Can you tell us a little about all the series you’ve created.
First, thank you very much for having me! As you know I’m an avid fan of Elizabeth Cage and all at St. Mary’s, and I’m delighted to be here.
My oldest series, which was first published in 2011, is Murray of Letho, featuring a minor Scottish gentleman and his ever-expanding household of servants of various levels of competence. We first meet him as a student at St. Andrews University in 1802 but now, thirteen books later, he’s a little more mature. Because he was aging too quickly, I started writing the Hippolyta Napier series, starting in 1829 in what is now Royal Deeside, not far from where I live. Hippolyta is a young doctor’s wife, an animal lover and very hospitable – and nosy.
Then came the Orkneyinga Murders series. That happened by accident, when my mother told someone I wrote historical crime fiction and he said excitedly ‘Oh, do you write anything about Vikings? I love Vikings!’ I was so taken aback that anyone could think you could write Viking murder mysteries that the idea stuck in my head, and the next thing I knew I was planning my first one.
In the last year I’ve added a couple more series, one, Alec Cattanach, set in Second World War Aberdeen – because I couldn’t get to Orkney to do research during lockdown – and the other, the Journals of Dr. Robert Wilson, based on real journals held in Aberdeen University archives. I’d come across them years ago and thought they’d make a great basis for a series, with Wilson as a dynamic hero, but he refused to be written that way!
Are you able, without giving too much away, to tell us a little about your plans for each series?
There’s at least one Murray to go, set around the visit of King George IV to Edinburgh, and maybe more after that. There’s also at least one more Viking one planned, as I had a story arc prepared for part of it before I started the series. Alec Cattanach is intended to have one book for each year of the war, and I have vague ideas of the background to each year – there was a serious local blitz in 1943 which I want to include., for example. Dr. Wilson I think has nine books, one for each of the volumes of his travel journal – he starts in northern France and ends, if I remember rightly, in Egypt? I think? Hippolyta is perhaps the vaguest, though I’m determined to get her on to a bicycle and a railway train, and she’s only in 1837 so far!
Do you have a favourite series? A favourite character?
I think my favourite series is usually the one I’m going to work on after the book I’m currently working on. Favourite characters … that’s a bit trickier. Too many to choose from!
Have you always written?
Since I first found out that that’s how the stories got into those book things I loved, I’ve written. When I was about ten I discovered my first Agatha Christie, and knew I wanted to write crime fiction. Historicals came later, when I realised I was too untechy to keep up with most of the current police procedural stuff – until very recently I’ve had a Nokia phone and driven a 24 year old Nissan Micra, and have never been able to program a video recorder! Supermarket automated tills weep when they see me approach.
How much research do you do? Do you find you don’t use most of it?
Loads of research. I don’t know how you do it, switching historical periods all the time. I can barely keep up with the ones I have! I suppose for the first two series it was relatively easy – I knew the Georgian period quite well, and had read lots of books written around that time, and visited stately homes and watched the Antiques Roadshow and so on. When I decided to take on the Vikings I realised just how much I would have to absorb before I could even start, and I spent about a year reading archaeological reports and sagas, and going to university lectures (a course helpfully called Vikings!, with the exclamation mark!), going to Orkney, of course (good excuse), and even learning Norwegian – yes, it’s a very modern language but it helped, I think, with rhythms – or I just enjoyed learning it. Then the Second World War was very easy, not long ago at all, but lots of details to check because there are still people around who remember. And yes, once you’ve done all that, you just head off and write and hope it all comes together. But I don’t like seeing anachronisms in other people’s books, so I try to avoid them myself. I’m picky!
How do you come up with your titles?
The Orkneyinga titles all include animals. This is basically a challenge to my cover illustrator, Helen Braid, but I think she’s won so far. As for the rest, I’m not sure. They just sort of appear. One of my early books was originally called An Unkenspeckle Woman, and friends wisely jumped on that and stopped it because they said it was incomprehensible (it means ‘inconspicuous’), so after that I’ve kept Scots words out of it. Apart from that one they’ve mostly kept their working titles. For the purposes of writing the books, though, the titles all have to be reducible to three initials (Tomb for an Eagle is TFE, The Contentious Business of Samuel Seabury is CBS) which can’t duplicate another book I’ve written, so that I can keep myself distantly acquainted with being organised.
Other than writing, how do you like to pass your time?
I have far too many hobbies or distractions! I do lots of different woolwork – knitting, crocheting, weaving, and so on, including some Vikingish stuff. I have a small allotment, I read copiously (of course), I enjoy cooking (not that anyone else necessarily enjoys eating it), and I play walking netball, which is enough to keep anyone grounded. Goal Attack for preference, but generally our squad is better at dishing out the insults than actually playing. It was someone at netball who first introduced me to the Chronicles of St. Mary’s, so for that alone it was well worth it!
When you’re being interviewed about your books do you suddenly become tongue-tied and can’t remember your characters’ names? Or is it just me?
What characters? Who? They did what?
Do you plan ahead when devising your plots or do you just plonk yourself down and have at it.
I always planned a bit with Murray and Hippolyta – not too much, or I could persuade myself that if I had written the whole plot down in two hundred words there wasn’t much point in writing the actual book. And I’m quite prepared for things to go off-plan. With the first Viking one for some reason I just hit the ground running, and thought Great, this works! But when I went back to write the next Murray it didn’t work. So evidently Murray and Hippolyta are polite, controlled, well-planned gentry, and the Orkney inhabitants are just free spirits. In the latest Orkney book I had a character who changed sex halfway through and was then edited out almost completely – I just have no idea what’s going on.
What can we look forward to from Lexie Conyngham in the future?
The plan (but see above) is another Cattanach next, then a Murray, then a Dr. Wilson, then a Hippolyta, then back to Orkney. But sometimes life gets in the way. I’ll try very hard, though, for the next few years, not to write something that isn’t in one of those five series! I’ll keep my other historical adventures to seeing where Max and friends go next.
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