Why do you write Gothic romance?
I didn’t set out to. I’d intended to write a contemporary romantic suspense set in the most romantic place I’d ever visited – Cordes-sur-ciel, a hilltop town in southern France. It even has a town square called Place de la Bride!
But then my hero turned out to be the aloof, brooding type, reminiscent of Mr Rochester …and I discovered Cordes’ eight hundred years of history and all the legends, myths and symbolism surrounding the heretic Cathars who found refuge there. The plot evolved from one of the persistent stories about the Cathars.
What kind of stories do you like to read?
I like page turners with developing relationships. Ones that evolve though a series of books are a particular delight. No surprises, I’m always drawn to stories where the plot is driven by forgotten family secrets and things that happened long ago.
There’s a small niche that I style ‘genealogical fiction’ that I’ve devoured too. Whether the books are crime thrillers or family history procedurals, the genre raises themes of identity and heredity. As an adoptee who didn’t meet a blood relative till the age of twenty six, I can’t resist them. One day I’ll write one.
What books would you want with you on a desert island?
If I could only have three, they would be:
- Monsignor Quixote by Grahame Greene. It’s so gentle and full of wisdom, a real late-lifestage book that couldn’t have been written by a younger man. Quixote and Panchez’s picnics by the Spanish roadside with bread, wine and manchega cheese are delightful and thought-provoking.
- Crocodile on a Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters. I adore her feisty, self-reliant heroine, Amelia Peabody, and her thoroughly modern marriage – in the late nineteenth century – to Egyptologist Radcliffe Emerson.
- The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken. Yes, a children’s book. It’s brilliantly Gothic with its wolves in the wild, wintry landscape, and the cruel governess who runs the orphan school. Its story arc is deeply comforting. As Oscar Wilde put it, “The good ended happily, the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
That said, my aspiration as a writer is one day to be given the accolade ‘the new Mary Stewart’. She combined contemporary romantic suspense stories, some using Gothic motifs, with beautifully described locations. I once took a holiday to the White Mountains of Crete solely due to her book The Moonspinners which began with the wonderful line,
It was the egret, flying out of the lemon-grove, that started it.
Have you always written stories?
My love of writing surfaced in primary school. When, eventually, I learned that my by-blood uncle, great-uncle and great grandfather had all been the storytellers in their communities, it made perfect sense.
Where in the world are you, and what do you do?
Paradoxically, given my love of the past, I live in a very young country: New Zealand. Now retired from decades in business strategy consulting, I’m investing my skills in genetic genealogy to help adoptees (and others with missing family members) to identify their biological families. Replacing “Names Unknown” with real, accurate identities on family trees is powerfully motivating to me.