Saxton Reads! & Reviews

 photo by Jerry Bauer

Welcome Guest Blogger, Elly Griffiths as she gives us a bit of insight into her first novel. The Crossing Places. I'm certain you'll agree with me that it sounds exciting. Forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway returns in The Janus Stone in 2011.

We were walking across a marsh. It was cold and it was raining (it doesn’t always rain in Norfolk, only when I’m there). The kids had run on ahead pretending to be Ancient Romans (they have active imaginary lives but their scenarios rarely fit the occasion, when we were in Rome they pretended to be Martians). Andrew and I stomped along. It was heavy going, the long grass criss-crossed with streams, birds rising up out of the rushes, the wrong step could send you plunging into the mire.

‘You know,’ said Andy dreamily. ‘Prehistoric man thought that marshland was sacred. Because it’s neither land nor sea they saw it as a kind of bridge to the afterlife. Neither land nor sea, neither life nor death.’

And the idea for my novel The Crossing Places came to me in that instant.  

But really the origins of the book lay further back than that. When I met Andrew he worked for a merchant bank. He had a pin-striped suit and an expense account. The problem was, he told me that first night in the wine bar surrounded by braying City types, he had never wanted to work in a bank. He had always wanted to be an archaeologist. But, when he was choosing A-Levels, someone had casually remarked that you need physics to study archaeology. Totally untrue but, as teenagers sometimes do, he changed his mind on the spot. He decided to study law. A safe option.

When we got married, we agreed that, one day, Andy would leave the bank and do a second degree in archaeology. I think, deep down, I never thought it would happen. But, when our children were still at primary school, he went back to university. He graduated with a distinction (it was the first time, he said, that he had ever studied a subject that interested him) and is now an archaeologist.

Our home life has changed completely. We no longer have the city salary but, amazingly, we have hardly noticed. OK, we’ve got a battered car and we have cold, wet holidays, but the children see their dad all the time and that has made us immeasurably richer. And the archaeology has enriched us too. When we are walking on the downs, Andy can bend down and pick up a prehistoric flint hand-axe that was used to butcher mammoths. Imagine that! Mammoths wandering the South Downs. .. Of course, when I pick up an identical stone, it’s always just a stone.

And now he has given me the idea for a book and, in Ruth, a feisty archaeologist heroine.

Elly Griffiths