Scottish Bookshelf
“A woman wouldn’t go into the house of man” a strange
“As soon as I read that anecdote in the autobiography, one of my first thoughts was that a woman would never do that. If it was a strange man and the genders were reversed, a woman just wouldn’t go into the house of a man and be like, yeah, I’ll eat your food. I’ll go up and sleep in your bed.
“Connor truly embodies the characteristics of very traditional masculinity. He just kind of feels like he’s untouchable. So I was imagining a world where men had to be frightened in circumstances that they usually take for granted. Circumstances where women have to be frankly afraid for their lives.”
It was important to the author to flip the “woman in peril” trope on its head. She says, “It was massively, massively important. In fact, one of the biggest hurdles that I had was to confront the fact that if I was going to have a female villain, I was going to have to show violence against women at some point. That’s something that I have always been really against in my books.
“I don’t want to throw shade at any writers – writers have so many reasons for writing stories the way they do. But I just feel like the crime genre is still dominated by the trope of the young, dead, naked woman. If you want to read about that, unfortunately you could just pick up a newspaper.
“I don’t want to revisit those images in my own mind. I don’t want to put that forward as a cultural norm. What I really want to do is do something different and say to men, ‘Imagine if you had to live your life with that cultural baggage hanging over you.’”
Elle’s next project will be another historical novel. She says, “It’s an idea that I’ve been working on since before I had my twins and it has sort of shape-shifted over time. It started out very broad and all over the place but, when I returned to it after a four-year gap, I worked on really honing it.
“It’s set around the world of 18th-century music – incorporating ballads, opera and society music concerts.
“I’m really excited about it and hope it can make its way out into the world at some point.”