INTERVIEW: CLIO GRAY
The Scotsman
19 August, 2009
FROM Balintore, the village in Easter Ross that Clio Gray has made her
home, you can look across the Moray Firth to Culbin Sands, a broad
sandbank near Findhorn. In the 1630s, she tells me, the original
village on the site was obliterated in a freak sandstorm. People ran
across fields to safety while the sand engulfed their homes. She has
read about it.
Gray’s world is coloured by stories like this, gems she has found in
old, rare, obscure books, half-lost snippets of history. They burrow
their way into her novels and stories. Writing, she says, is "just
a way of bringing all those wonderful things ADVERTISEMENTtogether
and making sure they’re not completely lost forever."
The eyewitness account of the Findhorn sandstorm, for example, came in
useful in her latest novel, The Brotherhood of Five, out this month,
in which she describes a similar disaster in Thanet, at the eastern
tip of Kent. It’s a vivid beginning for a historical thriller, her
fourth featuring missing-persons investigator Whilbert Stroop.
Sitting over a pot of tea after hours in Tain Library, where Gray is
a part-time librarian, we are where she is happiest: among books. Her
house, she says, is full of them. Apart from her dogs, they are her
most constant companion. She plans her holidays around visits to
second-hand bookshops. Her favourite solace is to reorganise her books.
She knows all her books, she says. She would know if one were
missing. "I lent a few once to somebody and they never gave them
back. That was a long time ago and I can tell you exactly what those
books are and what’s in them. I regretted it and I regret it now."
She reads voraciously: histories and travelogues, novels and
nature books. She speed-reads bestsellers "to see what people are
reading". When she comes across something that interests her it is
catalogued, referenced, added to her personal database. No book is
wasted. "Everything you read can give you a different viewpoint. It
adds that bit more to your life experience, which can go into maybe
the next book, or a story."
Research becomes a journey through places and times. A particularly
interesting fact can change the direction of a plot. A short story
might be shaped just to include one.
"When I come across a single fact that I find quite interesting, I’ll
follow that fact, which usually leads me to something else and then
something else. And so you end up with this beautiful, serendipitous
journey. I love it, it’s a really pleasant way to spend your life."
Gray came to the notice of many in Scotland when she won The Scotsman
& Orange Short Story Competition in 2006 with I Should Have Listened
Harder, about a man facing death in a prison mine in a place called
Nertchinsk (she came across it in a book).
At this time, her first novel, Guardians of the Key, was being
considered by publishers Headline, after winning the Harry Bowling
Prize for an unpublished book set in London. Gray knew she wanted to
enter, but loathes cities in general and London in particular. She
found a solution in the past – "when London was more or less a
collection of villages".
Victorian London, she felt, had been the subject of enough spilled
ink. But she found a period to her liking in the early 1800s. Europe
was in turmoil with the aftermath of the French Revolution and the
ongoing Napoleonic Wars; the industrial revolution was just around
the corner. "The past is another country," she says. "I just feel
it’s somewhere I belong to."
All her books are infused with moments of history: London’s silk
traders and the relics of the city of Lucca (Guardians of the Key);
the port of Odessa, and a curious Pennines mansion (The Roaring of
the Labyrinth); the islands of Saareema, off the Estonian Coast, with
their strange Jurassic landscape (The Envoy of the Black Pine). The art
is in weaving disparate snippets into compelling historic mysteries.
Gray cheerfully ignored the advice often thrust at new writers to
"write what you know". "I think writing what you know is extremely
dull. How many people have lives that are interesting enough that
other people want to know about? I think the better piece of advice
is write what you’d like to read – you might end up with something
half decent. That’s what I do."
She does admit to an interest in death. She writes about turbulent
times when death was an ever-present neighbour. "We do forget how
close death was. It’s a common theme in just about everything I
write. We’re very blase today, we expect to live until we’re 80. Back
in the 1800s, 30 per cent of the population never made it past 40. I
am rather morbid, I suppose. I like reading about these things."
She does add some fairly macabre deaths of her own. In The Brotherhood
of Five, a man falls – or is pushed – into a vat of molten lead,
which was part of a complex of towers on the Thanet marshes for making
lead shot. "I was imagining the tower, how they would melt all the
lead and so forth. It was kind of obvious really, to chuck somebody
in. It is quite gruesome, isn’t it? But quite interesting. I tried
to research it.
"I wrote to a couple of people to ask what would happen if somebody
did go into a lead vat that was beginning to boil. But none of the
answers that came back were much help, so in the end I just made it
up. There comes a point where unless you carry out experiments by
dropping cats into vats, you’re never going to know. And where would
you get all the lead?" She pauses, grins. "I could rustle up the cat."
>From an early age, Gray, who was born in Yorkshire, showed both an
interest in the macabre and a voracious appetite for information. "I
was reading Hitchcock by the time I was about ten. I remember my
primary school teacher called my mother in because she was worried
about the deep, dark nature of things I was writing at school. I used
to catalogue what colour cars went past the window, make maps of our
local stream. It’s all there, isn’t it? The seeds."
At Leeds University, she "didn’t stick to the curriculum", instead
immersing herself in its idiosyncratic libraries. "I’d come across
books that hadn’t been issued for 70 years. Linguistic books and
dialect books and books on the Armenian genocide in 1914, which no-one
had ever heard of at the time. I used to spend a lot of time at the
medical library, which had all these fantastically gory journals on
bizarre ways people die. The difference between manual strangulation
and ropes, that sort of thing." Discovering she loved research, on
graduating she spent an unemployed year writing her own independent
dissertation. It could have been a surprise to no-one when she got
a job as a university librarian.
Seventeen years ago, after finding discarded syringes in her local
park, she handed in her notice, packed her camper van and headed
north. A mechanical fault at Fort William prompted a diversion
to Inverness where she was referred – she still has no idea why –
to Ken’s Garage at Kildary in Ross-shire. She drove to Balintore,
parked up and never left.
Scotland is where she started to write. "First I wrote
‘world-from-your-armchair’ type books, the kind of things they used
to write in the 1930s. They described nature to you in a story-type
manner, which is a bit of an art that has been lost now.
"It was really for my own satisfaction, I used to paint all the
pictures for them." Then came four novels, which failed to find a
publisher. She regrets none of it. It was all the learning of a craft.
Switching to short stories, she started entering competitions – and
winning prizes. A collection of her stories, Types of Everlasting Rest,
has now been published by Two Ravens Press. Her novels have established
her as a writer of highly original, intricately plotted crime fiction,
which has depth as well as pace. Writing in The Scotsman, Allan Massie
described her as "uncommonly interesting writer" – if a slightly
morbid one.
Now she is in the process of developing a new historic crime series
set in Helmsdale and Brora where (she discovered in books) there was
a mini-goldrush in 1868. "I think it will be good for me. You can
actually get trapped in a web of your own making."
Crime interests her, she says, because it gives the writer a broad
vista, a storyboard on which a range of strands can be incorporated. "I
like the solving of things. It gives you quite a large vista, you
can bring in quite a lot of external things.
"I can’t bear reading books about failed marriages."
More than that, I suspect, crime interests her because death
interests her. "The mechanics of death are quite interesting, and
the implications. Someone is gone from the world. And how you can
never know if there’s anything on the other side. That’s interesting,
don’t you think?"
~U The Brotherhood of Five is published by Headline, price £19.99. Clio
Gray is appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival with fellow crime
writer Catriona McPherson at 6:45pm tomorrow.