by Sarah Rayne | Feb 27, 2016 | Sarah Rayne, settings for fiction
The legal profession has always been a novelists’ treasure house, and lawyers themselves are a gift to writers of fiction. If your plot has wound itself into a hopeless tangle, you can often solve matters by allowing the family solicitor to discover old documents or...
by Sarah Rayne | Feb 14, 2016 | charect, haunted houses, Sarah Rayne, settings for fiction
There’s a marvellous theme running through Benjamin Britten’s opera, Owen Wingrave, which is based on the Henry James’ story. It’s, ‘Listen to the house.’ It’s something I’ve done for years. By ‘listen’ I don’t mean yomping round the Tower of London and thinking...
by Sarah Rayne | Jan 7, 2016 | ancient legends, ghosts, haunted houses, Sarah Rayne, Uncategorized
Quite near to where I live is a beautiful and mostly unspoilt village which is chockful of history. It’s home to the 1,000-year-old Horn Dance, whose performers still caper through the village with enthusiastic glee once a year; it’s mentioned in the Domesday Book,...
by Sarah Rayne | Dec 4, 2015 | ghost stories, ghosts, haunted houses, Uncategorized
It was not a day on which I was expecting to meet a ghost. I know I write books with slightly eerie settings and incidents – also outright, unashamed ghost stories – but I don’t actually expect to actually find myself in one of those settings. It was, in fact, a...
by Sarah Rayne | Nov 20, 2015 | Sarah Rayne
When portrayed on the grand scale, villains in fiction can be surprisingly fascinating. Would vampires as a race have gained such worldwide appeal without a sinister undead gentleman in evening dress dominating the screen or the page? Equally, would psychological...
by Sarah Rayne | Nov 6, 2015 | Uncategorized
There’s frequently a point in a book where it’s nice to have characters grouped round a dinner table discussing the latest plot developments. This can be helpful for giving the reader an update on where the story’s got to – not to mention doing the same for the...
by Sarah Rayne | Oct 25, 2015 | Uncategorized
When I began to write the first of the Michael Flint/Nell West haunted house series, I didn’t actually know it was destined to become a series. In fact I had never previously considered writing a series at all – or even so much as a trilogy. Despite working in the...
by Sarah Rayne | Oct 15, 2015 | Uncategorized
Ghosts, like any character in a book, need a motive – a reason for haunting. They don’t just turn up because there’s a vacant slot at the moated grange, or because the grey lady at the old rectory wants someone to make a fourth at bridge. They don’t attend night...
by Sarah Rayne | Oct 8, 2015 | Uncategorized
I seldom attend parties unless I think they might be of use in my career, so it was all the more remarkable to find myself attending this one. This reticence is not due to shyness, you understand, nor to a lack of self-confidence – I value myself and my attainments...
by Sarah Rayne | Oct 5, 2015 | ancient legends, charect, ghost stories, ghosts, haunted houses, old diaries
The haunted house series, featuring Michael Flint and Nell West, was born several years ago, when I was asked to write and present a ghost-story evening at a local historic house. There were so many legends attached to the place it was almost a question of...
