'Shetland' is adapted from the novel 'Red Bones.' The book is based around an archaeological dig, and the mystery starts with the murder of the elderly woman who crofts the land where the dig is happening.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Shetland has always been a place of sanctuary for me. I visited when I dropped out of university, and I just loved it from the minute I got there. It's a bleak but very beautiful place.
I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.
I traveled to Ireland to research 'Sandcastles,' to visit the coastline where my ancestors looked toward America, the tiny town they once loved so much, and the docks from which they sailed toward their dreams of building a better life for their family. The answers I found on that journey are woven through the novel.
I read a bit of the Icelandic sagas. They're fascinating in that they are completely ordinary. The farmer will go off into the hills and fight a troll, and then go back and do ordinary things. It's an odd mix of fantasy and reality.
I lived in Shetland for a short while in the seventies and have been visiting ever since, so I have lots of useful contacts!
I decided to take my foot off the pedal with all the detail. I'm sure after 'Animalia' and 'The Eleventh Hour,' readers thought that's what to expect from Graeme Base. With 'The Sign of the Seahorse,' I took a step away from the puzzle-book genre - that was more of an adventure story.
The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character.
'Lost' is about a bunch of people stranded on an island. It's compelling, but kind of tiny. But what sustains you are the characters.
My first novel, 'Sacrifice,' was set on the Shetland Islands.
First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.