If you go down to the woods…

Tomorrow, September 12th, sees the publication of my first standalone novel, Broken Ghosts. I am equal parts proud and terrified, although copies have already been spotted in the wild and a few good reviews have popped up here and there. Broken Ghosts is not like any of my other books, so I don’t have the comfort of knowing there are readers who’ve enjoyed earlier stories with these characters. It’s like being a debut novelist all over again.

So why the standalone? Why not more Tony McLean? And when are you going to write us another Con Fairchild book, for heaven’s sake? It’s been years! Well, Tony will be back next February in The Rest Is Death, so you can relax there. I have plans for Con, too, but she’s a bit homeless right now, in a manner of speaking. But I had an itch that had needed scratching for a very long time, and that’s what Broken Ghosts is.

The story starts back in late 2007 or early 2008 – my memory’s not what it was and a lot has happened since then. I’d been working in various jobs around agricultural consultancy in mid Wales for a few years by then, many of them involving visits to farms and smallholdings. I’ve lost count of the number of farm kitchens I’ve sat in, fortified by tea and Welsh cakes, and chatted with people about their farms, their businesses, and all manner of other things. I met many an interesting character though, and heard some stories that lodged themselves in my fledgling writer’s brain.

I couldn’t write those stories down, or use those characters directly, but I wanted to do something with this fount of inspiration. And so I set about spinning a yarn based loosely on things I’d heard and people I’d met. I’m not much of one for using notebooks, but I do have one with early character sketches and a few scenes scribbled in my barely-legible handwriting. Not much of a plot at first, but I wrote about fifteen or twenty-thousand words, including what is now the formative incident of the whole book, where 12 year old Phoebe MacDonald walks home from the train station, assuming her father has once again forgotten to come and pick her up, only to find her house engulfed in flames and both parents dead.

Not long after I had written that scene, my parents were killed in a car accident on the A9, a few miles south of Inverness.

It’s been a while since that happened – sixteen years, in fact – and yet I still get a shiver in the pit of my stomach every time I think of it. I’ve written elsewhere about how that turned my life upside down, and ultimately put me on the path to where I am today, but for perhaps understandable reasons I abandoned writing my novel about a young girl dealing with her grief as she adapted to a new life in a new country filled with strange people.

I actually abandoned all writing for almost two years – my own kind of grief, I suppose. It was a very busy time, dealing with the fallout of losing both parents, moving from Wales to Fife and taking on the family farm. There wasn’t much mental space left for creativity, and when the words did start to flow again it was Inspector McLean and my wee dragon Sir Benfro who caught the public imagination and started off my journey to bestselling author. The little book about the young girl wandering the woods alone got left behind.

But never forgotten. I don’t like starting something and not finishing it (except books I’m not enjoying – life’s too short!), and I was determined to get to the end of Phoebe’s tale. Finding time was the problem. Between the crime fiction novels I was under contract to write, and running the farm, there never seemed to be a moment to stop and think.

With the publication of Inspector McLean book twelve – All That Lives – which was also my twentieth published novel in just nine years – I realised something had to give. I took a year off writing crime fiction to tight deadlines and let myself write at a slower pace. Phoebe’s story – The Patience of Bees as it was then called – came first, but I did manage to write a draft of a Science Fiction novel that might see the light of day sometime.

Bees went through several drafts before it settled into the story that would become Broken Ghosts. I’m not much of a plotter, so all I had to start with was about twenty thousand words and some scribbled notes, along with the vague memory of my life before the accident. Early finished drafts lean heavily into the crime fiction I’d been writing almost non-stop for a decade, and it’s a tribute to the editorial skills of my agent Juliet Mushens that we managed to purge that from Phoebe’s tale. What emerged in the end is far better, I think.

From that first acceptable draft to the book now available from all good bookshops has taken very little time, thanks to the excellent work from Jack Butler and the rest of the team at Wildfire Books. Someone in that team came up with the title – Broken Ghosts – after sales and marketing thought The Patience of Bees didn’t cut the mustard. I don’t know who it was, but I owe them big time. It works for the story, and it’s a line from a Dylan Thomas poem that itself is a meditation on grief and resilience, among other things. Everyone will think I chose the title myself for that very reason, which makes me seem far cleverer than I really am.

And so it is here. My twenty-second published novel and first standalone. I hope you’ll take a chance and read it, and if you do I hope you’ll enjoy it.