CS4W: How long have you been writing? Were you always drawn to the mystery/suspense genre?
EH: I’ve only been writing in earnest since the mid-80s. I started taking writing classes in my late twenties, mainly to keep my brain from shrinking. That evolved into a second career as a freelance journalist and critic, and it was that regular practice of putting ideas on paper that really taught me how to write. I’m not actually someone who always had ambitions of being a novelist; I just found an irresistible story that needed telling. Having written a couple of novels, however, I find the whole process fascinating and quite addictive.
I’ve always loved mysteries—I’d probably read every one in the library by the age of fourteen. And I still love them, though I’m probably more selective than I used to be. I love stories that are thoughtful and slightly philosophical, and I like to learn something new—about a place and a culture, about psychology or history or science. P.D. James is without a doubt my favorite crime novelist, for her compassion and depth of character; I also admire Dorothy Sayers, Elizabeth George, Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine, and Minette Walters, among others. I also look for inspiration to writers like Iain Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost), Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose), and A.S. Byatt (Possession), for the way they fashion literature, history, and philosophy—things we sometimes tend to think of as boringly academic—into such ripping good entertainment.
CS4W: What inspired you to write Haunted Ground?
EH: The story centers on an unnamed red-haired girl whose perfectly preserved, severed head is found in an Irish bog. There really was such a red-haired girl, and that’s what first inspired me to write a novel—to give her a story, even if it had to be fiction.
I first learned about her in the summer of 1986. I was staying with friends while traveling in Ireland, and asked my friend’s mother about strange things that had turned up in bogs. She started telling about all the things her archaeologist son-in-law had found: ancient butter, wooden roads from the Iron Age, a 500-year-old wooden practice sword, all preserved in the bog. When this son-in-law was nine or ten, he’d accompanied his father (also an archaeologist, and head of Ireland’s National Museum) on the evening he was called out to a farm where two brothers cutting turf had found something strange: the severed head of a beautiful red-haired girl, perfectly preserved in the cold, wet peat. This really happened, around 1955. Not knowing what else to do, the farmers brought the girl’s head into their house and kept it in a biscuit tin on the kitchen table. It was clear that she had been decapitated, and her position in the bog suggested that she might have been killed arou nd 1650, during Cromwell’s occupation of Ireland. Her body was never found.
All I could think when I first heard the story was that it would make an incredible opening for a mystery. Who was the red-haired girl? Why on earth had she been beheaded and buried in a bog? It took ten years before I finally decided that I should at least try to write her story. Nobody else seemed to be doing it, and I had a particular kind of story in mind, one with a very strong sense of place, incorporating all of the elements that really fascinated me, from Irish history and archaeology, to forensic science and folklore.
CS4W: Creating characters can sometimes be challenging. Did Nora Gavin and Cormac Maguire come easily to you? Where did you get your ideas for the other characters in your book? Do you make charts to keep track of them?
EH: Well, the police don’t handle 300-year old murders; that kind of detective work is left to archaeologists. So it seemed natural to feature an archaeologist as a main character in a story that starts with an old body in a bog. And after devising Cormac, I thought he ought to have a foil, possibly an American, perhaps someone with a strong interest in bog bodies, and that’s how Nora Gavin was born. They both seem like real people to me now, though each one was stitched together carefully over time. Cormac plays traditional music, Nora sings. And they each came with pretty substantial back stories as well; Nora’s life has been shattered by her sister’s unsolved murder, and Cormac’s a bit skittish about relationships because of his own parents’ unconventional union. Even though I know them well, Nora and Cormac are the most difficult to write. I think that’s partly because they’re romantically involved, and it’s so difficult to write about relationships in a fresh way. Maybe one day scholars will unravel that riddle, and explain why it’s so much easier to write about people killing each other than it is about having them kiss.
I love complex stories with lots of points of view, and as a writer I’m finding that good secondary characters can offer vibrant color and life. What’s most important is that the characters seem vitally connected to the places from which they come. Some of the secondary characters in my books are loosely based on people I know in Ireland, and some just spring to life complete with their own props and costumes, not to mention attitudes and full-blown dialogue. A cast of characters is one of the first things I do in developing a story. And I do make charts, one to keep track of birthdates and other pesky continuity issues, and one showing how each character is connected to all the others. When you’re dressing people up as suspects in a classic whodunit, you’ve got to have plenty of connections.
CS4W: The bog bodies and the forensic details in Haunted Ground fascinated me. Where did you begin your research? How much time did you spend on research?
EH: When I decided to write the story of the red-haired girl from the bog, I began by contacting Barry Raftery, the archaeologist son-in-law and the person who actually had firsthand knowledge of her. The way she’s described in the book—the once-beautiful face, the long red hair and staring eyes—was exactly how Barry described her. “Forty years later,” he wrote, “she is still with me.” Those words still give me goose bumps. Barry was kind enough to let me grill him about archaeology for hours, and also sent me to several of his colleagues, including Ireland’s foremost expert on bog bodies, an anatomy professor who was able to offer all kinds of details on the difficulties of excavating bog remains, what kinds of tests are carried out, how bog bodies are dated, and the latest preservation techniques. I was unbelievably fortunate to have such expert help. And of course I read every book I could find about Irish history and archaeolog y and folklore. I spent a great deal of time on research—months and months, if you were to add it all up. It is certainly enthralling, but can become an excellent way to avoid writing altogether. At a certain point, you have to just write your story, and then check facts and fill in research holes afterward.
CS4W: Haunted Ground takes place in Ireland. Ireland has such a rich history, magical folklore, and hauntingly beautiful music. You capture all of this in such amazing detail. What are your connections to Ireland? Did you spend a lot of time there while working on this book?
EH: I’ve been fascinated by Ireland since childhood. My husband Paddy is from County Offaly in the Irish Midlands, and he helped me with absolutely everything, from capturing turns of phrase to making sure that my description of turf-cutting was just right. Paddy is also a traditional musician; I wanted to include the music because it’s always been such a huge part of my experience of Ireland. Almost everyone we know there plays an instrument or sings.
It was vitally important to make the characters and the setting feel as real as possible, so I traveled to Ireland a few times while working on Haunted Ground. The last major research trip lasted several weeks and included some very specific research. I drove all around the country, visiting bogs and historic houses and ruined monasteries. I was fortunate enough to interview several members of the Garda Siochana ( Ireland’s national police force) about police procedure. I also visited an excavation in progress, and visited the conservation lab at the National Museum of Ireland, where artifacts and ancient remains are studied.
All of my research trips have been filled with serendipitous discoveries: at the entrance to Clontuskert Priory in East Galway I looked across the fields to a small hill, only realizing after a few minutes that the ‘hill’ I was staring at was probably an ancient burial mound. That detail provided me with a new scene, and underscored my theme of the past being always underfoot. At one point I was also toying with the idea of making Nora Gavin a traditional singer, but thought it might stretch credibility too much; after all, I already had an archaeologist who played the flute, and a policeman who played the fiddle. But as it happened, the pathologist/bog body expert I interviewed also happened to be a wonderful unaccompanied singer. So after meeting her, Nora’s fate was sealed—she sings, of course!
CS4W: In your second book, Lake of Sorrows, Nora and Cormac return. When writing a book that contains characters you know so well, do you still face challenges? Did you find Lake of Sorrows easier to write?
EH: You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But Lake of Sorrows actually seemed more difficult, probably because I had a deadline. I remember complaining that I wasn’t smart enough to write a mystery! Writing has always been a difficult and time-consuming process, at least for me. Actually, ‘excruciating’ is the word I’d use, especially for first drafts. I’m not sure it will ever get any easier, but in the end, a good story is definitely worth all the pain.
I have to tell about another serendipitous discovery in Lake of Sorrows. I was just finishing up the story, and feeling that I needed a few more details about the 2,000-year-old bog man who turns up in the early chapters. Just before we were left for Ireland in May 2003, I got a message from a friend that a body had just turned up in a bog in County Offaly, near my husband’s home town. It was pretty exciting, because you never know when something—or someone—will turn up. I printed the newspaper article about the find and was reading it aloud to Paddy: ‘A remarkably well-preserved body found in a Midlands bog could be up to 2,000 years old… When he stepped out of his mechanical digger and close to the body, farmer Kevin Barry particularly noticed the fingernails were still intact…’ I was expecting some sort of response from Paddy, but at that point he raised his head and said, ‘Did you say Kevin Barry? I think that fella’s my cousin .’ And of course he was. So when we got to Ireland, we got on the phone, and Kevin very kindly took us out to the site and explained exactly how he’d found the body, and of course all those real-life details went directly into the opening chapters of Lake of Sorrows. Truth really is stranger than fiction; sometimes it feels as though I don’t have to make anything up.
CS4W: How long does it take you to complete a novel? Do you adhere to a strict writing schedule? Do you write the first draft straight through before doing edits?
EH: It’s really varied so far. Haunted Ground took sixteen years (if you add up ten years thinking and six years of part-time writing), and I worked on Lake of Sorrows for about three years, mostly full-time.
I don’t actually stick to a strict writing schedule—I only wish I could. My approach is pretty intuitive. I don’t generally outline, and like to let a story develop on its own—that way the characters and their actions can actually surprise me—and also the reader, one hopes! The downside is that everything is very fluid until it’s pretty close to finished.
I tend to re-work the first part of a book many times, trying to get the tone and the atmosphere just right. If I can do that, the later parts seem to follow more easily. I often say I’m not really a writer, I’m a re-writer. First drafts are unavoidably horrid, but I look at every pass through a manuscript as a chance to make it better.
CS4W: How did you go about marketing and selling your first book? Did you have an agent before you sold Haunted Ground?
EH: For me, everything happened exactly the opposite of how it’s ‘supposed’ to happen. I started taking writing classes, thinking I’d concentrate on creative nonfiction. It was mostly because fiction seemed far too scary—heck, you had to make that stuff up! After toiling away at nonfiction for several years, I discovered a sad fact: if you had even a reasonably happy childhood, absolutely no one wants to read your memoirs. After eight years of graduate school, I emerged with a master’s degree and exactly one quasi-publishable short story. To keep from feeling like I’d wasted time and money, I sent out my one fiction opus, which somehow accidentally won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers that year. When news of the award was published in Poets and Writers magazine, I received letters from two New York agents, asking for more of my fiction work…which was non-existent, as you might recall. In an effort to st ring them along, I admitted that I didn’t have any additional fiction at the moment, but was working on an idea for a mystery novel about a red-haired girl whose perfectly preserved, severed head was found in an Irish bog. The first agent asked me to get in touch when I finished the novel. The other asked for the first fifty pages, which I had to write post-haste. She’s been my agent for almost a decade now. So I had an interested agent even before I’d begun writing Haunted Ground. As I said—everything happened backwards, leaving me supremely unqualified to give any practical advice about how to land a good agent. I only succeeded through pure dumb luck and a couple of freakish twists of fate.
CS4W: What are you working on now? Can we expect to see Nora Gavin and Cormac Maguire return in any future projects?
EH: Yes, Nora and Cormac are coming back in a third book in the series. It’s in progress now. Nora’s returning home to the States to re-open her sister's unsolved murder. So far the manuscript doesn’t even have a working title; it’s just going by the very enigmatic title BOOK THREE. We’ll see what happens after that. The beauty of characters involved in archaeology is that they can delve into any period in human history. I’ve got a few ideas under my hat for future books in the same vein.
CS4W: Lastly, what advice would you like to share with aspiring writers to keep them focused and motivated in their pursuit to become published?
EH: Creatively speaking, you can never stop trying to become a better writer. And you do that by reaching, trying all the things you’re most afraid of. Certainly there are no guarantees, but how do you know you can’t do something unless you at least give it a go? I often think how different my life would have been if I’d never tried fiction writing because it was just too scary.
On the practical side, I recommend reading a few really rotten books occasionally. If dreck like THAT got published, you can tell yourself, there’s hope for us all. Guaranteed to cheer you up immensely. Looking for an agent or publisher can be intimidating, but remember that finding great new writers is actually their job. Everyone in publishing is searching for the Next Big Thing—and who knows? The Next Big Thing could very well be you.
