by Sarah Rayne | May 13, 2024 | Sarah Rayne
“The Murderer Inside the Mirror”. Book 2 of the “Theatre of Thieves” mysteries “Is this a forgery I see before me…?” Forgery is a criminal act, but also a wide-ranging craft. It can include a musical score purporting to be a masterpiece from Mozart or a long-lost...
by Sarah Rayne | Feb 19, 2023 | Sarah Rayne
Oxford Music Hall Old songs and half-forgotten shreds of old music can be a gift to an author. Rather than sprinkling a crime scene with conveniently dropped, helpfully initialled handkerchiefs, partially burned letters or hidden keys to secret passageways, a song...
by Sarah Rayne | Jan 30, 2023 | Sarah Rayne
Launching the newly-created Fitzglen family on their maiden voyage in Chalice of Darkness, I trawled a great many legends to provide them with a plot. There is, of course, an abundance of material when it comes to legends and lore and myths. Some might be true, some...
by Sarah Rayne | Oct 22, 2021 | Sarah Rayne
Embarking on a new outing for music historian and researcher, Phineas Fox, it seemed to me that it was time for him to explore uncharted territory. To date he had wandered happily and generally quite productively through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, helped...
by Sarah Rayne | Nov 22, 2020 | Sarah Rayne
Music is a brilliant tool for setting just about any scene and creating any mood. For starters it can be unashamedly romantic: for example Fred Astaire serenading Ginger Rogers with Jerome Kern’s, The Way You Look Tonight, in the film, Springtime. It...
by Sarah Rayne | Jul 27, 2020 | Sarah Rayne
There are always decisions to be made during the writing of a book. Usually these are straightforward and familiar – for example, should a character be killed off in Chapter Three, or can the tension be stretched out until, say, Chapter Eight? There are also the...
by Sarah Rayne | Aug 24, 2019 | Sarah Rayne
The creation of a villain can be a surprisingly fascinating exercise. There are so many roles they can be allotted. For starters, it’s usually necessary – and hopefully interesting for the reader – to show their multi-layered lives, because they aren’t always...
by Sarah Rayne | Jul 28, 2018 | Sarah Rayne
I wasn’t expecting to find I had combined an ancient law and opera for a book, but Song of the Damned, (Book 3 of the Phineas Fox series), turned out to have both elements at its heart. It’s not, of course, so very rare for opera and the law to meet up. In Lohengrin...
by Sarah Rayne | Feb 15, 2018 | Sarah Rayne
Finishing the writing of any book is a curiously mixed experience. There’s a sense of achievement and even a muted delight because you finally got there. But there’s also hideous doubt, because although you got there, you’re no longer sure if it’s as good as it seemed...
by Sarah Rayne | Aug 20, 2017 | Sarah Rayne
Music has frequently been a catalyst for me in the creating of a plot, and it seems to have found its way into a good many of my books. There’s the eerie death lament, ‘Thaisa’s Song’ in The Bell Tower, and the music hall songs in Ghost Song. More recently, there’s...
