Where E’er We Tread, ‘Tis Haunted, Holy Ground

Sharing the Hidden Heart of Ireland

A guest post by Erin Hart. 

People often ask why I chose Ireland as a setting, and I always say it’s the other way ‘round—I’m fairly certain that Ireland chose me. For some reason, I've been drawn to that little island more than any other spot in the world ever since I was a child. There's just something about the deeply complex and contradictory nature of the place, all those layers of history one on top of the other—that lends a particular resonance to the kinds of stories I feel compelled to tell. I’m attracted to the otherworldly quality that emanates from certain spots in Ireland, and one of my aims in writing stories set there is to share some of those wonderful hidden places.

I’m fortunate to have some really good connections. My husband is an Irishman and a traditional musician; his name is Paddy O’Brien (not making that up!) and he plays the button accordion. Whenever we travel in Ireland, we visit musician friends and go to informal sessions where tunes and songs are traded. Those places aren’t exactly top secret, but they’re usually off the beaten path. You have to know where to go, or you risk straying into a bar where a DJ is blasting ordinary pop music, or even American-style country, also very popular in Ireland. If you’re looking for traditional music, it helps to know someone who knows where to find it. Paddy and I have gone into bars out the West, in Clare and Connemara where the locals are mad for set dancing, and have their own signature sets (danced in a square, with eight people and a bit of fancy footwork), that the people in that particular locality have been doing for a hundred years or more. All right, it does help if you bring along a well-known, world-class musician to play for them, but still…

When I take groups to Ireland, which I’ve been doing for the past three years, we visit many of the locations from my stories. There’s a lot of traditional music in my novels, because the main characters, Cormac Maguire and Nora Gavin, are both musicians. (He plays the wooden flute and she’s a traditional singer, as I am.) In the beginning the choice to make the characters musicians seemed like a handy way to give them a little extra dimension, but it also seemed pretty authentic, since many of our musician friends are also schoolteachers and journalists doctors, policemen, and scientists in real life. So many people in Ireland play traditional music that it seemed quite natural to have characters who’d bring along instruments when they traveled to an excavation site, just in case there might be a good local session nearby. As time went on, the music also became a way to flesh out the stories, a chance to slip plenty of history and culture into the mix, and to give the characters a true grounding and connection to the places they come from. 

So when I bring people to Ireland, we always try to hit some music or singing sessions, like An Góilín – the traditional singer's club that meets at the Teachers’ Club on Parnell Square in Dublin, or instrumental session at The Cobblestone in Smithfield or Hughes’s pub in Chancery Street. Old friends are regular performers at all those venues. If you’ve never been to one, a traditional session is a feast of music—jigs, reels, hornpipes, a whirl of notes that will leave you exhilarated and sated by the end of the night—even if you’re not drinking porter.

I’m also fascinated by traditional culture, folklore, and folkways. My stories often involve ancient rituals from thousands of  years ago, still practiced today in Ireland—and there are many: bonfires set alight on the tops of hills at certain times of the year, crosses woven of rushes, trees adorned with rags and ribbons beside holy wells, and otherworldly ringforts said to be inhabited by the little people. 

My husband  used to work in the industrial peat bogs of the Midlands, so we often cross these dark bogs, strange places where all surface vegetation cut away, where blackened peat from just after the last Ice Age still remains underfoot—not quite the picture of green Ireland that so many hold in their imaginations. I asked Paddy to take me to the place where he’d worked, since I was writing about a similar workshop in LAKE OF SORROWS. We parked the car, and as we approached the large machine shed, I asked, “Will anyone here remember you?” He said, “You must be jokin’. I haven’t been here since 1969.” But as we got closer, a man in a brown canvas coat stepped out of the doorway, looked us up and down once, and said, “O’Brien—what do you want?” The exploitation of the bogs might be bad for the environment, but in that part of the country, it was the only good job to be had. Everyone Paddy had worked with—way back in 1969—was still working there.

But the most fascinating thing about the industrial bogs is that they’re also the spots where much of Ireland’s archaeology is going on these days, and where artifacts and bog bodies still turn up with an almost alarming regularity.  At the National Museum in Dublin, we visit an exhibition called “Kingship and Sacrifice,” which features the remains of several bog people, thought to be human sacrifices during the Iron Age. One of these men was discovered by my husband’s cousin, Kevin Barry, while he was clearing a drain in a bog being developed for gardening peat moss. If this really is a small world, there’s no place smaller than Ireland. Everyone is linked to everyone else somehow, and if you need to get in to see the state pathologist or a member of the murder squad, you’ve nothing to do only ask your friends, and someone will come up with a connection. At least, that's what happened to me.

In researching THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN (Scribner, March 5), I visited the bog where the Faddan More Psalter, a 9th-century book of Psalms, was discovered, buried in a bog. My aunt and I went to interview Ned Kelly, an archaeologist and Keeper of Antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. And we visited many old ruined chapels and monasteries, and exhibits featuring some of the few existing manuscripts left from the days of the ancient scribes. We toured a friend’s organic farm, and visited with a local cheesemaker and his goats to get the flavor of the locality where this story is set. 

Of course on the HAUNTED GROUND tours, we also visit regular stops like museums and woolen shops and the Guinness brewery (practically required by law!) We also go to an old distillery, tiny pubs out the West, and we usually stop at the most haunted castle in Ireland where the current human inhabitant tells stories and plays a few tunes on the whistle. We venture down narrow, hedge-lined roads to wild boglands, rocky coastlines, hidden streams, and coral beaches that resemble ground-up bones;  we clamber around ruined monasteries and ancient burial places. It’s easy to miss these hidden places, and that’s why I enjoy sharing them so much, these spots where you can feel the connection to the past, where you can almost hear strains of ancient music in the wind that goes through you, right down to the bones.


Erin Hart writes archaeological crime novels set in the mysterious boglands of Ireland. Before a wayward detour into crime fiction, she worked as an arts administrator, editor, copywriter, journalist and theater critic. Her debut novel, HAUNTED GROUND (Scribner, 2003) won the Friends of American Writers award and Romantic Times' Best First Mystery, was shortlisted for Anthony and Agatha awards, and was named by Book-Of-The-Month Club and Booklist as one of the best crime novels of 2003. LAKE OF SORROWS (Scribner, 2004) was shortlisted for a Minnesota Book Award, and FALSE MERMAID (Scribner, 2010) was named by Booklist as one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of 2010. Her latest, THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN, is being published by Scribner on March 5, 2013.  Erin lives in Minnesota with her husband, Irish button accordion player Paddy O’Brien, with whom she frequently travels to Ireland, to carry out essential research in bogs and cow pastures and castles and pubs.


Please drop by Stuff and Nonsense today for a review of THE BOOK OF KILLOWEN, to be released tomorrow.

The Ends Justify the Means

A guest post by Hank Philippi Ryan.


Guilty, guilty, guilty. Yes, I’m guilty, and here, since it’s just us, I will confess to it.

Sometimes I read the end of a mystery first.

Okay, not completely first. I’ll read the first chapter, and then, read the end. (Don’t groan! Don’t hiss at me and click to another article. Listen. It’s for a reason. And I do go back and read the whole book.)

Before I started writing mysteries, I didn’t read the end first. In the time before
Prime Time, I read mysteries and thrillers and suspense just the way authors hoped I would. Starting at the beginning in a really good book, turning the pages as fast as I could, and then getting to the end at, well, the end. And that method of reading, time honored, was completely successful.

Then (at age 55, so all of you who want to write but thinking: it’s too late for me—well, it’s not) I started writing Prime Time. I had no idea what I was doing, so I powered along, happily typing and churning out pages. Outline? NO way, la dee dah, I was a pantser before I even know what a pantser was. Writing by the seat of my pants. But I figured I knew the story, and who got killed, and how, and who the bad guy was, and certainly, as a result, the ending. I absolutely knew where this book was going.

So one night, late, lying in bed, I was, of course, thinking about the book. I was about half-way through Prime Time, maybe 40,000 words. And I had been dipping into a how-to book by G. Miki Hayden. In it, she suggests an exercise where you try out each character as the villain. The point, she said, was to get a deeper view of your characters’ relationships with each other. That made sense to me, and seemed like a fun idea to try.

On the other hand, it also seemed like a waste of time, because I knew who my bad guy was.

But, sleepless in Boston, I gave it a shot. “Person A as the bad guy,” I mused. No, that wouldn’t work. Person B as the bad guy. Hmm. Nope, that wouldn’t work. Person C as the bad guy—nope, that wouldn’t—wait.

Wait. A. Minute.

My brain started racing, careening through my manuscript, checking chapters and mentally turning the pages as fast as I could. Had I—chosen the wrong bad guy? Had I—written half the book thinking I knew whodunit—and was I wrong?

I couldn’t believe it. I tried to talk myself out of it (luckily my husband was asleep) but the reality was staring me in the face.

I had chosen the wrong bad guy. It was all I could do not to run down to the study and bang open the computer and pull up the half-done manuscript and check.

The next morning, I realized I was right. To change the ending to the new (and real) villain, all I had to do was change—ah, maybe four of the thousands of words I had already written. The bad guy was already there, lurking in the pages, guilty. I just hadn’t noticed it. And I wrote the thing!

Talk about a surprise ending. I had surprised myself!

By the time I got to writing The Other Woman, I learned to let go. I had no idea about the twists and turns along the way. It’s a thriller, right? And there were plenty of thrills for me along the way as I discovered—as you will!—what the story turned out to be. If I had known at the beginning what would happen, the book would be completely different. Because that ending I thought I knew would have pulled me along—and not let the magic of the story create its own true ending.

It’s gotten me thinking about endings. How, in a well-written mystery or thriller, something about the ending is right there in the beginning. It has to be. That the book is a cohesive whole, every little individual word of it creating the big picture. And when the author brings you to a terrific, original, unique ending, it makes the whole book work. The puzzle pieces rearrange, right? And you say: oh, now I see what the author was doing!

Shutter Island. Murder on the Orient Express. The Sixth Sense. Whether you like them or not, knowing the ending would make you read the book or see the movie in a different way, right? You would see the clues, you would see the foreshadowing, you would understand what techniques the authors used to fool the reader and how they lure the reader into believing one way—when reality is another. How they play fair—or how they don’t.

Knowing the ending, and reading “for” it, is a wonderful learning experience for me. It lets me reverse- engineer the story and the writing, and understand all the techniques that come into play.

And frankly, it allows me to take more time to enjoy it. When I was reading the new Think of A Number, I realized I was turning pages so quickly to find the secret, I wasn’t really “reading” the words. So—another confession—I asked my husband to just tell me what happened.


I’m not telling you what happened, he said, astonished. That would spoil the whole thing!

No, I said. Not knowing is spoiling it.

So he told me. And it was good. And then I read it, more slowly and even more appreciatively, because I knew what was coming.

And that is why, fellow readers and authors forgive me, I sometimes flip to the end. And then start at the beginning. Yes, I am guilty. Are you, too?

PS. Okay, fine. Do NOT read the last page of The Other Woman first. Still, even if you do—you won’t know exactly what happens. So go ahead. I dare you. And we’re giving away a first edition (they’re all gone!) of The Other Woman to one lucky commenter!




Hank Phillippi Ryan is the on-the-air investigative reporter for Boston’s NBC affiliate. Her work has resulted in new laws, people sent to prison, homes removed from foreclosure, and millions of dollars in restitution. Along with her 28 EMMYs, Hank’s won dozens of other journalism honors. She’s been a radio reporter, a political campaign staffer, a legislative aide in the United States Senate and an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone magazine working with Hunter S. Thompson.

Her first mystery, the best-selling Prime Time, won the Agatha for Best First Novel. Face Time was a BookSense Notable Book, and Air Time and Drive Time were nominated for the Agatha and Anthony Awards. Hank’s short story “On the House” won the Agatha, Anthony and Macavity.

Her newest thriller, The Other Woman, is already a bestseller and in a second printing. A starred review from Library Journal says “a dizzying labyrinth of twists, turns, and surprises. Readers who crave mystery and political intrigue will be mesmerized by this first installment of her new series.” The Booklist starred review calls it “A perfect thriller…” It is an Indie Next Great Read, an RT Top Pick, and is being translated into three foreign editions.

Hank is on the board of MWA and is president of National Sisters in Crime. 


Please visit  Stuff and Nonsense today for a review of Ms. Ryan's latest novel, The Other Woman.

Enter the Culture Police: Home Slaughter Rituals

by Tom Adair, thriller author and forensic scientist


As an undergrad I studied cultural anthropology and it made me a better criminalist. That education forced me to recognize that people engage in a myriad of cultural practices and beliefs. Some of these may seem quite odd, offend our morality, or be classified as criminal acts under our laws. Over the years I've spoken to criminalists from all over the world, and those conversations remind me that our perceptions and values are influenced by these practices. As people, we sometimes have a hard time understanding cultural practices outside our own, even among people of the same "society". These differences can sometimes be problematic for detectives and crime scene investigators because the activity does not conform to what we may consider "normal". Take the United States for example. We have a very diverse culture, even among people of the same geographic area. A prime example of this is food preparation.

A few months ago I saw this BLOG posting about a Polish ritual at Christmas time that involves the home slaughter of carp. It was the photograph of the bloody bathtub that really caught my eye and I immediately began wondering how I would react to seeing a tub full of blood at a crime scene. Most people don't have blood spattered all over their bathrooms. Then I remembered a trip I took to a small town in Iowa. A sign in the motel bathroom asked hunters not to clean their game birds in the bathtub. It's all a matter of perspective you see.

 Killing an animal for food might seem very strange (even cruel) to people living in a city with a grocery store down the street. On the other hand, paying "good money" for a steak seems bizarre to a cattle rancher. I've been to crime scenes with goat heads in the refrigerator and live chickens scurrying around the house. At another scene, a cow's tongue was found hanging from a tree. The tongue was filled with tiny scraps of paper bearing the names of people. Out of a cultural context one might think they have stumbled into the home of a serial killer. More often than not though you've just expanded your cultural understanding of the world.


The reason I bring this up is that these cultural misunderstandings can lead to fireworks in life, and in your novel. As writers we tend to write what we know. What we "know" is often bound by our cultural practices. After all, it's hard to imagine some of the various rituals and ceremonies that exist outside our comfort zone.

This is especially true of food. People are much quicker to change their manner of dress or speech over diet. But just like real life detectives, writers should be mindful of the limitations of our accepted reality. We should embrace cultural differences because they can enrich a scene. As a reader I love being surprised. Nothing kills my desire to turn the page faster than one predictable scene after another. Predictable stories never challenge your views, never force you to look at the world in a new light. Cultural differences can momentarily scramble your brains, put you off balance. That makes for a memorable scene.

So as you are developing your characters ask yourself how you might use cultural differences to the delight of your readers. The more culturally diverse your scene setting is, the more likely your characters will encounter foreign practices. The same effect can happen in reverse too. If, for example, your character is placed into a foreign "homogenous" setting (think Crocodile Dundee). An easy place to start is the varied methods of meal preparation. Read up on various cultures and see if something catches your eye. If nothing else, you may find a great recipe!

When reseach becomes more than research

One of the bonuses of writing for a living is a flexible schedule. We writers can be working at midnight and swim or bike at 3 o'clock if we're so inclined. It's a great life, especially if it pays in dollars.

But even if the income is, shall we say, unpredictable, the writing life also can pay in other ways: the freedom to be part of the neighborhood. A couple years ago I volunteered to read to kids waiting to see their doctor at HCMC (Hennepin County Medical Center) in downtown Minneapolis. On Thursday mornings I walked about 10 minutes, past the Mall of America Metrodome, to the center, grabbed a bag of books, and sat in the lobby reading to kids, or their siblings. Most of the kids loved hearing about Clifford's latest escapades, or searching for Waldo. I suspect their parents liked the respite. Then, as kids left their appointment they were allowed to choose a book to take home. The idea was to encourage literacy, and in a tiny way, I think it worked. But last spring I dropped the gig because it didn't give me a chance to get to know any of the kids. It felt like shift work. Plus, I was worried I'd get caught up in the latest measles epidemic.

Then, one day, I walked into the Somali Resource Center in Riverside Plaza (known to the University of Minnesota students who live nearby as Crack Towers)  and volunteered  as an aide to an English as a second language class one morning a week. It has turned into exactly the activity I wanted. I get to see the same people every week. Habiba. Dube. Hussein. Hua. I work with them in small groups as they struggle to learn English, which I've come to realize makes no sense. Most of the students are well over 60, and many never learned to read in Somali. Yet they keep working. I take two or three aside and help them read sentences such as "The shower is leaking. Call the manager."

I look forward to each Wednesday morning class for the chance to be with people, for the stimulation, for the change of scenery from my computer.   I'm also learning about customs, mannerisms, habits of Somali women, a community where I plan to set my next book in the Skeeter Hughes mystery series.

Have you ever turned a work or volunteer opportunity into a mystery?

My Visit with Death

By Andrew E. Kaufman

Of all the questions readers ask me, what seems to interest them most is my trip to the autopsy room during the research for my novel, While the Savage Sleeps.

“What was it like?” they’ll often ask.

Pretty gross, actually, but at the same time, illuminating because it confirmed my theory that one of the best ways to draw the reader into a story is to experience that which you describe. Googling a topic may be a good start but won't cut it if you're trying to create a solid and meaningful sense of setting.

A former television journalist, I know how to combine words and pictures to tell a story. However, writing fiction, I've discovered, is a completely different world. Unlike with TV, in novels there's no video to convey the tone and mood of a particular scene. Here, your words are your pictures, and if readers can't see them in their minds, you'll lose your audience in a heartbeat. With my autopsy chapter being one of the most critical in the book, I couldn't afford to do that, and despite a rather strong visceral resistance, I felt I simply had no choice.

You may find my reluctance a bit odd considering I'm often accused of writing some very gritty stuff in my novels. Besides that, I'm no stranger to blood and gore—I'd seen a fair share during my tenure in television news. Still, somehow, the autopsy room seemed different to me, like an intimate dance with death, a messy one, which I much preferred to sit out of. But as it often does, logic won, and like it or not I was off to experience my first—and hopefully last—autopsy (at least from a vertical point-of-view).

First stop, the freezer. This is where they keep the bodies before examination, a thirty by fifteen room with shelves lining three walls, stacked three high. At the time of my visit, every seat in the house appeared to be taken, standing room only. I walked in, gazed at the sea of body bags, then stopped in my tracks. I'm pretty sure this was the exact point where reality finally set in: I was surrounded by dead people, lots and lots of dead people. Guess it makes sense that with a city as large as San Diego, plenty of folks die each day, and they all have to go somewhere; I just don't think I had expected to be standing among all of them.

Next stop: the autopsy room. But first, a little advice before entering: I was shown the exits and told to use them if I began feeling ill.

Reassuring.

Once inside, besides an all out assault on the senses (no need for explicit detail here), I think what surprised me most was what a busy place the autopsy room was. Now, I'm going to show my age here, but as a member of the Quincy generation, my preconceived notions were far more simplistic than I had imagined. In my world, I expected to see a lone autopsy table center stage with the medical examiner standing over it and a sanitized view of what went on. All this and, of course, wrapped up in less than an hour.

So not the case.

The place was busier than any newsroom I'd ever worked in, except it wasn't the clicking of keyboards I heard—it was the buzzing and whining of saws; probably why they had me change into a white space-suit-looking getup with transparent facemask before entering. Yes, folks, cutting, sawing, and drilling human remains is messy business. Things do fly.

Ten stainless steel tables lined the wall, each with a faucet at the top, a drain at the bottom, and yes, each with a body laying on top—all in varying degrees of examination, and most of them clearly missing things that shouldn't have been. I have to say that the ones without heads were the most unnerving. As they say, parts is parts, but parts belong where they belong. Looking around at the people working here, I got an odd sense of extreme desensitization, that this was business as usual and walking past headless bodies was like a walk in the park.

Wish I could have felt the same.

As for the autopsy itself, after getting past the initial shock, it did become somewhat easier to watch. I’m not saying it was a piece of cake—it wasn’t—but one does adjust to their surroundings if they stick around long enough. Even in situations like this.

As an added bonus, the medical examiner not only described what he was doing as he removed the organs—he also handed each of them to me (luckily I was wearing gloves). Kind of gross, I know, but nevertheless a valuable experiences for a mystery writer. After all, you never know when you might need to introduce a disembodied organ or two into a story—a kidney here, a spleen there. Like I've said, I'm known for writing grisly scenes.

I could go on describing every detail, but at the risk of losing those of you who have made it this far, I'll stop and say this: Despite everything, my autopsy chapter never would have been the same had I not gone through this experience. Unpleasant as it was, the truth is that as writers, we sometimes need to get our hands dirty—in this case, very dirty—but it’s all for the sake of the craft. Simply put, sometimes you have to give until it hurts. I did—I'm pretty sure of it.

Did I achieve my intended goal? I hope so, but if you'd like to decide, here's a link to the chapter, along with a warning: It's a bit gruesome, but at the same time, depicts reality, and that's what we, as writers, should always strive to do.

Andrew E. Kaufman is the bestselling author of While the Savage Sleeps, a forensic paranormal thriller.

Five Tips for Researching Your Mystery

 By Judith Yates Borger

So you want to write a mystery and you’ve heard the advice, write what you know. But what about what you don’t know? Where to begin? This is a problem that sometimes stops authors dead in their tracks.

Have no fear. Think of it as going to garage sales. The perfect item at the best price is out there, and while looking for it you'll probably find lots of other useful stuff. Here are some ways to get started.

Tip 1. Find the best research engine for you.
There are probably more search engines than you ever imagined. First define in broad terms what you want to know, then check out Noodletools.com. Click on “Choose the best search” in the middle of the page. Beware: you could be up half the night reading fascinating facts you never knew.


Tip 2: Start on the periphery of your subject and work your way to the middle.
Now that you have a broad overview of your topic, start to narrow your focus. For example, my next mystery — still unnamed — will be set among Somali women. Once I found the best search engine for my topic, I searched for "Somali women Minneapolis." Voila, I had names and background  information on several women.


Tip 3: Don’t let the idea of calling a stranger and asking for an interview intimidate you.
People, especially experts, are usually delighted to have someone ask them about their favorite topic, and then actually listen to the answer. When I was writing “Whose Hand?” I wanted to include a section about the trafficking of live tigers. Until then, all I knew about tigers was that they were striped. I Googled and Binged tiger trafficking but I wasn’t getting the muscle and sinew I really needed. Well, what about the zoo?

I checked the Minnesota Zoo website and found the director of the tiger program. Then I Googled his name and learned I was in luck. Not only was he king of the tigers at the Minnesota Zoo, he was king of tigers everywhere. Because tigers are endangered, there’s an agency that regulates which captive tigers can mate with which. The Minnesota Zoo tiger director was the guy in charge of tiger love across all zoos. No male/female rendezvous without his OK.  When I called to ask for an appointment he was delighted to talk for hours and I ended up basing a character in Whose Hand? on him.


Tip 4:  Establish rapport with your source.
The key to getting the information you need most is to make your source comfortable. If she offers you coffee, take it, even if your bladder's about to burst. It gets the source in a giving state of mind, and if you're both sipping something hot, or cold, it establishes a commonality at the start. Spot a picture of the your source's children? Ask about them. Nothing gets a parent talking faster than a question about darling little Susie. Then segue into what you really want to know.

Tip 5: Keep the discussion to an hour or under.
Being interviewed is tough work. People get tired. If you want to know more than you can get in the time it takes to watch a full episode of CSI, ask your interviewee if you can call back with follow up questions. Then follow up. Either call or ask for just a bit more of your subject's time.

Remember to relax and enjoy the process. I promise that once you get into research you’ll find it’s the second best part of mystery writing, right after cashing royalty checks.

Next topic: Interviewing techniques, or when to take notes and when to just listen.

—Judith Yates Borger, author of  Skeeter Hughes Mysteries, Guilty Pleasures for Manic Moms