.
Q: Geraldine, I've been looking at your website and one thing
that really hit me was what a versatile writer you are: two different crime
series, a romance, short non-fiction on a variety of subjects, and in 2004,
as well as two crime novels, you had Reluctant Queen, your first historical,
published under the name Geraldine Hartnett. What made you try writing so
many different things?
A: I suppose I just like variety. I actually began as a writer of romances,
but when I started trying to write, in my early twenties, I found I never
finished anything. But once I hit the milestone age of thirty my mind concentrated
wonderfully and I wrote a book a year for six years – all aimed at the Mills
& Boon market and all rejected. The last of these, Land of Dreams, I cut to
a length acceptable to the then Rainbow Romance series of Robert Hale; it
was taken from their slush pile and published in 1991. But the book didn’t
set the world on fire. Nor did the next one I sent to them – it was rejected.
I then decided I'd try my hand at crime novels. I sent Dead Before Morning,
my first attempt in the genre, to Macmillan, and it was pulled out of their
slush pile and published in 1993.
Q.Your seventh in the series, Bad Blood, was published in December 2004.
All the books in the series have a strong vein of humour running through them.
So what decided you to write humorous crime novels rather than more serious
crime?
A. I suppose it's just that I've always found the more humorous crime novel
doubly entertaining. You not only have the mystery to solve, but the characters
generally get themselves in to all kinds of entertaining scrapes as well.
Anyway, I decided that was what I wanted to do. After much head scratching,
I came up with DI Joseph Aloysius Rafferty, like myself Catholic-raised and
secondary modern educated, from a working-class family far from averse to
back-of-a-lorry bargains – particularly his Ma, Kitty Rafferty. For his foil
I hit on Sergeant Dafyd Llewellyn – the university-educated only son of a
Methodist minister – a morally upright Welshman who thought the law should
apply to everybody – even the mothers of detective inspectors. All I had to
do then was write the novel… Luckily for me, although I'm now with Severn
House, Maria Rejt, the then senior editor at Macmillan, must have liked the
humour enough to offer me a contract for Dead Before Morning and the next
three in the series Down Among The Dead Men (1994), Death Line (1995) and
The Hanging Tree (1996). The police characters are DCI Will (Willow Tree)
Casey, whose parents are unreconstructed old hippies and Sergeant Thomas Catt,
the politically-incorrect product of children’s homes. Casey’s parents cause
him grief and not only because he joined the ‘pigs’ who hassled them at various
druggy music festivals in their youth.
Q. The first in the Casey & Catt series is called Up In Flames and was
published in December 2003. Tell me about the storyline.
A. Up In Flames involves the murder of a young Asian widow, Chandra Bansi
and her baby daughter, Leela. Like many westernised Asian girls, Chandra's
idea of what is ‘suitable’ for her differs from that of older family members.
These differences bring about her murder and that of her baby.
Q.The family theme seems to feature a lot in your writing, not just in
the humorous sub-plots but in the main plots as well. Is there any reason
for that?
A. I suppose it partly stems from my working class background and how much
more difficult it made it for me to get a writing career off the ground. It
just made me think a lot around the theme of family. Unlike Margaret Thatcher,
I don't believe the family is necessarily always an influence for the good;
a belief which stems in part from remem- bering some of the families I knew
back when I was a child growing up on a Council estate and also from looking
at the lives of the so-called underclass today. Her family is certainly not
good for Chandra Bansi or her baby daughter, the victims I used in Up In Flames.
Q. Your last novel, Dying For You, the sixth in the Rafferty & Llewellyn series, had DI Joseph Rafferty in all sorts of trouble. Laughs. Yes. Poor old Rafferty. I do put him through it. In Dying For You, he manages – unbeknownst to his colleagues – to become chief suspect in his own double murder investigation. And all he'd been doing was looking for love.
Q: It's an unusual plot. How did you come up with it?
A. I actually came up with the idea when I thought about where I had left
Rafferty at the end of the previous novel, Absolute Poison. His Sergeant,
Dafyd Llewellyn, had just got married and Rafferty's love life was non-existent,
apart from the various nubile prospects his would-be matchmaking Ma kept trying
to line up for him. So in Dying For You, in order to bypass his Ma's
efforts, he decides to join a dating agency. Only, for various reasons, he
doesn't want to sign up under his own name, so he borrows that of one of his
many cousins, joins the agency, meets two delightful women who each take his
fancy, but who are both promptly murdered. After his colleague who had charge
of the investigation goes on sick leave, Rafferty gets the job of solving
the murders. Then the fun begins.
Q: He certainly found more than he bargained for when he went looking
for love. That one got a starred review from Kirkus, I understand. Congratulations.
Now, your latest in the series is Bad Blood.
A. Yes. This one involves Rafferty in investigating the murder of wealthy
widow, Clara Mortimer, estranged from her family and living alone in an upmarket,
sheltered apartment. Rafferty fears his own family estrangement. Because his
reaction, when Abra, his girlfriend, said she might be pregnant, wasn't exactly
New Man… between the grudges of Clara's estranged family and those of her
adoptive 'family' – the other apartment residents – Rafferty had suspects
and questions in plenty. Why had the sensible Clara Mortimer chosen to open
her door to a burglar? And why had her daughter insisted Clara's husband was
dead? When he considered the other awful lies her family told, how could he
not conclude they had something to hide? As Rafferty tries to get back in
Abra's good books, another tragedy ensues. But he still manages to fight his
way past all the lies to find the sad truth – a very modern murder.
Q: Are you ever going to give Rafferty a break and involve his morally-upright
sergeant in hot water for a change?
A. Funny you should say that – because the sub-plot of the one I'm writing
at the moment, Love Lies Bleeding, actually involves a member of Llewellyn's
family in the sort of trouble with which Rafferty's so familiar. I can't tell
you any more about that one because I'm still working on the plot. .
Q: Okay, I understand! Now, as I said, you had your first historical novel,
Reluctant Queen, published in March 2004. That tells the story of Mary Tudor,
Henry VIII's younger sister. What attracted you to the character?
A: I love the Tudor period. The characters are so much larger than life. And
although, through reading about her elder brother, Henry VIII, I had only
learned a little about Mary's life, it intrigued me enough to try to find
out more. And then I discovered the rest of the story of her love for Charles
Brandon. Brandon was Henry's boon companion, whose father had saved the life
of Henry and Mary's father, Henry VII, at the Battle of Bosworth, and although
Henry pushed her into marrying the elderly and sickly King Louis X11 of France
for State reasons, Mary was determined not to let Henry force such a marriage
on to her a second time. So she schemed to marry Charles Brandon, the love
of her life.
Q: That book was published in spring 2004 under your maiden name. Yet you use your married name of Evans for your crime novels. Was there any particular reason for the latter?
A. I decided to use my married name because I remember, before I was married, how many differently-spelt versions of the name Hartnett people managed to come up with. I didn't think it would be a good idea to use for my writing a name people found difficult to spell – I was worried they might never find my books on the shelf! But then, when I found myself addressed as Geraldine Evens, I thought 'what the hell' and decided I might as well use my maiden name for Reluctant Queen. Besides, I thought it would be nice to see my own name on the cover of a book for a change, rather my married name.
Q: Tell me - do you have a typical writing day? Most authors seem to.
A: No. Not really. When I started out, I was working five full days a week
as an office temp, so it was mostly a case of burning the midnight oil and
working all weekend. It was a demanding, seven days a week schedule and I
mostly car ried on until the letters began to dance up and down on the screen
and the matchstick eye props broke under the strain. When I really got in
a hole with the plot, I'd take a week off to sort it out. Now, although I
have a permanent job and only work three full days a week rather than five,
I find I still often have to do a lot of my writing in the evenings. Sometimes,
particularly when I'm in frenzied production of flyers, postcards and bookmarks
for marketing purposes, I can still be at the keyboard till 2 or 3 o'clock
in the morning. Often, between the day job and my writing, I still put in
seven days a week. Most of my holidays are set aside for writing, too. And
they say writing's a glamorous career… The vast majority of writers, like
me, have lives that are nothing like those you read about in the national
press, unfortunately. Though I live in hope that one day I'll live the life
of a sybarite!
Q: As you say, a demanding schedule. All writers seem to settle on a favourite
writing method. Some, particularly crime writers, have said they prefer to
do their plotting from the end to the beginning. Is that what you do?
A. No. Although, for my first historical I forced my mind to think in straight
lines from beginning to end, for my crime novels, my brain thinks in scenes,
which I then slot in to place and draft and redraft. I used to have to do
a lot of cutting and pasting, but with more experience, I seem to have reduced
much of that element and the number of drafts required.
Q. You've already mentioned that it took six years of writing before you
achieved publication and later in your career, you experienced another six
year period without a publisher. Why was that?
A. Macmillan, who had published the first four in my Rafferty& Llewellyn series,
was taken over by a German firm of publishers who decided to drop something
like a third of their list, including me.
Q. That must have been a miserable time for you.
A. Very much so. Sometimes, looking back, I'm amazed that I managed to get
through it and continue writing. But, along- side the novels, I had also written
short non-fiction on a variety of topics and these continued to be published
(in The Lady, the now defunct Writers’ Monthly and various county magazines).
Thankfully, that period in the wilderness as a novel writer ended when my
second agent took me on her books. Within a matter of months she had sold
not just one, but three of the books that I had written or rewritten during
the wilderness years, and obtained a two-book contract for the next two Rafferty
& Llewellyn novels as well.
Q. Just goes to prove that perseverance pays off. Here you are now with
your tenth novel, Bad Blood, just out. Geraldine, with all your experience
as a writer, what advice would you give to any of our readers who might just
be starting out on a writing career?
A. There are three main pieces of advice which I think would-be writers might
be wise to follow. The first is don't try following writing trends. Write
what you want to write – I found my particular niche by looking at what I
preferred to read. The trend in the bookshops today may well not be there
several (or more) years down the line, which is the time it might take you
to find a publisher. Secondly, listen to that wise little voice that is telling
you, as mine did, that writing romances (or whatever) isn't really your thing.
I ignored that little voice; maybe if I hadn't, I would have achieved that
first publication more speedily. As I said, it took six years and six books
for one of my romances to get published, yet my very first attempt at a crime
novel achieved publication on only its second outing. Thirdly, do make use
of professional criticism services. I know they're not cheap, but I found
their advice invaluable. If any would-be writers out there look on the Advice
section of my website, they will find the details of two reputable firms,
one of whom I used in the past.
Thank you, Geraldine.
. CRIME NOVELS
Dead Before Morning
Absolute Poison
Down Among The Dead Men
Up In Flames
Death Line
Dying For You
The Hanging Tree
Bad Blood
OTHER NOVELS
Land of Dreams
(first published novel)
Reluctant Queen (Under the name Geraldine Hartnett–Historical
)
If any of our readers would like to know more about Geraldine
Evans and her novels, visit her website: http://www.geraldineevans.com