This week Crime Cymru’s Thorne Moore gives us a fascinating insight into some of the things which inspire her writing …

Show me a house and I’ll see a story unfolding. It’s easy for me to find inspiration in bricks and mortar – or stone and timber. Houses do come and go but they quite often outlive us. We are just passing through, leaving our mark and making way for others, but they remain, waiting for the next layer of wallpaper to cover up evidence of our residence there. Houses have a permanence that can be quite deceptive, hiding distant history behind updated facades, keeping secrets hidden under floorboards, up chimneys or concealed in attics. If you live in a house that’s older than World War II, there’s a high likelihood that it will have witnessed births and deaths. Natural, peaceful deaths, or violent ones? Who knows?

There was a derelict cottage lurking in the wooded valley, two fields beyond my garden. It’s been renovated and extended in recent years, but when I first stumbled across it, it was overgrown, slates falling in, panes shattered, nettles coming up through the floor, but still nursing signs of the people who’d lived there fifty years before – a rusting pot on the hearth, peeling wallpaper. It was a gift, and it went on to become the inspiration for my first published novel, A TIME FOR SILENCE, with its prequel, THE COVENANT.

My home territory, north Pembrokeshire, is riddled with abandoned cottages, each of them enshrining a story lost to history. It’s also riddled with much grander houses also falling into ruin, unless attempts have been made to convert them to hotels, or nursing homes, or art centres. They can be tucked away round any corner, hidden behind tangled woods and rhododendrons, their rusting gates guarded by cute little lodge cottages, very des res. Quite a few go back to the ambitions of Victorian sea captains, but others are much older, sometimes with histories stretching back to the Middle Ages, even if the fabric has changed beyond recognition. Collectively, they were an inspiration for my novel SHADOWS, and its prequel LONG SHADOWS.

In all those books, houses are sufficiently central to the story to be considered characters in their own rights, and I’m not sure how I would have formulated the stories without them.

But I am also frequently inspired by random comments that intrigue me enough to spark a story into life around them. A casually mentioned remark by a guide at Ightham Mote in Kent, about the skeleton of a woman found behind panelling, prompted part of the story in SHADOWS. It needed explanation. A mention of a murder that supposedly took place in a cottage not far from me, prompted the story of A TIME FOR SILENCE. A man had been murdered, everyone knew who did it but nothing was done. Pure gossip and I have never been able to confirm it, but it was enough for me to build on.

It was an item on the news that inspired my novel, MOTHERLOVE. An item I could easily have missed, but I didn’t and it caught me up short, wanting to understand more of the psychology at work. A young Argentinian woman, María Eugenia Sampallo Barragán, was taking her parents to court, because she had discovered that they were not her birth parents after all. She had been born, in a torture centre, to an activist couple who were two of the 30,000 ‘disappeared,’ murdered by the military regime. Like some 400 other children born while their parents were detained, María had been handed over to supporters of the regime, with a falsified birth certificate.

I discovered that María had fallen out with her adopted parents some years before. That made sense of her determination to prosecute them. By contrast, when some of the other ‘adopted’ children were traced, their relationships with their presumed parents had been so good and loving that they didn’t want to learn the truth. Better to keep intact what they’d always had.

What is a real mother? The one who gives birth or the one who raises the child? Bertolt Brecht could probably tell you. It’s a question coming up repeatedly these days, with more and more tales of single mothers being forced to give up their children, even if not in quite such extreme circumstance as existed in Argentina in the 1970s. I didn’t set out to examine that iniquity, but rather the relationships between daughters and the women who reared them. If you grow up loving someone, can you simply switch that love off, if you find it was founded on criminality and the suffering of others? I would imagine not, but I don’t think it would be an easy thing to deal with. And if you already blame your mother for any misery in your life, what does the discovery that she didn’t give birth to you do to you?  

In MOTHERLOVE, two girls discover that their mothers are not their birth mothers after all. How they react to the news depends on the state of their relationship so far. But they also have to deal with the discovery that their history was not down to unfeeling interference by authorities, or careless mix-ups at birth, but to a criminal abduction. Crime novels usually focus on murder, but there are other crimes as traumatic. The theft of one’s own identity, let alone the theft of a child, has to be one.

I do have another source of inspiration, which runs through all my books, and MOTHERLOVE is no exception. It’s my awareness that serious crimes, murder and others, are not merely puzzles to be solved but pivotal events that wreck lives and wound souls, including those on the periphery, with damaging ripples that spread through time, even through generations. In MOTHERLOVE, two young women are profoundly affected by their recent discoveries, but three older women have been living with the consequences for the last twenty-two years. Can things ever simply be put right, or does the truth just make everything worse? Whatever happens, with such crimes, no one personally involved says ‘Ah, so that’s who did it,’ has a nice cup of tea and gets on with life.

---

You can read more about author Thorne Moore here

Links relating to this article are below :-

MOTHERLOVE  https://amzn.to/2M3jmkM

A TIME FOR SILENCE  https://amzn.to/2v6zvPH
THE COVENANT  https://amzn.to/3a0YzLi

SHADOWS   https://amzn.to/2HL9ARV

LONG SHADOWS  https://amzn.to/3SrqQjp

Link to the María Eugenia Sampallo Barragán story http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7291482.stm