Interview with Jane Adams

Kim Wallis: You live in Leicester now. Have you always lived in the area, and how many of your books are based in or around Leicester?

Jane Adams: I’ve always lived in Leicester and it’s really only this new series that’s based in Leicester at all. The first book, The Greenway, was based on an actual location in Norfolk, and so I ended up writing about Norfolk, but as the books went on they could have really been set anywhere as the location was I think lost to a certain extent. But what I really wanted to do was have a location I could visualise, and that people could visit I suppose, and that people would know. The Leicester area is a fascinating area, it’s very rich in history and I’ve used Leicester to a great extent, but I’ve also made up outlying towns so that I could fiddle with the geography without anyone getting too offended!

KW: Do you do very much research for the setting of a book, for example, I was thinking of The Angel Gateway?

JA: The Angel Gateway took a lot of research, yes. I wanted to know how old the Angel Gateway was, what had originally been there, and I got it back so far and then of course the book went through to copy editing, and then through to production, and I tracked it back another 200 years which was really, really annoying because it was too late to do anything about it then. But the research is fun – the Record’s Office is in Wigston so it’s not far from me and it’s a great place to work. Very nice people, very helpful. The research is a big interest. The 1640s needed quite a lot of looking at, what the customs were, what people ate, simple things like recipes, and how they cooked and those sort of day to day things. The problem with research is that you do a massive amount and then you use a fraction of it, and that can be a bit frustrating – you’ve put all this work in.

KW: What drew you to crime writing initially?

JA: A mistake! [laughs] No it was purely accidental. I wrote The Greenway and I didn’t think it as crime novel, I didn’t really categorise it. I sent it to MacMillans and when they took it I discovered it had ended up on their crime list. That wasn’t intentional but I’m quite happy to be there because crime actually gives you quite a big scope. It’s a very popular genre, it’s one of the few genres that are actually growing. A lot of genres are really losing out, the market for science fiction and horror is quite a select one, but a lot of people will read crime. Even if they don’t read it continuously they will read the odd novel, so it seems to be a good place to be.

KW: Do you have any police background?

JA: No, no I don’t. I read a great deal about police procedure. I talked to as many people as I could get to talk to me. We used live over at Beaumont Leys and I went up to the police headquarters there a couple of times and talked to the desk Sergeant, put queries to him. I don’t know what he thought about me [laughs]. On one occasion I asked him something about a murder scene and he looked at me and said "I don’t bloody know, Love!"

JA: It’s an interesting area to research. I’ve been lucky enough to meet ex-policemen who fill in gaps in what I know so that’s good. Ex-journalists are pretty good too…

KW: You are always billed as writing psychological suspense novels. When did you start to have an interest in this aspect of crime writing?

JA: Always. The ways people’s minds work, that’s the most interesting part. What motivates them? And a lot of crime is so casual. You tend to look very, very deeply into how this person has committed this particular act and so often find out it’s a mistake or it’s a sequence of events that got out of control. What interests me is the state of mind that led up to that but also the state of mind afterwards – how it affects people. Some novels reflect that more than others. I think Cast the First Stone probably reflects that more than any of them because it deals with the idea of ‘victim’, not just the victim of the abuse – the novel is about child abuse to a great extent – but also the victims in the sense of the family of the accused. Do you stand by the person? Do you leave them? Do you believe it – what do you do? I think those questions aren’t often asked and those people are often neglected and I think that’s a big mistake.

KW: You seem to have quite a strong interest in witchcraft and the supernatural, particularly in The Angel Gateway and The Greenway. What particularly interests you about these subjects?

JA: I’m interested in religion, I’m interested in the way religion affects people and the way it makes them behave. I was brought up in quite a religious household, my mother was involved with the Jehovah Witnesses, and although when I got to my teens I didn’t want that, that wasn’t what I wanted out of life, it leaves a gap when you leave that behind. I think I spent my teenage years, and into my early twenties, looking for something to replace that and tried everything from UFO cults to Buddhism to whatever bandwagon was going at the time. I finally settled on something which is fairly close to Wiccen traditions I suppose for my own belief set. I’m not anything, I wouldn’t label myself as anything particular, but I certainly have sympathy with the idea that nature is important, and that the natural rhythms are important. My father used to like to plant at certain times of the year. He said it was unlucky to plant at certain times. I think those influences, whether you like it or not, stay with you. They seep into what I write, because they are part of the way I live my life I suppose.

KW: Your two Detective heroes are Mike Croft, who appears in four of the novels, and Ray Flowers, who appears in one, and in the forthcoming book. Do you have a favourite?

JA: At the moment it has to be Ray Flowers. Mike Croft was a very good person to begin with I think, but I got to the point where I didn’t quite know what to do with him next. I needed a fresh start. In The Final Frame there’s a character called Charlie Morrow and originally he was my prototype for Ray Flowers… Ray Flowers really did grow out of Charlie Morrow. I’m very, very fond of Charlie Morrow but my editor didn’t think it was a very good idea to lift one character from a book and build another series around them. So Ray evolved really and he isn’t Charlie Morrow but there are similarities. I’m not worried about that.

KW: Are any of your other characters based on people you know?

JA: That would be telling! Bits of them, yes. I haven’t lifted whole characters or anything like that but so certainly character traits, speech patterns, little habits that people have. There was someone called Ray that I knew briefly because my mother-in-law was dating him. I think a lot of Ray Flowers ways of talking, his speech patterns, his brusqueness, that’s very much what I remember of this particular Ray. It’s odd, the things that creep into your mind that you think you’ve forgotten and they are there, they suddenly appear when you are creating a character.

KW: My final question. Your novel Bird is the one novel that stands out separately from the detective novels. Can you tell me why you wrote this particular book?

JA: I wrote it for my father. My father died seven years ago and he never saw me published. He was very, very ill at the time when I was sending work out to MacMillans and we knew he was dying, he had leukaemia, and he spent his last week and a half in the LOROS hospice which was actually a wonderful place for him to be because they could take him outside and he could see the garden. He was fanatical gardener all of his life. While he was very ill he talked about things that had happened to him during the war and things that had happened to him as a child. All of these memories began to come back, many of them very confused, and talking to my family, and saying ‘What is he talking about?’, stories emerged that I really wanted to write about, to include in the book. He was so keen on the idea that I would be published that a couple of days before he died I told him that MacMillans had accepted me and he died believing that, and it turned out to be the truth, but at the time I didn’t know. I just wanted him to be sure of that. I had to write Bird because I really wanted to record the things that he’d told me about the place he’d grown up and Bird is set in a little village in Lincolnshire where he lived as a boy. He had grown up in a great deal of poverty, a great deal of difficulty. Some of his memories about things like the Hiring Fairs in Louth are memories that are fading, that are going, and I wanted to kind of hang onto those, so that was a big motivator for writing Bird. It then grew beyond that but that was the starting point. I didn’t quite intend Bird to be the ghost story that it turned out to be because I was worried that the McMillans wouldn’t like it basically. I sent the manuscript in and my editor phoned me up and said ‘Great, but can we have more ghost please!’ so all the things I had taken out I put back in and Bird turned into a ghost story!