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Ayo: For those readers that do not know much about you, would you like to give us a bit of background information about yourself?
Erin: Although I write about Ireland, I’m a native Midwesterner; both my parents come from Iowa and I grew up in southern Minnesota. Despite having been fascinated with words my whole life, I’m a rather late bloomer as a writer. My first love was theatre, and I trained to become a director, but ended up taking a detour into arts administration for nearly twenty years. I fell into a writing career by way of theatre, actually -- working as a freelance journalist and theatre critic. I only began to write novels after hearing the true tale of a red-haired girl whose perfectly preserved, severed head was discovered in a bog. It seemed to me that her discovery begged to be the opening chapter of a creepily atmospheric crime novel set in Ireland.

Ayo: How were you introduced to the genre of crime fiction?
Erin: I probably started reading Edgar Allen Poe and the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was about ten or eleven. Early on, I also devoured writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. I remember Phyllis A. Whitney as an early favourite, too.

Ayo: Who were your influences when you first started writing and which authors continue to influence you today?
Erin: Since I started writing only a short time ago, my influences have remained pretty steady. The crime novels I love best are dense, full of complicated plots, characters and many prickly philosophical questions. While I’m naturally drawn to the wonderful writers who compose those sorts of stories - people like P.D. James, Umberto Eco, Iain Pears, just to give a few examples - I can only hope their work has had some influence on my own writing. I also love Elizabeth George, Minette Walters, Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, Mark Billingham, John Connolly, David Hewson, Janet Gleason, Leslie Silbert - and probably many people I haven’t even read yet.

Ayo: Irish culture plays a pretty important part in your books - is this because of your husband’s Irish background and heritage?
Erin: I’ve actually been fascinated (some might say obsessed) since childhood with all things Irish, especially music and language and folklore. I remember itching to visit Ireland when I was about eleven years old, and the attraction has never worn off, no matter how many times I travel there. I don’t think it’s pure accident that I ended up marrying an Irishman! There’s something about Ireland’s complex and contradictory nature - all those layers of history, I suppose, one on top of the other - that lends a particular resonance to the kinds of stories I feel compelled to tell.

Ayo: Cormac is Irish while Nora is American and they appear to duplicate your relationship with your husband; was this intentional?
Erin: I originally conceived of the main characters in Haunted Ground as two Irish fellas. It was only after I’d thought about it for a while that I decided it might be better to have protagonists who were different from one another, so making one male and one female, one Irish and one American seemed a practical way to do that. Therefore, they’re not really Paddy and I. We do share a few traits: Nora’s a singer, for example (as I am), and Cormac is a musician, as Paddy is. But they’re certainly not the pair of us cut from whole cloth. Bits of us are in many of the other characters as well. I know everybody says their characters are composites, but it’s really true.

Ayo: As well as Irish culture, are you interested in archaeology?
Erin: I’m deeply intrigued by archaeology. As one of the characters in Haunted Ground says: ‘We learn about ourselves by studying those who have come before.’ I’m fascinated with the science of archaeology, and I also love the rich metaphors it offers. Archaeologists dig through evidence and draw pictures of the past based on that evidence. How wonderfully that parallels other kinds of investigations, everything from murder inquiries to writing one’s memoirs. One of my particular passions is finding all sorts of things from the past that remain in the present day. Some of those things are actual physical objects, like the mysterious artefacts archaeologists discover buried underfoot, and some are all the beliefs, the behaviours, the language, literature, and music that’s passed down from generation to generation.

Ayo: The three main characters all have painful experiences that have shaped their lives and initially they find it very hard to let anyone close to them and as such until you get to know them, they come across as being quite prickly. Could you explain a bit more about each one of them?
Erin: Cormac Maguire is an Irish archaeologist specializing in wetlands archaeology and the study of human remains. He’s also a traditional musician, a flute player. He’s quite reticent by nature and a bit apprehensive when it comes to relationships. Although his parents never formally separated, they lived apart for years; when Cormac was ten years old, his father, a physician, was part of a humanitarian mission to Chile; while there, he became involved in the political struggle, and never returned home. In Cormac’s mind, his father abandoned the family. As Haunted Ground begins, he has also recently suffered the loss of Gabriel McCrossan, the friend and mentor who was like a second father. Nora Gavin was born in Ireland, but raised in the United States, so she thinks of herself as American. She’s a pathologist and instructor in anatomy at Trinity College Medical School. Almost no-one knows that she has fled to Ireland still haunted by her sister’s murder three years before. Her sister’s husband remains the primary suspect, but without sufficient evidence, no one has ever been charged in the case. Nora tried to bring her sister’s killer to justice, but her efforts failed, and effectively shattered her career, her relationships, her whole life at home in the States; that’s why she’s in Ireland, nursing her wounds from that experience. Detective Garrett Devaney carries a serious burden of guilt - for a child accidentally killed in his pursuit of a suspect. Since the accident, his career has started to slide downhill, and his marriage also seems to be foundering, drowning in grief and bogged down in the usual detritus of daily life. Devaney’s only joy is in music - he plays the fiddle - and wonders whether he might use music as a bridge to try to reach his youngest daughter. But he also struggles with his inadequacies, as a father, as a teacher, as a human being. You know, I’m getting rather depressed thinking about these poor people! Nevertheless, everybody has problems, in fiction and in real life. I have to admit that when I start thinking up new characters, the first question I always ask is, ‘Okay, what’s his trouble?’

Ayo: Haunted Ground received a lot of rave reviews when it was released it was also nominated for a number of awards including being nominated for both an Anthony Award and an Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Were you surprised with the attention that it received?
Erin: ‘Surprised’ doesn’t quite do it. ‘Stunned’ might be more accurate. I still find getting published pretty incredible, so award nominations went right off the normality scale, straight into the realm of the surreal. I still have this schizoid perception that there’s this other Erin Hart who actually writes the novels – and I’m just her secretary!

Ayo: The title Haunted Ground is quite apt, bearing in mind the book’s subject matter. Did you find it difficult to come up with the title?
Erin: Haunted Ground wasn’t difficult at all—ask me about Lake of Sorrows! Haunted Ground was my original working title for the first book, but it came from a something that I didn’t end up using in the finished manuscript, a couple of lines from Byron: ‘Where’re we tread / ‘Tis haunted, holy ground.’ It seemed unfair to use that reference for a title if the poem wasn’t going to be in the text, so I scrapped it in favour of The Bone Midden. Of course, lots of crime novels are called The Bone Something, and not everyone is familiar with the word ‘midden,’ so I should have known it was never going to fly. But when I told the people at Scribner that my original working title had been Haunted Ground, they loved it, and ran with that. I like double meanings, and I do think Haunted Ground has good resonance for a book about archaeology, but it also sounds a bit supernatural, which isn’t what the story is about, really. In France, the title was changed to Le Chant des Corbeaux (The Call of the Crows); precisely because they thought French readers wouldn’t like that supernatural tinge.

Ayo: Your latest book is called Lake of Sorrows. How did you go about doing your research for this book and what was your inspiration?
Erin: About halfway through the writing of Haunted Ground, I was visiting the National Museum of Ireland, looking at the bog body exhibit, as was my custom when in Dublin. I also spent a lot of time studying the Bronze and Iron Age gold artefacts and weapons that make up one of the permanent exhibits at the Museum. It suddenly struck me that all of these objects -weapons, gold, and human beings - all shared one thing in common. Most had been found in bogs and lakes and rivers and other watery places. And so I began to read up on ritual sacrifice, and when I came across the reference to ‘triple death,’ the theory that Iron Age people were sacrificed to appease some pagan triple deity, I knew I had a place to begin. The body of an Iron Age man would turn up on an industrial bog, followed by a modern body, but both men would seem to have been killed in the same ritual way… I read all that I could find about the Celts, and Iron Age gold, human sacrifice and bog bodies, past and current wetlands archaeology. Since the story was set in the Irish Midlands, I read about the history of Bord na Mona peat production, and about all the artefacts discovered by bog workers. I dug into the history of the place, and pored over letters written by John O’Donovan, the great Gaelic scholar who did exhaustive field research for the Ordnance Survey during the 1830s, documenting every castle and dolmen and holy well, and standing stone. I also visited and worked on some bog excavations, dropped in at a Bord na Mona workshop, and shadowed a beekeeper for a day. I interviewed archaeologists and bog workers, and drove for miles and miles around the Midlands bogs, soaking up the atmosphere, and taking notes and photographs. When I finished the book, I was using the working title A Triple Death, which I liked, but everyone else hated. So I dreamed up more than 500 other possible titles, but none of them were right. For me, a title has to have some resonance, a certain connection to the story and its themes, and absolutely nothing I’d thought of was working. Then I started looking at Irish place names, which are often strange and quite poetic. I found a place in the bogs of west Offaly called Pollagh, which means ‘pool’ in Irish. A little farther to the west in Clare, I found the Poulnabrone Dolmen. And Poulnabrone means ‘pool of sorrows.’ Since lots of Irish bogs are former lakes, I substituted ‘lake’ for ‘pool’ and imagined a place that doesn’t actually exist—Loughnabrone, the Lake of Sorrows.

Ayo: Did you feel under any pressure when it came to writing Lake of Sorrows because of the various nominations and the reviews that you received?
Erin: I actually wrote Lake of Sorrows before any of the nominations, so they weren’t really a factor. A second novel is always hard - that’s just a fact But I heard Sofia Coppola being interviewed, talking about the so-called ‘sophomore slump’ just after she was nominated for an Oscar for ‘Lost in Translation’. She said that at first she was a bit nervous about her second film, wondering how it would be received and compared to the first, but then decided that she could drive herself crazy that way; so she quit worrying and concentrated on the work, rather than wasting time agonizing about how it would be received. Seemed an eminently sensible approach.

Ayo: Lake of Sorrows starts with Nora trying to get to County Offaly. Was there significance for this as it is where your husband comes from?
Erin: It’s significant for lots of reasons, one of which is that it’s the place my husband is from. Paddy actually used to work at a Bord na Mona bog in West Offaly, so we visited the workshop there. I asked if anyone might still remember him, since the last time he’d set foot on the place was 1969. He said he didn’t think so, since it was more than thirty years before. The first person to approach us as we walked into the place just gave us a quick once-over and asked, ‘O’Brien, what do you want?’ Then we got a wonderful guided tour of the place. Everybody he’d worked with thirty years earlier was still there. The other reason that the Offaly is significant is that it’s a place where archaeology is really happening. It’s right in the centre of Ireland, so there are all kinds of interesting sites that had great spiritual significance in ancient times. And about one-third of the county is bogland. Several sets of ancient human remains have turned up there in the past decade, precisely because of the peat production going on. And several really significant hoards of artefacts have also been discovered in Offaly, including some spectacular gold objects. As I was finishing up Lake of Sorrows, I was feeling that I really needed a few more details about the ancient bog man who turns up in the early chapters. Just a bit more to make him more realistic. Then, just before we were going to Ireland in May 2003, I got a message from a friend that a new body had just turned up in Offaly, near my husband’s hometown. It’s exciting, because you never know when something - or someone - will turn up. I printed out the newspaper article about the find and read it aloud to my husband: ‘A remarkably well-preserved body found in a Midlands bog could be up to 2000 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…’ At this point Paddy raised his head and said, ‘Kevin Barry? I think that fella’s my cousin.’ So of course, when we got to Ireland, we phoned up Kevin and he took us out to the site and explained exactly how he’d come across 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. I don’t have to make anything up.

Ayo: How would you like your three main protagonists to be remembered? Erin: I suppose my aim is to create flesh-and-blood human beings with their own peculiar troubles, needs and desires. I hope they’re remembered as decent and capable of compassion, despite some of the terrible things that compel them.

Ayo: How would you describe your books to someone who is about to make their first foray into the genre?
Erin: When people ask, “What are your books about?” I usually explain that so far, the setting has been Ireland, and that the main characters are involved in archaeology and forensics, but there are other layers as well - history, traditional music, and folklore. The aim of all that is to explore the mysterious connections between past and present. I love connecting an unsolved riddle from the past to something that’s happening in the present. I also love creating a strong sense of place, so that the setting becomes a moody backdrop, almost another character in the story. I hope to create characters and themes and images that will resonate with readers, maybe even give them something to think about after they’ve finished the book.

Ayo: How do your stories normally come about? Do you already have an outline or do you just have an idea at the back of your mind and see where it takes you?
Erin: I don’t really have a complete outline. I usually have just a sketchy idea about where I want the story to go, but oftentimes the plot gets hijacked halfway through and ends somewhere quite different than I had originally imagined. Ayo: What is the most important element for you when you are writing? Erin: A really good pen. No, seriously, I suppose it’s getting to know all the different characters, because in the end, they really determine where the story is going. For me, writing is a kind of investigation. I have to find out what’s going to happen along with my characters. It’s like that rhetorical question, which has been attributed to various writers: ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ In purely practical terms, apart from the good pen, I have to have hours and whole days of complete silence, without music or ringing phones and other distractions, to get really deep into the storytelling. I wish I could write in phone boxes and on buses and planes, but it just doesn’t happen.

Ayo: What do you enjoy the most when you are writing?
Erin: Being there. Shutting my eyes and being completely in the moment with the characters as things are happening, letting myself see what they’re seeing, think what they’re thinking, feel what they’re feeling. It’s like becoming another person for a short while, and seeing the world through different eyes.

Ayo: What is your biggest distraction when you are writing?
Erin: Probably eating. This thing of having to feed oneself several times a day really takes far too much time. Seriously, though, all the administrative work that goes along with appearances and promotion and the business end of things is quite distracting.

Ayo: What made you decide to write a series and not a standalone novel? Erin: Actually, when I sat down to write Haunted Ground, it was a standalone. I felt obliged to give the red-haired girl a story, but had no notion of writing another novel at that point. But of course, the first question that escaped my agent’s lips was, ‘Is this a series?’ And my answer was, ‘Yes, of course.’ Didn’t know what else to say, I guess. But I knew when Haunted Ground was winding down that I wasn’t finished with the characters, so now I’m very glad that I answered in the affirmative. That’s not to say I won’t ever write a standalone novel. We’ll have to wait and see what happens…

Ayo: I understand that you like to sing. Has your writing influenced your singing or has it been the other way round?
Erin: Oh, the songs have definitely had an influence on my writing. There’s a certain plainness and truthfulness in traditional songs that I keep trying to capture in my writing. I actually use snatches of traditional song to underscore certain ideas and feelings in the writing, and there are lots of ideas and images imbedded in my writing that come directly from songs.

Ayo: Part and parcel of being a crime writer is the camaraderie that goes along with it. Do you enjoy attending conferences and book signings?
Erin: I love meeting fellow readers and writers and book lovers. Time spent with real people tends to counteract all the hours you spend holed up with a notebook or in front of the computer talking to imaginary people - and it’s good to maintain a healthy balance, I think.

Ayo: Are you a crime/mystery reader yourself? If so, do you still find time to read and what type of book do you prefer?
Erin: Oh yes, I’m still a crime novel fiend. Given the choice between a literary work and a crime novel, I’ll generally go for crime. I’m a sucker for dense, character-driven, slightly esoteric, or twisty psychological crime novels. I’m coming off a period in my life where I was working about four jobs and trying to write, so I literally didn’t have time to read. I still don’t have as much time as I would like, but I’m trying to convince myself that it’s actually part of my work, because it is.

Ayo: If you could organise a concert with Garrett Devaney and your husband providing the music while both you and Nora providing the vocals which 5 fictional characters and 5 fictional authors would you invite and why?
Erin: Gosh, couldn’t we just have a session instead of a concert, maybe with a few pints? Otherwise, the music might impede the conversation… I have to say, it’s difficult observing the 10-guest limit! I’d invite Harriet Vane from Dorothy Sayers’ novels, because she’s clever; and of course I’d have to invite P.D. James’s melancholy poet/policeman Adam Dalgliesh; the raffish Augustus McCrae from Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (mainly for Paddy, who loves the Wild West, but also because Gus really likes talking to women, and I believe he could hold his own with any crowd); Jeeves & Wooster of course, because you can’t invite one without the other, and Bertie plays the piano; maybe Bridget Jones, because she makes me laugh out loud, or Jo March from Little Women because she was the first plucky heroine who inspired me; and Holmes’s colleague Dr John Watson, who is charming and self- deprecating, and might have a few interesting tales to tell. Top of the list for authors would have to be Oscar Wilde—I’ve always wanted to invite him to a soiree, and this is my first chance; I’d also invite my crime-writing heroine, P.D. James; Edna O’Brien, whose way with language is a constant surprise and delight; and A.S. Byatt and Umberto Eco, because they manage to be erudite and raucously entertaining at the same time. And Shakespeare, and Tom Stoppard, and Robert Benchley, and Anton Chekhov... As I said, much too difficult!

Ayo: What are you working on at the moment?
Erin: I’m working on the third book in the Nora Gavin/Cormac Maguire series. No working title yet, but it takes up where Lake of Sorrows left off; Nora is finally headed home to nail her sister’s killer once and for all. That’s there it begins anyway, and who knows how it will end… I’ve got to sit down and finish writing the bloody thing to find out.

Ayo Thanks Erin for taking the time to talk to us.

More information about Erin can be found on her website
: http://www.erinhart.com

Books by Erin Hart
Haunted Ground
Lake of Sorrows