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Angela: Were you always a scribbler?
Frances: Guilty. As a child, I acquired thirty or so pen pals. Due to postage costs, I passed many contacts to girls at school, though I did go on writing to a man in an Iowa asylum. Every year he sent me a promotional calendar from the local funeral parlour. When I went to work in the USA at the age of nineteen, my mother took over as his pen pal.

Angela: Was there a defining moment when you decided to start writing a novel?
Frances: I was eighteen and bought a portable typewriter from my evening barmaid job earnings. I wrote thirty or forty pages of utter tosh. This is how I knew it was tosh: I compared my writing with books from our shelves and from the local library, including Dickens and Evelyn Waugh. Then I left the country. (See above).

Angela: How did you set about getting published? And how easy was it?
Frances: I came back from New York with a few dollars and spent a year in the attic writing a novel. This took two years to be turned down by four publishers, with very nice comments. I began writing sketches, stories, and a play. A radio dama producer advised me not to write novels because ‘It takes too long. You’re good at dialogue. Write scripts.’ I wrote scripts, but also a second novel. And guess what? This took two years to be turned down by four publishers, with very nice comments. My first publications were short stories and scripts, in anthologies. My mother was hughly supportive and had wanted to be a writer herself. I had promised I would write her story. She badgered me to get on with it. After many false starts, I said, ‘I’ll write it as a novel.’ She said, ‘I thought that’s what you were going to do.’ This became Sisters on Bread Street. (Bread Street, Leeds, was where she spent her early life.) By the time it was finished, Mam hadn’t long to live. There was no time to wait for a publisher’s yea, nay or maybe. The book came out under the Pavan Press imprint that I had jointly set up in order to publish the autobiography of a Welsh miner. I sent Sisters on Bread Street to the agent I’m now with. Thanks to her advice, it turned into the saga Somewhere Behind the Morning. This was followed by Sixpence in Her Shoe and Sisters of Fortune. My agent encour aged me when I came up with the idea for the Kate Shackleton mystery series.

Angela: Do you aim to write every day and do you set yourself a target in terms of, say, a word count or completing a scene from your story?
Frances: I’m working on the third Kate Shackleton novel and try to write a chapter a day. It doesn’t always work out. For instance, I’ve just spent a fun long weekend at Bristol’s CrimeFest.

Angela: Are you an owl or a lark in terms of your writing?
Frances: Because for so long I had to work around a proper job, I can write at any time. I prefer to work in the mornings but sometimes there are interruptions and diversions. I might be about to give a talk, and spend far too long making notes and worrying. It can be good to write late at night, when it’s quiet and the phone won’t ring.

Angela: Do you work to an outline with a new novel, or simply set out writing and see what happens?
Frances: When I’m almost ready to start a novel, I buy two A4 spiral notebooks. I make notes – characters, events, locations, snatches of dialogue or plot points. I jot down the chapters, as far as I can, which never takes me to the end of the story, though I have a good idea where it will go. Then I write the opening scenes, and do a bit more plotting and so on.

Angela: Do you ever get ‘stuck’ or suffer from writer’s block?
Frances: I hate the words writer’s block. In other occupations there’s never the luxury of being ‘blocked’. Dorothea Brande, in Becoming a Writer, calls this ‘the slough of despond’. She says you must regard yourself as two persons in one. The intelligent critic person must take care of the artist. I have found it helpful to get on with something else while the unconscious comes up with solutions. I once took up the stair carpet to paint the skirting board. After one coat of paint, I was ready to start writing again. Have you ever tried to re-lay a stair carpet single-handedly? Writing is easier.

Angela: Do you write one draft and edit as you go along – or do you write two or more complete drafts before you are satisfied?
Frances: As I read through the previous day’s work, I may tinker. After one complete draft, I become ‘the other person’ who will read critically and yet encouragingly, and make suggestions. Then I write another draft. I may do this at least twice before I label it ‘first draft’ and send it to my agent.

Angela: You started out writing historical sagas. What sparked your interest in the past? For example, was it family stories, a wider knowledge of history, or something else?
Frances: Our own history always starts with our grandparents’ generation. That’s why I’m hooked on the period of the Great War and the 1920s. My detective, Kate Shackleton, is a First World War widow, living at a period of momentous change in women’s lives. It was a time of great hardship, but also very modern in terms of changing attitudes, dress, and work opportunities.

Angela:    What made you turn to crime writing?
Frances: My first broadcast story, when I was in my twenties, featured a policeman in Hong Kong. The question could be why did I then turn away from crime writing? Sometimes we travel in circles.

Angela:    Tell us about your new book, Dying in the Wool.
Frances: Kate Shackleton becomes an investigator after trying to find out the circumstances surrounding her husband’s disappearance in 1918: ‘Missing presumed dead’, the telegram read. She’s fortunate enough to have a house, an income, and a car, which gives her the freedom to take up sleuthing. Her hobby is photography, which was hugely popular in that period. She lives in Leeds and her investigations take place across Yorkshire. In Dying in the Wool she goes to a mill village on the outskirts of Bradford to find out what happened to millionaire mill owner Joshua Braithwaite     who hasn’t been seen since 1916. His daughter wants one last try to find him before she marries. A Medal for Murder (October 2010) takes Kate to Harrogate.

Angela: Do you feel that your characters are like companions when you are writing?
Frances: They come swimming with me.

Angela: Do you feel elated when you finish a book? And maybe sad as well?
Frances: I feel surprised.

Angela: What advice would you offer to new writers?
Frances: Frances’s Seven Step Programme:
                 Watch out who you marry/live with!
                 Read good stuff, to raise your game.
                 Read rubbish – there’ll be something in it.
                 Write every day.
                 Write whatever you want. Writing is a craft that you can teach yourself
                 Be flexible. Aim high but don’t miss an opportunity to write on a small scale for local people – memoirs or stories.
                  Don’t be discouraged. There’s a lot of luck involved. The harder you work the greater the chance of striking lucky.

Angela: What do you like to read for relaxation?
Frances:   At present, contemporary crime; vintage crime; stories by Alice Munro, and whatever else takes my fancy.

Angela: Of all the novels you have read which one would you most like to have written yourself?
Frances: Odd, but I’ve never had that feeling about novels. They so much belong to their author. My only ‘wish I’d written that’ moment – perhaps because theatre is a more public experience – was after seeing Peter Whelan’s play The Accrington Pals.

For more information on Frances Brody visit her at
www.frances-brody.com

Angela Dracup is the author of fifteen books.
A review of her latest book The Killing Club is posted to ths web site.