Alan Bradley Q&A
Jennie Blake interviews Alan Bradley, author of the Flavia de Luce historical thrillers, the latest of which, A Red Herring Without Mustard, is out now via Orion.
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‘You frighten me,’ the Gypsy said. ‘Never have I seen my crystal ball so filled with darkness.’ So begins eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce’s third adventure through the charming but deceptively dark byways of the village of Bishop’s Lacey.What the fortune teller in fact claimed to see was a vision of Flavia’s mother, Harriet, who died on a mountainside in Tibet when Flavia was less than a year old. ‘She’s trying to come home,’ the old woman intones. ‘And she needs your help.’ For Flavia, the old gypsy’s words open up old wounds and new possibilities – not all of them nice ones. Is she a faker, motivated by the fact that the rom used to camp in the grounds of Buckshaw until Flavia’s father turned them off, with tragic results? Or is there some truth to her powers, and the message she brings back from the other side? And when the village is rocked by another ghastly murder, how will a growing fascination with gypsy lore help Flavia to solve it?
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Jennie Blake: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?
Alan Bradley: ‘Apply bum to chair’. A fundamentally sound bit of advice which I follow slavishly, although not literally.
JB: Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?
AB: Authors who love the language: Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Sir Walter Scott, Evelyn Waugh, John Banville, T.H. White, Charles Dickens…the list goes on.
JB: Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?
AB: I write for myself, but I’m always aware that there are readers who like the same sorts of things that I do. It’s a kind of secret kinship.
JB: Where do you write, and why?
AB: I write most often in the early morning hours – 4:30 a.m., or so – propped up in bed with a stack of pillows at my back and a laptop and two cats on my knees and legs. When the sun comes up, I will be able to see the spot where the sea-nymph, Calypso, held Ulysses captive in her cave for years. I’ve even joked that, in Flavia, I have my own sea nymph.
JB: Tell us the book you most wish you had written.
AB: Ecclesiastes. Runners up: Ulysses (the Joycean version); Finnegan’s Wake, Bleak House, The Once and Future King
JB: Flavia is such a charming and unique character, and she has grown through all three of the novels; does writing her present a special sort of challenge in any way?
AB: Not really. I had to learn how to write Flavia. The secret was to learn how to shut up and listen.
JB: The books are full of chemical know-how and history, is that an interest of yours as well? Have you conducted any of the experiments that so enthral Flavia?
AB: My knowledge of chemistry is less than minus zero. Although Flavia came fully equipped with family, house and enthusiasms, I was happy that her obsession was chemistry. I recognized that I would be able to approach it with the same fresh eyes as she did. Had her interest been in, television engineering, say – something which I knew a little about – I’m afraid she might have been much more jaded in her outlook.
JB: The titles of your books are both apt and interesting, do you go searching for a title before beginning the story? Or does the title somehow emerge from the story itself?
AB: That’s an interesting question. The title of the first book, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie came quite a long time before the book. I picked the quotation out of a hundred year old encyclopaedic dictionary. Once chosen, it dictated, at least in part, some of the details of the mystery. The same with The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag and A Red Herring Without Mustard.
JB: What sort of research goes into each book? Were you familiar with post-war Britain before you began writing the series?
AB: I do enormous amounts of research before I begin writing, and I must confess that it’s – other than completing a first draft – one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing. As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a magnet for old reference books: Whitaker’s Almanacks from the ’50′s, old ABC Railway Guides, Law’s Grocer’s Manual: my library overflows with these delicious (and wonderful-smelling!) volumes. It’s a joy to work with them, to inhale them (their odour alone catapults me into the years I’m writing about). I’ve been reading about postwar Britain all my life, so writing about it seemed almost inevitable.
JB: The quotes, character names, and events always feel as if they resonate on more than one level; are you ever going to publish an annotated version of the stories?
AB: Wouldn’t that be fun? I’m glad you noticed. There’s as much beneath the surface as there is above. An annotated version would allow me to make use of the 99% of my research that doesn’t actually make it into the final pages.
JB: In A Red Herring Without Mustard, we get further insights into Flavia’s mysterious and intriguing mother, will Flavia (and the readers!) ever learn what really happened?
AB: I think of the Flavia series as a pie, of which each book is simply one slice. By the end of the sixth volume, we will have answers to many of the questions that have been asked about the books.
JB: In this book, Flavia begins to confront some of the harsher realities in her life. Has she reached a specific turning point where the cares of the real world are going to intrude more strongly on the life she is leading?
AB: Flavia’s life is shaped, to some degree, by an outside world of which she has little awareness. Much of her knowledge of that world is gained second hand and is coloured, (or should I say “tinted” accordingly, by those who convey
it to her. On the other hand, as someone who is swiftly learning the scientific method, she is in a unique position, with unique tools, to find things out for herself.
JB: Do you have plans to write about a different time period or set of characters?
AB: Not really – at least, not at the moment. I was about Flavia’s age myself in 1950, so I have a strong sense of those times. I’m very comfortable working with the characters, so there’s not much compulsion to do anything else. And yet, there’s that absolutely terrific idea I have for …
JB: Is there anything you can reveal about what might happen next?
AB: I’m just finishing work on the fourth book, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows which will be published early next year. It probably wouldn’t be giving away any secrets to say that it’s set in winter, and that I’d been looking forward to writing it for a long time. There’s much more to learn about the de Luces of Bishop’s Lacey. My fondest hope is that, at the end of the sixth book, readers will say, “Oh my God!”, and begin digging for The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie so that they can go back and begin all over again.
