon’s medieval past, a festival celebrating a privateer from the middle ages
(with connections to Chaucer) and a sinister fantasy website and The Shroud Maker came into being.
That’s
it really. Inspiration can be
anywhere. It’s just a case of being
ready when it appears!
Kate Ellis
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