Threaded throughout #Domevember will be occasional features by Dome authors, kindly spending their time answering some frankly ridiculous questions including this one-
‘Along the lines of tv classic, Ready Steady Cook, what 5 ingredients would you say go into one of your books?’
Author of the Teifi Cornoer series and founder of Crime Cymru, I am grateful to Alis for indulging this feature and helping support Domevember!
Hi Rachel
I’m thrilled to be taking part in Domevember – thanks so much! I hope you like my five ingredients.
Kindest regards,
Alis
When I was invited to contribute a post on my 5 top ingredients for writing to Ready Steady Book as part of Domevember, I initially came up with: time, space, imagination, research and chocolate. But, to be honest, those ingredients could have written any of my books. So I decided to write about the very specific ingredients that go to make up the books in my Teifi Valley Coroner historical crime series – ‘None So Blind’ and ‘In Two Minds’ which are already available from bookshops and Those Who Can which will be published by The Dome Press at the end of May, 2020.
So, here they are:
My boys
Not, in this context, my beloved sons but my two viewpoint characters, Harry Probert-Lloyd and John Davies.
At the beginning of None So Blind, Harry, 26, has been forced to leave his London life as a barrister and do what he had sworn he never would – come home to his father’s estate; because he’s going blind.
John, a 19-year old solicitor’s clerk who’s managed to blag himself an education, becomes Harry’s assistant in a very personal murder investigation, and so begins a far more fascinating relationship than I had even begun to imagine when I started writing. And one which turned None So Blind from standalone novel to the first in the Teifi Valley Coroner series.
The Teifi Valley
The place where I grew up and where my family still lives, the Teifi valley has become the setting for all the suspicious deaths Harry and John investigate. It’s a beautiful area with a stunning coastline (including some of the best and most unspoiled beaches in the world, one of which I decorate with a naked corpse in In Two Minds) beautiful, secluded little tree-lined valleys whose streams burble and cascade down towards the river Teifi, cute little market towns like Newcastle Emlyn (site of riotous threats in None So Blind) and major trading ports like Cardigan. There’s probably more landscape variation in this comparatively small area than anywhere else in Britain and it has produced a huge variety of extraordinary characters, both real and fictional.
For those who haven’t yet discovered its beauties, here’s where you can find the Teifi valley within Wales.
This is the form of blindness Harry suffers from, though it’s never mentioned as such in the books as Herr Stargardt didn’t describe it until 1909. It’s a form of macular degeneration which involves a loss of central vision while peripheral vision remains. So, as Harry says, ‘I can see but I can’t look.’
People have asked me, at author events, why I made Harry blind. Initially it was a plot device to force him back to west Wales – I needed something which wasn’t life threatening or too physically disabling but which would prevent him from continuing his work as a barrister. Macular degeneration fitted the bill perfectly. But as soon as I actually started writing from Harry’s point of view (literally!) I could see that it was going to be fascinating. I realised, as Harry does, that so much of our social interaction assumes that we can see and read faces, leaving those who cannot in the unpleasant position of being present but feeling excluded. As the books progress, Harry gradually learns how to make use of the sight left to him and to depend more on his other senses. At least twice in None So Blind, he notices things which the fully-sighted John doesn’t.
The history of the area I grew up in
‘Rebecca’ rioters in action. The accepted wisdom is that everybody in a petticoat was a cross-dressed man. At least one of my characters in None So Blind begs to differ.
‘The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.’
Quite. So when you set your books in the past, you need to make sure you know exactly how differently they did things. And everything I’ve read has shown me that Harry and John’s Teifi Valley was as different from the mid-nineteenth century world that Dickens was writing about as his old curiosity shops and rookeries were from Calcutta.
One of the most striking differences between Wales and England at the time was the relationship between the sexes. In the mid 19th century the English sexual politics which insisted that women confine themselves to the domestic sphere hadn’t really taken root in Wales yet, so my female characters tend to be a lot more feisty and active than you might expect.
Research
As in, the kind real historians do not just trawling the net. When I was trying to find out about the role of nineteenth century coroners in Wales, I discovered an intriguing and incredibly useful research paper by historian Dr Pam Fisher. It’s called ‘Getting Away with Murder: the Suppression of Coroners’ Inquests in Early Victorian England and Wales’ and it directly contributed to Harry becoming acting coroner at the end of None So Blind.
Dr Fisher’s paper showed me that coroners were, to some extent, hamstrung by budget-trimming local authorities (nothing changes, does it?) and that, as a result, people were literally getting away with murder.
Well, what better invitation does a crime author need?!
Thanks so very much to Emily Glennister of Dome Press for putting me in touch with Alis and for her well considered and extremely illuminating answers. Join me for more interviews as #Domevember progresses.
setting for all the suspicious deaths Harry and John investigate. It’s a beautiful area with a stunning coastline (including some of the best and most unspoiled beaches in the world, one of which I decorate with a naked corpse in In Two Minds) beautiful, secluded little tree-lined valleys whose streams burble and cascade down towards the river Teifi, cute little market towns like Newcastle Emlyn (site of riotous threats in None So Blind) and major trading ports like Cardigan. There’s probably more landscape variation in this comparatively small area than anywhere else in Britain and it has produced a huge variety of extraordinary characters, both real and fictional.
As in, the kind real historians do not just trawling the net. When I was trying to find out about the role of nineteenth century coroners in Wales, I discovered an intriguing and incredibly useful research paper by historian Dr Pam Fisher. It’s called ‘Getting Away with Murder: the Suppression of Coroners’ Inquests in Early Victorian England and Wales’ and it directly contributed to Harry becoming acting coroner at the end of None So Blind.
Great feature!
Ah, thank you! That means a lot coming from you x
🥰