Sarah Rayne has written six critically-acclaimed psychological thrillers, including A Dark Dividing, Spider Light, The Death Chamber and the 2005 Theakston-nominated Tower of Silence. Her novels are characterised by dark complex plots cutting seamlessly between multiple narrators, time-frames and settings. Her writing’s imbued with atmosphere and suspense, peopled by large casts of richly-crafted characters and landscaped with often bleak buildings that seem to ooze menace. Not surprisingly, Sarah’s known as the ‘dark lady of crime fiction’
Maureen. Tell us about Frank Douglas – he’s much more than a minor character in the book, isn’t he?
Sarah. Frank Douglas was my father’s stage name. He was in the theatre and music halls after the First World War and during the 1920s and 1930s. His era was actually a bit later than the main part of Ghost Song’s setting – ten or fifteen years on – but other than that the character in the book is him. Like the fictional Frank Douglas, he was in ENSA in the Second World War, and again like the character in the book he wrote much of his own material, most of it com-edy sketches and reviews and songs. He also had the delightful Irish trait of being laid-back about life, of being able to recount a story entirely off the cuff, and also of making people laugh very easily. If there was a humorous side to any situation, he would find it. He died when I was sixteen, but he left me a terrific legacy of memories – also intriguing speculation about the life he had led before meeting my mother in 1940. Frank Douglas isn’t a major player in Ghost Song, but he’s a presence throughout a lot of it. And I love the fact that the book gives a nod to my father’s memory.
Maureen. Given your father’s background, were you ‘haunted’ by the idea of setting a story in the music hall era? Was it something you’d long felt urged to do?
Sarah. I’d wanted to write a ‘theatre’ book for years and I’d wanted it to be Victorian or Edwardian theatre; it’s so colourful. But while I’m never short of ideas, I’ve been lucky enough with most of my books to have a defining moment when a plot leaps out of nowhere and smacks me in the face. But I hadn’t had that ‘moment’ for a theatre book plot until a conversation with my brother, Tony, about music hall songs…
Tony happened to mention, quite casually, that so many of the popular songs of that era had a far deeper meaning, and that most of those meanings have been lost to us today. The best example of that is perhaps My Old Dutch. People parody it now, especially the first line: We’ve been together now for forty years/And it don’t seem a day too much. But how many people know it was actually written as a lament? That it’s the husband’s farewell to his wife as they trudge up the hill to the workhouse, knowing that once there, they’ll be separated for the first time in all their forty years – probably for good? That’s so incredibly moving. In its day, that song would have struck an immediate chord with the people hearing it, because music hall songs were written for the ordinary people and about their lives. So that conversation with my brother was the trigger for Ghost Song. I instantly ‘saw’ that a crime could be committed and the truth about it hidden inside a music hall song – perhaps hidden for many years. The problem was that the crime would have to be massive and potentially damaging to people in high places. Otherwise it wouldn’t need to be hidden so thoroughly and for so long. That was the part I had to really think about before I started writing.
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Maureen. It’s tempting to ask whether you felt your father’s presence during the writing. Or is that just the journalist in me emerging?
Sarah. Once or twice I think he may have been with me. I mention Collins’ Theatre in one part of the book, which was one of his theatres – I have a photo of him on stage there. And when I was describing how the main music-hall character, Toby Chance, writes his own songs, I suspect my father was laughing at my efforts.
Maureen. Your knowledge of and passion for the period shines through the book. Was it difficult not to get ‘carried away’ writing the music hall sequences?
Sarah. Actually, I think I did get carried away. The book is set in two different time-lines – the music halls around 1890/1914, and the present. Sometimes I had to force myself to climb out of the earlier scenes because I knew it was time to return to the present-day plot. Although I did enjoy the present-day scenes as well; I liked writing about the old theatre when it was abandoned and empty, and having the modern characters wondering about its past and trying to fathom its ghost legend.
Maureen. The book conveys the period so vividly: smells, sounds, fashions, even food. Telling detail and fascinating snippets are lightly sprinkled through the narrative. It’s a real skill not to let your research show. How do you do that?
Sarah. I’d love to say I whistled up the Tardis or H G Wells’ time machine and actually went back! What I did, of course, was read and read and then read some more. It’s an age that’s just about still touchable. There are people alive to day who remember the stories their grandparents told. And there’s masses of stuff written about people like Marie Lloyd and Gus Elen and Vesta Tilley – written by people who knew them. What I do find sad is that we never quite got any of the old performers on film. There are some sound recordings,but even with digital enhancement they’re scratchy. I gave Toby Chance a scene where he records two of his songs. He didn’t take it very seriously, though – it was 1914, and nobody really took sound recording seriously then. Income came from the sale of song sheets and they couldn’t imagine sound recordings ever amounting to much. So Toby – Frank with him – embark on the recording in light-hearted manner, without even a proper accompanist.
Maureen. You’re known for complex plots, multiple narrative strands and time lines; it seems a hugely demanding path to choose to go down?
Sarah. It happened almost without my realising it. The first book I ever tried to write many many years ago was set in the present but with diaries interspersed from the past. And it never saw the light of day. From there I discovered I found it quite easy to write in the 18th/19th centuries. And I did try that for a while. But it’s almost now as if the two sides come together for me. I’m interested anyway in the effects of the past on the future. I just find it so
intriguing that it seems to me a very natural construction. And I don’t find it difficult because you can build up the tension in one time frame and just when you want to leave the reader, as they say: wanting more, you switch to the other time frame. I find it quite an easy construction actually.
Maureen. You obviously have a way to keep track of all the strands, all the complexities?
Sarah. I don’t always! I get in dreadful tangles and have to backtrack and unpick all kinds of knots. But I do set out a kind of multiple flowchart at the beginning, so that I’ve got a column for each strand and each time. Then as the plot unfolds, I write a brief note in each column of what’s just happened. It works quite well, except when I get so absorbed I forget to update the columns, and have to plough back through four chapters.
Maureen. The Tarleton theatre – like memorably menacing buildings in your other books – becomes almost a character. How important are settings to you?
Sarah. The buildings are massively important to me, and I rather like the fact that they seem to have become a trademark. I didn’t set out to do that, but readers often comment on it. I don’t know if I believe in ghosts, but I do believe that some buildings can retain a kind of print of things that have happened in them. Some people are more sensitive to that than others. I’m not over-sensitive to it – I’d like to be – but maybe something does reach me on some level. The Tarleton theatre, by the way, is named for one of the old Elizabethan clown-actors: Richard Tarleton. And Platt’s Alley, which is where the stage door is, was named for the old word for stage plot: platt.
Maureen. The names you give characters always seem so apt. How do you choose them?
Sarah. Like you, I believe names are immensely important. I love the names Charles Dickens came up with and I love the way he had almost two levels – heroes and heroines with pleasing names such as Richard Carstone, Nell Trent, and Esther Summerson, then on the other side, the slimy Uriah Heep, the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge and so on. Restoration and eighteenth century comedy does the same kind of thing with names – Mrs Malaprop and Lady Sneerwell and Benjamin Backbite. To a much lesser extent, I try to follow that rule. In The Death Chamber, for instance, I gave the 1920/1940s corrupt prisoner warder guarding the death cell the name of Saul Ketch – from the legendary Jack Ketch, the executioner in the 1600s. For Ghost Song I had great fun with some of the performers’ names: Elise le Brun, whose real name was Elsie Brown but didn’t believe in letting her origins hamper her; Bunbury the comic, who writes and performs his own sketches and the fruity old Edwardian ham, who I called Prospero Garrick. I loved Prospero – I wish I could have met him.
Maureen. Before Tower of Silence, you wrote sixteen fantasy and contemporary horror novels. Why the switch to crime writing?
Sarah. The fantasy novels were fun and I didn’t find fantasy difficult to write but then two things happened. One was that I think fantasy began to diminish in popularity and two, it wasn’t stretching me. And once I’m not stretched mentally I get bored and complacent and the work suffers. So I could see it was time to switch. Contemporary horror seemed a natural thing to do at that stage because I love horror and spooky films and ghosty books so I swiched to that. But again, there comes a point where you’ve resurrected all the ancient demons and you’ve vanquished all the curses and you kind of run out of steam a bit. My agent suggested I write a psychological thriller, and everything coalesced; all the strands that I was trying to write came together and hence the first Sarah Rayne, Tower of Silence.
Maureen. You’re now embarking on the seventh…would you say the writing gets easier or harder?
Sarah. In many ways it gets easier, of course. Even when you’re seriously blocked, you know you’ll get through the block because you’ve got through it in the past. And if you have any sense you’ve learned as you’ve gone along about such things as structure, and the need for maintaining tension and avoiding repetition. But on the minus side, you have to keep coming up with different plot twists and angles. You start off thinking, ‘Well, that character could turn out to be the illegitimate brother and not the lustful employer as everyone thought.’ Then you realise you used that very ploy three books ago, and readers will remember it.
Maureen. What’s a typical working day for you?
Sarah. It’s not much different to most people’s working day. It’s no good sitting meekly with your hands folded waiting for inspiration to strike, because it never does. It has to be pursued and grabbed by the throat and dragged to the desk. So I start around 8.30 am, work until lunchtime, which can be midday if I’m hungry and the prose isn’t flowing, or 2.30 if I’m absorbed and forget about eating. I do wander into the kitchen to make mugs of tea at frequent intervals, though. After lunch, unless I’m working on re-writes, I don’t normally return to the desk until 4.30, when it’s a straight run to around 6.30. Occasionally I’ll go back for another hour’s work after a meal. Some writers like to set a target of a certain number of words for each day, but I’ve never been able to do that. A writer friend once sagely remarked that writing a book isn’t necessarily about the number of words that end up being typed. There are things to resolve, sometimes a tricky plot twist to fathom out. For that, I tend to type out possible developments, often as many as eight or nine. I find that typing the alternatives – seeing them on the screen – is remarkably helpful. That can take as much as half a day, and although it doesn’t advance the plot by any more pages, it does lay out what has to be done.
Maureen. Tell me about the ‘dark lady’ tag? Do you like it?
Sarah. It quite pleases me because of the erudite connotation I suppose. Instantly your mind goes to the sonnets and I should think a lot of people have been identified as The Dark Lady of the sonnets… But I didn’t think I ever expected to be, and I don’t think it was intended, quite, but I love the link to the sonnets. And I thought it was one of those lovely intelligent phrases that has two or three meanings.
Maureen. Going back to Ghost Song, I feel it probably holds a special place in your heart. Is that so?
Sarah. Yes, very much. Most writers if asked to name their favourite book will say the one they’ve just finished. But it’s probably also true that most of us have one book we’ve always wanted to write. For me, Ghost Song was unquestionably that book.
Maureen. And what might Frank Douglas’s verdict be? What do you think your father might say?
Sarah. He would have loved it. He would probably have wanted to write the music hall songs – and would have made a much better job of them than I did. As it was, I fudged up two or three and prayed my editor wouldn’t laugh them out of court. (She didn’t.) When it came to the main song, the one that contained the truth about the crime that absolutely had to be kept hidden for over ninety years, I wrote what I thought might do, then enlisted my brother and my partner to sing it. We tried it to the tune of The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo and had an hysterical afternoon trying to make it scan. I think it worked in the end, though.
That it certainly did. Thanks, Sarah.
Ghost Song, published by Simon & Schuster, is out in hardback now; the paperback’s scheduled for July.
Frank Douglas seen here centre stage
at
Collins' Music Hall
The date is the early 1940s.
(The guy seated near the back on the left of the shot is
Wee Georgie Wood -
who was quite famous in his day).
I’I’ll I'll declare an interest here: Sarah and I are more than fellow crime writers. We’re friends who three years ago formed the writers’ performance group, Lethal Ladies. This interview has nothing to do with those connections. I genuinely admire her work, and more than that, my journalist’s antenna quivered when I heard the fascinating story behind her latest novel. Ghost Song is partly set in a London theatre during the music hall era, the dedication reads simply: For ‘Frank Douglas’