From the very
beginning, A Baby’s Bones was
a crime story. Burial rites were very important in the Elizabethan era. Being
denied a regular burial was a punishment, and the dumping of two people down a
well suggested they had been murdered. Someone was trying to conceal the crime.
I loved writing fantasy elements like the suggestion that the house is haunted,
but at its heart, the book was about a possible crime far in the past. I leave
it to the reader’s imagination to decide whether Solomon Seabourne’s efforts at
alchemy had any effects, in the past or present.
The contemporary strand
did have to change. I think investigating such brutal events must affect people
working on it, and Sage and her students are overshadowed by the bones emerging
from the well. The place, the story of the bodies and the associated burial
tell a story that affects the people around it, from the family living in the
cottage to the villagers. I’m not one of those writers who can plan
meticulously, so the moment I started writing a scene in the sixteenth century
cottage the atmosphere started to affect the story. I think the jury is still
out on whether the house is haunted and whether it affected the behaviour of
the people around it – I shall leave it to the readers to decide for
themselves. But some people are vulnerable to atmosphere and to the violent
events they are excavating.
I’m a big fan of crime,
mostly (but not exclusively) by female authors. I want to understand what
intersection of thinking and emotions cause people to commit crimes. When I was
working as a psychologist I found people were often planning acts they had
seriously considered, like the mercy killing of a sick or demented relative,
for example, or even getting revenge on someone. They rarely acted on these
impulses, but the idea was there. I wanted to explore the motivations of the
different characters, from the deceived wife to the lovelorn man to the
rejected lover. Why do people lose it and try and kill someone? Sometimes even
the person themselves can’t understand after the red mist has cleared.
Researching the forensic
side was fascinating. Val McDermid’s Forensics was
an inspiration here, as well as texts on the work of forensic archaeology.
Sage’s systematic consideration of the evidence as it’s revealed is very like
solving a crime. Archaeologists find artefacts and interpret them in the same
way that we form a theory of how a crime was committed. We’re all, as writers
and readers, building stories as Sage shows us the evidence. Writing, for me,
is like reading in slow motion, I don’t know what’s going to happen next
either.
A Baby’s Bones by Rebecca
Alexander (Titan Books)
Archaeologist Sage
Westfield has been called in to excavate a sixteenth-century well, and expects
to find little more than soil and the odd piece of pottery. But the disturbing
discovery of the bones of a woman and new born baby make it clear that she has
stumbled onto an historical crime scene, one that is interwoven with an
unsettling local legend of witchcraft and unrequited love. Yet there is more to
the case than a four-hundred-year-old mystery. The owners of a nearby cottage
are convinced that it is haunted, and the local vicar is being plagued with
abusive phone calls. Then a tragic death makes it all too clear that a modern
murderer is at work...
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