Crime galore: Interview with Elly Griffiths

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n Wednesday 25^th March 2015, I’m introduced to Elly Griffiths, crime novelist and creator of Ruth Galloway. Ruth is an archaeologist and charismatic sleuth, starring in seven of Griffiths’ novels. Elly has travelled to Lincoln in order to launch The Ghost Fields, the latest Ruth mystery. The first novel in the series, The Crossing Places was released in 2009. Six years, six books and six murderers later, in The Ghost Fields, Ruth is forced into juggling the life of her young daughter, a complicated romantic situation with a police officer and a new case. A decomposed body is discovered inside the remains of a buried WWII aeroplane.

Ruth lives in Norfolk and teaches at a fictional university. As an aspiring novelist myself, I can’t help asking where Ruth came from.

 It’s easy to forget that these people are actually made up.

“I kind of don’t like telling the story but it’s true – this is really what happened,” Elly begins, breaking into a smile. We’re sitting in one of the staff rooms in the depths of The Collection Museum. “The idea for The Crossing Places came when my family and I were walking across Titchwell Marsh. My husband, Andy, mentioned that prehistoric people thought that marshland was sacred because it’s neither land nor sea but something in between. They thought it was linked to the afterlife, which is neither life nor death. When he said that, the whole plot of The Crossing Places came to me and it was as if I saw Ruth heading towards me out of the mist. I felt as though I knew everything about her. Now, I teach creative writing and I would never let my students get away with that! They have to have character notebooks and character sketchbooks and everything but it really was a case, actually, of her suddenly appearing. She’s probably all sorts of people. There’s a good friend of mine who I think has a lot of Ruth in her and a few of my older siblings do too. She’s not that like me, although people always think she is.”

The way that she talks about writing makes it sound fun, something that is sometimes lost under the weight of making literature mean something.

I’m intrigued as to what it must be like to write about a character so intensively for so long. Although Elly takes the odd break from Ruth – she released an independent crime novel The Zig-Zag Girl in November 2014 – she takes up a large portion of her busy writing schedule.

“It’s a real privilege to spend so much time with someone,” Elly tells me. “When you think about it, that’s hundreds and thousands of words. If you don’t write in the Crime genre, you rarely get the chance to write a sequel. I have to explain to my students on the MA course when they say ‘I’m going to write about that in the sequel,’ that, unless you’re writing crime, there really won’t be a sequel. Before I wrote crime, I did write literary fiction and you never get the chance to revisit those characters. They’re still living in your head somewhere but you can’t go back to them. So it really does feel like a privilege.”

It’s a privilege to speak to Elly. The way that she talks about writing makes it sound fun, something that is sometimes lost under the weight of making literature mean something. Not that Elly’s novels aren’t thought-provoking – they are. It’s obvious from the comments made by the audience in the Q&A session later that the Ruth Galloway novels have had a profound impact on them; one couple even describe travelling through Norfolk, spotting various scenes from the books on the way. But Elly doesn’t shroud herself in mystery, or act as though writing is a kind of magical gift granted to her by a deity. Instead, she makes it clear that, although she works incredibly hard, she has an enormous amount of fun.

She wrote her first novel when she was eleven.

“I’m still not sure what’s going to happen at the end of the series,” she tells the audience. “I know the kind of mood I want to close with but not exactly what’s going to happen.” She teases the audience by speculating about Ruth’s love life. Does Ruth really love Nelson? Does Nelson really love Ruth? Should they live together? What sort of school should their daughter, Kate, attend? Sitting in this room, with all these questions and answers, it’s easy to forget that these people are actually made up. Elly reveals that the last time she gave a talk, she prompted an argument in the audience about Kate’s schooling. Fiction is fiction, until it’s not.

It is clear from just the short time I spent with Elly that she loves what she does. She’s been writing for a long time; she wrote her first novel when she was eleven and, before Ruth, she wrote novels under her real name, Domenica de Rosa. Her pen-name Elly Griffiths is also the name of her grandmother and, as she explains on her website, is a more suitable name for a crime novelist. What’s more, the letter G normally sits at head-height in a bookshop when the shelves are ordered alphabetically. Before I leave, I’m eager to extract from her every scrap of advice she has for young writers.

“I’d say write every day, if you can.”

“I would give three pieces of advice,” she says. “I’d say write every day, if you can. Don’t rewrite too much – try and trust your first draft. And the third is the most important; don’t show it to your family and friends. They’ll have opinions and then you’ll start rewriting for them. I even feel this a bit about writers’ groups. Writers’ groups are good because they make you write but I have a friend who’s been stalled on a book for seven years because her writers’ group keeps saying things like ‘I think it should be written in the first person’. So then she’ll go back and rewrite it. Although I try not to mention it, in those seven years I’ve written and published seven books. I don’t show it to anyone until it’s finished and then I show my agent Rebecca and my editor Jane. They are the first people to see it and their approval is really important. Also, they are the only people to whom it matters as much as me.”

I’ve met quite a few authors through my involvement with the Young Journalist Academy, and Elly Griffiths is certainly one of the most charismatic and down-to-earth. She sucks her audience in with her warmth and good sense of humour – after forty-five minutes everyone emerges from the auditorium smiling and buzzing. It is soon time to say goodbye, but, with the eighth book halfway complete and more to follow, it won’t be goodbye for long.

Image Credits: Header (Flickr/PJD-DigiPic), Image 1 (Photo: Ellen Lavelle), Image 2 (Flickr/Srividya Balayogi)

Check out Ellen’s interview with author Stephen Church here: theboar.org/2015/06/16/magna-carter-and-king-john-an-interview-with-stephen-church/#.VYIirPlViko