Christine Poulson - guest blog

I'm glad to welcome my friend Christine Poulson as a guest contributor to this blog, with a charming personal story. Christine is very good company in person and also a very good novelist with whom to spend time. I'm pleased to say that her new book, Invisible, published by Accent Press, is now available in paperback and as an ebook (the latter is an especial bargain) As you will see, the starting premise of the story is a gripping one. Over to you, Chrissie....

‘Had a good break over the summer?’

   ‘Great, thanks, spent three weeks touring the cemeteries of southern Sweden.’

   ‘Oh . . . lovely . . .’

    It was, too. I was accompanying my husband who was researching a book on the great Swedish architect, Gunnar Aspland, designer of, among other things, the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, a World Heritage Site.

      I came home knowing that I wanted to set at least part of a novel in Sweden. As a young art historian I had been more drawn to Italy and France and was late coming to Scandinavia. With my blue eyes and with a name like Poulson, I almost certainly have a Viking or two among my ancestors. Perhaps that’s why I felt an immediate affinity with Sweden and fell in love with Stockholm.

    There was another memorable aspect to the trip: in our seven years of marriage this was the first time my husband and I had spent three weeks alone together. When we met he was a widower with two children and we had been a family right from the start. Holidays had been great fun, but busy and full of distractions. On this trip there was plenty of time for ideas to start bubbling over: the long midsummer days, nights that were barely more than twilight, the hours on the road, the waiting while my husband took photographs . . .

     The character of Lisa began to form in my imagination, a woman who was only ever alone with her lover. No-one knew about him and she saw him for a week-end only once a month. The novel would begin when he failed to show up.

      I was already committed to writing the third in my Cassandra James series and it was a few years before I got round to writing Invisible. By then I knew why Lisa’s lover had to vanish and why it would be so dangerous for her to search for him.

      Invisible is a novel that for many reasons is close to my heart and it all began on that wonderful trip.

Poisons and Poisoning

One of the unexpected pleasures of the CWA conference at Abergavenny was a talk by a writer I hadn’t heard of before, called Celia Kellett. Her subject was Poison and Poisoning, which just happens to be the title of a book she published recently on the subject.

Maybe it’s my fondness for Christie, maybe it’s my interest in the Crippen case, but I have a weakness for mysteries featuring poisons, and I did find Celia Kellett’s talk fascinating. Unfortunately, she didn’t have many copies of her book for sale, and they’d all been snapped up by the time I reached the end of the queue. But I’ve now bought a copy for myself, and it’s certainly a book packed with information (published, by the way, by an enterprising Welsh firm, Accent Press.)

We tend to think of mystery stories featuring poisoning as slightly old-fashioned, perhaps because of all those cases of demure-seeming Victorian ladies doing away with their husbands with different kinds of poison. As I’ve said before, the Liverpool case of the Maybricks is one of my favourite true crime stories, and of course it features here.

But Kellett also makes it clear that there is plenty of potential in the modern world for murder by poison. As she says: ‘poisons are everywhere’, and ‘prisons worldwide still hold many murderers who used poison as their deadly weapon.’ This is a very useful reference book, and I expect to dip into it often in the future. And, who knows, it may tempt me into writing a poisoning mystery of my own one of these fine days....