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The Death Pit was a book which just popped out of nowhere. I
hadn't intended to write a sequel to The Poison Tree - I'm interested
in unique concepts, not character-based series - but my publishers
suggested it. The idea for this came as I was reading a magazine
article about a real-life research student who found her thesis
about a famous dead poetess became less marketable the more
she strayed off her mouthwatering but misguided initial hypothesis
into mundane accuracy. I can't remember now how witchcraft came
into my mind, but once I'd started researching witch trials
I realised Scotland was going to be a better setting than England,
as the whole witchcraft-hysteria was something that largely
passed England by. From seventeenth-century witchcraft it was
a fairly short step to introducing some modern-day Wiccans.
though I was always determined I was going to treat them accurately,
and not demonise them or use them just to titillate.
My wife was a free-range pig farmer, at the time. She was moving
her 'death pit' - the pit where all the animals are buried that
have died of natural causes on the farm - and she happened to mention
to me that the bodies at the bottom were, strangely, less decomposed
than those at the top. I then started reading the brilliant University
of Bradford Introduction to Forensic Archaeology - a book I'd
picked up at random in Waterstones -and discovered why this should
be so: because bodies need oxygen to decompose, a sealed pit full
of corpses uses all the available oxygen at the top, while those
below go into a kind of suspended state.
Somehow, these two thoughts came together in my mind. That's usually
the way with me - coming up with an interesting plot requires not
one idea but two: it's the collision that generates something unusual.
The book was roundly criticised, particularly by American readers,
who felt that it was a hotchpotch - a little bit of historical crime,
a bit of forensic crime, a bit of romance, a dash of the occult,
all wrapped up in a campus-novel that isn't even set on a campus.
To me, that's what makes it a story and not a formula.
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