E. S. Thomson: The Creation of Jem Flockhart

I’d always wanted to be a writer. I read a lot as a child, and wrote loads of stories at primary school – long rambling things, usually based on thefts and hauntings (“The Mystery Of The False Teeth” is an unpublished classic!) Then I went to secondary school and was shepherded towards maths and physics and other things I’m really bad at. I kept reading, but I read mostly 19th century novels – Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, RL Stevenson; later on some HG Wells, Graham Green, DH Lawrence… I spent a year reading nothing but Dylan Thomas. Anyway, as I was mostly reading stuff written by dead men, I never really got a sense that writing was something someone like me could do. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in a small town in the middle of the Lancashire sprout fields and coming from a non-graduating family, writing a novel and getting published seemed as likely as visiting Mars.

Then I went to Edinburgh University (my family are from Scotland), where I studied English then switched to history. I kept reading novels. I got a job at Waterstones after my undergraduate degree and eventually tried some contemporary fiction. At that point, I thought “I could do this!” for the first time. I got a PhD in the history of medicine, and found it all so fascinating that I decided to see whether I could put it into a novel. I got an agent on the back of 'A Proper Education for Girls' (2009), that first manuscript. I wrote another novel called 'Bleakly Hall' (2011) and got a publisher this time too! I started off writing more literary fiction, but when my publisher suggested I try crime, Jem Flockhart was created in 'Beloved Poison' (2016).

Crime fiction is often regarded as inferior to other sorts of fiction but recent authors like Robbie Morrison, Graeme Macrae Burnet and Alis Hawkins have shown that it can be beautifully written and deeply evocative of time and place, as well as having a compelling narrative and being intricately plotted. I love crime fiction – as a genre it offers a puzzle, and we all like to work out puzzles. It’s a safe space to read about awful things, which I think humans also find appealing – exciting and horrifying, but with a satisfying resolution and no actual threat to ourselves. And there are so many excellent writers too; readers have so many opportunities to find characters and locations and historical time periods that appeal to them – and if there’s a crime, then you can add excitement into the mix. What’s not to love about that?

I wrote my first two novels on the Number 23 bus going from Stockbridge to Morningside. Forty minutes every morning and then again in the evening as I went back home. I never write on the bus these days as I walk to work now. I started off writing longhand with a fountain pen in a hardbacked wire-spined A4 notebook, and I still write this way. I love the connection between the mind and the hand, and the pen and paper. It’s centuries old as an approach and that appeals to me. I have to use a fountain pen – I have four favourites. If I forget my pen, I can’t write. I’ve written nine novels like this. Every few days (if I can) I type up what I’ve written.

Now, writing is much, much harder. I no longer have an hour and a half on the bus – time to myself to be creative. My job is ten times busier than it used to be. I now have two sons, and although they are old enough to look after themselves, they are still at home. When writing the first four Jem Flockhart books I was a single mother with a full-time job. It was super-hard producing fiction, but I could do it when my sons were in bed (they went to bed at 7pm on the dot!). Now, my day job as university lecturer takes up so much more of my time and energy – plus I am older and more tired, my sons watch things on TV that tempt me to loll exhausted on the sofa and watch with them… These days I only get to write when I go an a writing retreat – I’ll blitz out 20,000 or 30,000 words in a frantic week long hand then type them up in between the blizzard of emails and classes when I get back. It’s quite stressful. But what else can I do? Carry on or give up are the only options. I choose to (try to) carry on.

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