I recently read Scarlet Widow by Graham Masterton and I jumped at the chance to put some questions to this well known author. You can read my review of Scarlet Widow here and you can buy the book for yourself from Amazon by clicking here.
Q: Can
you tell us a little about Scarlet Widow, the first book in the
Beatrice Scarlet series?
A: Scarlet
Widow opens in London in the mid-18th
century. The heroine Beatrice is the only daughter of an apothecary,
and her father teaches her all he knows about medicines and other
scientific experiments. When her parents both die, Beatrice goes to
Birmingham to live with her aunt, where she meets the boy who she
will eventually marry. He becomes a preacher and is appointed to
take care of a parish in New England. Beatrice, being an obedient
wife, goes with him. Not long after they have arrived, however,
the animals of local farmers begin to die in mysterious
circumstances. Beatrice’s husband and most of the local populace
believe that it is the work of Satan, but Beatrice, with her
knowledge of chemistry, begins to suspect otherwise.
Q: What was
your inspiration for Scarlet Widow and what made you set it in
America?
A: To
be totally honest with you, I don’t know what inspired me to write
it, except that I thought that the idea of an 18th
century CSI was quite entertaining. Ever since my days as editor of
Penthouse magazine I have been interested in women’s thinking and
their role in society, and Beatrice gave me a good opportunity to
write about a woman who was brought up to be obedient but at the same
time was characterful and strong. I wanted to set it in New England
to get that Salem Witch Trial atmosphere and also because I know New
England well (and once almost bought a house in Connecticut). Not
only that, I wanted to show that the goodwives who emigrated to New
England were enormously hard-working and supportive and without them
America would not have developed as quickly and with such prosperity
as it did. They had to do everything: cook, clean, look after
animals, help with the crops, sew and knit and make clothes, and
at the same time have children and bring them up. Many of them were
well-educated and could read and write and some were kidnapped by
Indians so that they could write letters on behalf of the tribes to
the colonists.
Q: Beatrice
Scarlet is not your first female protagonist as your Katy Maguire
series received rave reviews; why do you choose to write with a
female lead?
A: I
have written many novels with female protagonists, such as Lady of
Fortune about a woman banker, Maiden Voyage about a girl who
inherits a shipping line, and probably my favourite Trauma, about a
woman crime-scene cleaner whose job and whose collapsing marriage
almost drive her insane. I find it very challenging to write novels
from a female point of view, but it gives me the added advantage of
being able to describe my male characters through their perceptive
(or sometimes besotted) eyes. When I was editing Penthouse I spent a
lot of time getting to know the girls who appeared in the magazine
and finding out what their ambitions were and how they coped in a
world where most men would just look at them with their tongues
hanging out and not care about their personalities or their anxieties
or their self-esteem.
Q: Scarlet
Widow delves into some weird and wonderful potions and remedies; how
long did it take you to research?
A: Bloody
ages. I don’t think I realised what I was letting myself in for.
Every single tiny detail of everything needed intensive research.
Food, drink, church services, housing, hygiene, transportation.
The fact that everybody in England had to be buried by law in a
woollen shroud to support the wool industry. The number of
undergarments women wore (and didn’t wear…no knickers in those
days!). There were many familiar acids and alkalis and other potions
around in the 18th century but most of them were known by totally
different names.
Q: Who
is your favourite character in Scarlet Widow and why?
A: Of
course it has to be Beatrice. I so much enjoy writing about the
conflict between her natural feistiness and her respectful behaviour
towards her husband and towards the church and her community as a
whole.
Q: There
are some disturbing and shocking scenes in Scarlet Widow, especially
towards the end; how do you decide how graphic you need the scene to
be versus how much should be left to the reader's imagination?
A: I
could write a book about this alone. I have written some very
graphic scenes but murder and sexual assault are horrendous and there
is no point in being coy about it. You can read much more graphic
accounts of butchery every day in your newspaper…the only
difference being that I make readers feel as if they are witnessing
it first-hand. I know many people enjoy what they call “cosy
crime”, where the worst thing that happens is that the bishop gets
beaten to death with a badger in the bathroom, but I wanted to face
up to the true horror of taking somebody else’s life. Graphic
horror has to be very well written and I have several times
experimented with taking readers right to the very edge in order to
test my own writing skill. My short story Eric the Pie had the first
issue of the new horror magazine Frighteners banned by the retailer
WH Smith. Then there was a Cemetery Dance chapbook Sepsis (woman
eats dead cat) and another extreme Cemetery Dance chapbook is on the
way…Cheeseboy.
Q: You're
well known for your horror books; what made you move from horror to
crime writing and which genre do you enjoy more?
A: Crime
has a much wider audience than horror but I think I have managed to
keep all of my horror readers with the Katie Maguire novels, simply
because death in the real world is just as grisly as death in the
supernatural world. I am still writing horror. My story The Greatest
Gift appears in Grey Matter’s new anthology Peel Back The Skin and
I have a new horror novel in mind to write this year. The reason I
wrote the first Katie Maguire novel was that my late wife and I were
living in Cork in Ireland at the time which is an extremely
characterful city and I realised that very few writers had ever used
it as a setting. I enjoy writing in all genres. I am just about to
write a new family saga in which nobody dies.
Q: You
can consider me in the queue to read the next book, so can you give
us a hint as to what's next for Beatrice Scarlet?
A: The
next Beatrice Scarlet will be set in London, and involves a bit of
witchery.
*****
Well I certainly can't wait for the next instalment in the Beatrice Scarlet series.
Thank you very much to Graham Masterton for answering my questions and to Blake Brooks from Head of Zeus for giving me the opportunity to interview such a well known established author.
