Today, I have the fabby sassy author, Throne Moore sitting
round my pool and showing me up in her bikini….!!!
Thank you for inviting me from rainy Wales to your gorgeous
swimming pool. Here I am.
Well, I can always dream. I’ve reached the age when the more
appropriate dress, if I don’t want to frighten the horses, would be
Perhaps I’ll just sit under an all-concealing umbrella,
sipping something cool, and natter on about my new novel,
The Unravelling.
Thorne, it’s been a long time since, I’ve laughed so much
and whilst you talk and I giggle, let’s open another bottle of bubbly….
Perfect, I’m in need of another drink after that. Now let me
talk about Karen, she’s a little more sobering than we are *laugh*
Karen, who mentally
unravels, as she begins to unravel the truth about events in her childhood.
Events that she had wiped out of her mind, but one little incident, an apple
rolling into a flooded drain, begins to unblock memories. Flashbacks come
piecemeal, leaving her struggling to make sense of it all, but the one thing
she is sure of is that she must find her childhood idol, the angelic Serena
Whinn, who is the key to the truth.
I write crime mysteries – I really love the label Domestic
Noir. I like to delve into the Why of crime, how it all came about and what
happened after, to everyone touched by it, rather than forensic investigation
or police procedure. I aim at slow revelation and understanding, rather than
the dramatic punches of a thriller. I’d prefer to evoke tears of pity rather
than squeals of terror. But in The Unravelling, I think I have come closest to
writing a genuine thriller, rather than just a psychological study.
The inspiration for the book is the estate where I grew up.
Like Karen, I was 10, going on 11, in 1965, and I have very vivid memories not
just of the place but of the childhood fears and fantasies attached to an
innocuous walk home from school It seemed to me then like a very permanent
thing, but it is only now, looking back with hindsight, that I can appreciate
what a state of flux it was in, spreading out across what had been farmland and
market gardens not many years before, a post-war council estate with prefabs
coming down and high rise blocks going up. Old farm tracks still existed among
the houses and streams ran through the estate in deep ditches, appearing and
disappearing like magic. They were always a lure to children, something to
swing across, somewhere to pick kingcups or fish, unsuccessfully, with bent
pins, for sticklebacks, but also slightly ominous, with dark culverts that only
big bold boys dare enter, because of killer leaches and possible monsters.
Children are good as inventing monsters. Perhaps they are an essential part of
childhood. They certainly add colour.
I fixed Karen’s childhood very firmly in 1965/6 because my
memories of what it was like to be a child then would not have made sense a
couple of years later. By the end of the 60s, the world had turned upside down
in psychedelic rebellion, influencing everything from dreams to dress. Back in
1965, before the summer of love and Vietnam and moon landings and The Troubles,
we were still clinging to the tail end of the deferential 50s in our cotton
frocks and pigtails. Daddies went to work and drove cars, mummies did the
shopping and packed us off to school, and discipline was maintained by the cane
and a clip round the ear from the local bobby. But there were still monsters,
real and imagined.
Action in the book is split between Karen’s flashback
memories of her childhood, and her attempts to unravel the truth, thirty-five
years later. I like using time as a significant element in all my books,
because I am fixated on history. No event stands alone. It occupies a place in
time, brought about by previous events and leaving a mark on all that follows.
Any attempt to look back at something, whether it happened yesterday or a
hundred years ago, is always coloured by our knowledge of what came after. I
like contrasting that sort of analysis of events, with the very different
understanding we have of events as they are happening around us now, in the
present, when we have no idea of what will follow.
I have played with time in similar ways in my two previous
books.
In
A Time For Silence,
a young woman comes across the derelict Welsh farmhouse where her grandparents
had lived and she discovers that her grandfather was shot, although no one was
ever charged or convicted. She is determined to discover the truth, and
fantasises about how idyllic life have been before the murder destroyed it. I
intersperse her frequently deluded investigations with an account of what
really happened in the cottage, back in the 1930s and 40s.
In
Motherlove, the story is split between 1990
when two babies are born in the same maternity ward, and twenty two years
later, when two young women discover that their mothers are not the women who
gave birth to them. They react in different ways, and both of them want to
learn the truth, but neither are expecting it to be what it is.
Thorne, a million thanks for sitting round my pool and
talking about your fascinating writing, as you know, I have read The
Unravelling and loved it, now I am about to take a peek at Motherlove. though not
until we’ve eaten more of these tapas I’ve made and finished this bottle of
bubbly.
Well, I have plenty more in the pipe line, in the same genre
and I’d be happy to share them with you another time around your pool, that’s
if you’ll have me back.
You bet, but I’ll make sure I buy a new bikini first … *laugh*
Other links, if you can’t get enough of me:
Thank you Thorne and thank you for stopping by and meeting
my lovely guest today.
Have a wonderful day and I hope the sun is shinning on your
face and in your heart.
Love
Pauline
xxx