Sizzling Round my Pool, Thorne Moore Talking about Unravelling!

Today, I have the fabby sassy author, Throne Moore sitting round my pool and showing me up in her bikini….!!!

Thank you for inviting me from rainy Wales to your gorgeous swimming pool. Here I am.

Well, I can always dream. I’ve reached the age when the more appropriate dress, if I don’t want to frighten the horses, would be

 Perhaps I’ll just sit under an all-concealing umbrella, sipping something cool, and natter on about my new novel, The Unravelling.

Thorne, it’s been a long time since, I’ve laughed so much and whilst you talk and I giggle, let’s open another bottle of bubbly….

Perfect, I’m in need of another drink after that. Now let me talk about Karen, she’s a little more sobering than we are *laugh*

 Karen, who mentally unravels, as she begins to unravel the truth about events in her childhood. Events that she had wiped out of her mind, but one little incident, an apple rolling into a flooded drain, begins to unblock memories. Flashbacks come piecemeal, leaving her struggling to make sense of it all, but the one thing she is sure of is that she must find her childhood idol, the angelic Serena Whinn, who is the key to the truth.

I write crime mysteries – I really love the label Domestic Noir. I like to delve into the Why of crime, how it all came about and what happened after, to everyone touched by it, rather than forensic investigation or police procedure. I aim at slow revelation and understanding, rather than the dramatic punches of a thriller. I’d prefer to evoke tears of pity rather than squeals of terror. But in The Unravelling, I think I have come closest to writing a genuine thriller, rather than just a psychological study.

 The inspiration for the book is the estate where I grew up. Like Karen, I was 10, going on 11, in 1965, and I have very vivid memories not just of the place but of the childhood fears and fantasies attached to an innocuous walk home from school It seemed to me then like a very permanent thing, but it is only now, looking back with hindsight, that I can appreciate what a state of flux it was in, spreading out across what had been farmland and market gardens not many years before, a post-war council estate with prefabs coming down and high rise blocks going up. Old farm tracks still existed among the houses and streams ran through the estate in deep ditches, appearing and disappearing like magic. They were always a lure to children, something to swing across, somewhere to pick kingcups or fish, unsuccessfully, with bent pins, for sticklebacks, but also slightly ominous, with dark culverts that only big bold boys dare enter, because of killer leaches and possible monsters. Children are good as inventing monsters. Perhaps they are an essential part of childhood. They certainly add colour.

I fixed Karen’s childhood very firmly in 1965/6 because my memories of what it was like to be a child then would not have made sense a couple of years later. By the end of the 60s, the world had turned upside down in psychedelic rebellion, influencing everything from dreams to dress. Back in 1965, before the summer of love and Vietnam and moon landings and The Troubles, we were still clinging to the tail end of the deferential 50s in our cotton frocks and pigtails. Daddies went to work and drove cars, mummies did the shopping and packed us off to school, and discipline was maintained by the cane and a clip round the ear from the local bobby. But there were still monsters, real and imagined.

Action in the book is split between Karen’s flashback memories of her childhood, and her attempts to unravel the truth, thirty-five years later. I like using time as a significant element in all my books, because I am fixated on history. No event stands alone. It occupies a place in time, brought about by previous events and leaving a mark on all that follows. Any attempt to look back at something, whether it happened yesterday or a hundred years ago, is always coloured by our knowledge of what came after. I like contrasting that sort of analysis of events, with the very different understanding we have of events as they are happening around us now, in the present, when we have no idea of what will follow.

I have played with time in similar ways in my two previous books.

In A Time For Silence, a young woman comes across the derelict Welsh farmhouse where her grandparents had lived and she discovers that her grandfather was shot, although no one was ever charged or convicted. She is determined to discover the truth, and fantasises about how idyllic life have been before the murder destroyed it. I intersperse her frequently deluded investigations with an account of what really happened in the cottage, back in the 1930s and 40s.

In Motherlove, the story is split between 1990 when two babies are born in the same maternity ward, and twenty two years later, when two young women discover that their mothers are not the women who gave birth to them. They react in different ways, and both of them want to learn the truth, but neither are expecting it to be what it is.

Thorne, a million thanks for sitting round my pool and talking about your fascinating writing, as you know, I have read The Unravelling and loved it, now I am about to take a peek at Motherlove. though not until we’ve eaten more of these tapas I’ve made and finished this bottle of bubbly.

Well, I have plenty more in the pipe line, in the same genre and I’d be happy to share them with you another time around your pool, that’s if you’ll have me back.

You bet, but I’ll make sure I buy a new bikini first … *laugh*

Other links, if you can’t get enough of me:

My website: www.thornemoore.co.uk

My Blog: Thorny Matters

Facebook

Twitter

My Amazon page: Thorne Moore

My publisher: Honno Welsh Women’s Press

Thank you Thorne and thank you for stopping by and meeting my lovely guest today.

Have a wonderful day and I hope the sun is shinning on your face and in your heart.

Love

Pauline

xxx