The Chemical Novelist
Author Fiona Erskine challenges stereotypes to create a female James Bond
AFTER spending most of her working life as a chemical engineer, Edinburgh-born Fiona Erskine, decided to turn her hand to novel writing. Using the world of science to explore her creative side, the author penned the crime thriller series, The Chemical Detective, featuring explosives expert, Jaq Silver.
“I always wrote as a child,” Fiona says, “but then life got in the way for a bit. I began working in India on some engineering projects and I think seeing the contrast between Europe and India made me look at life in a different way.
“Then during a skiing holiday with my family, I had a minor accident which meant that I was off work for six weeks. It was the first time in my adult life that I had time to write. Once I started, I couldn’t stop!”
But there were some stumbling blocks in Fiona’s way. The engineer soon realised that she would need to perfect the craft of writing before she could fulfil her ambition of becoming a published novelist.
After seven years of hard graft and the completion of a course on self-editing, the engineer finally saw her dream of being an author realised when The Chemical Detective was published by Oneworld. The follow up novel, The Chemical Reaction, was released in May.
The series’ protagonist, female action hero, Jaq Silver, has been heralded as the female version of James Bond or Jason Bourne – something that Fiona is quite proud of.
“I always loved James Bond as a child, but, of course, as you get older and you re-watch the old movies, you realise how appalling they are. They are at times a little problematic on topics like sexism and race, but they are also very funny. Rather than moaning about the films, I wanted to show what it feels like if you’re on the other side of that.
“I was really bored with women being portrayed as victims, especially where rape and murder was involved. I wanted to see someone with agency, so I made a very deliberate decision to write a feisty, older female character. I wanted a character who was sexually confident and uses her brain rather than her muscles. I’m afraid that it’s just a bit of wickedness that I wrote in an
array of very beautiful but unimportant men – they are like sexy lampshades in male form!”
Fiona, who grew up in Edinburgh, said that she would like to see a shift in how women are portrayed in fiction and on screen.
“At the moment, our femme fatales tend to be very languorous and passive. In films, they wear evening dresses and kind of lie around smoking long cigarettes and drinking martinis. The action characters that we do have are often seen as unlikeable figures. Some people say that they don’t like Jaq and that’s absolutely fine – although it does always surprise me a bit. But you know, you don’t need to like her, so long as you’re willing to come along for the ride.”
“That’s one of the reasons that I love watching Scandi dramas, like Borgen, The Killing and The Bridge. I always feel like they do a much better job of showing confident, capable, older women. They don’t focus on the way that their characters look, they show the whole person – what’s going on in the character’s head and how that affects their behaviour.”
Now, Fiona has turned her attention even closer to home, using her own work experiences to pen the novel Phosphate Rocks: A Death in Ten Objects, set in an old chemical works in Leith, which will be published this month by Sandstone Press.
The book opens with a body being found in the ruins of a defunct fertiliser factory. Encased in a carapace of hardened dust – phosphate rock – the mummified corpse is surrounded by unusual objects.
Each chapter of the novel is based around one of these objects and has three interwoven strands: a police investigation into the unexplained death; a story from the factory and the chemistry. “I originally pitched it as a non-fiction book,” Fiona explains. “My husband had encouraged me to write down some of my work stories, because he always enjoyed hearing them. The book started as sketches, fragments of things that I remembered about my first job. Lots of people who looked at them really, really liked them, but it was the tutor on the self-editing course, Debi Alper, who suggested that I knit them all together and turn them into a novel.
“I’d really enjoyed becoming part of the crime community with The Chemical Detective, so I came up with the idea of putting all of my non-fiction sketches together and centring them around the solving of a crime. After that it was really easy. I suppose I already had the
“They are like lampshades!” sexy
meat of the book, but just I’d been lacking the skeleton.”
The novel features real life characters from the author’s first job at a fertiliser factory on Leith Docks, including Fiona’s mentor, John Gibson.
“That was what I was incredibly nervous about. I am in regular contact with John and I see him a few times a year when I’m up in Edinburgh. He’s not a big reader, but he has finally read the manuscript, which I’m incredibly pleased about, and thankfully he loved it.
“I should have known really, because I had talked to him about what I was doing and he was nothing but enthusiastic.
“It is an odd feeling because, it is an affectionate portrait of John, but it is a bit warts and all! I had originally tried fictionalising all the characters, but it just didn’t work. I decided I really needed John in there.”
Although Fiona currently lives down south, Scotland has always been a huge source of inspiration for her.
“I am Scottish through and through. I love Edinburgh and before Covid-19 hit, I was back home regularly. It is definitely a place that I come back to in my writing as well. Although Jaq isn’t Scottish, she does have a lot of Scottish characteristics including an independence of spirit. She also holds that enlightenment view that you really can triumph over anything, if you think about it hard enough.”
Fiona, is currently in the process of taking up a new position in Northumbria running a biofuels power station – while working on book four of the Jaq Silver series.
“I write very early in the morning and I am a bit relentless! I can very happily tune everything out so I can write on a train or a plane or in a waiting room. I can write in snatches of 20 minutes, so I grab little bits of time whenever I can. Writing novels is just a really lovely escape. Although I do work in the world of science and technology, when I’m writing fiction, I can really let my imagination run riot!”
“Writing escape” novels is just a really lovely