Despite taking place at one of Bloody Scotland’s smallest venues, the Secret Histories event featured three brilliant authors who were not only masters of their craft but engaging and captivating public speakers who had me invested in their own ‘secret histories’ from the onset. Hugo Rifkind, Colin Walsh, and Ellie Keel joined Frankie Burr to discuss their novels that delve into the dark corners of adolescence and unveil the deadly secrets that it harbors.
Frankie began the conversation by pointing out that each of the books, Rabbits, The Four, and Kala, interestingly all have a fifteen year gap in the setting. This is notable in the varying uses of technology in each book, such as the use of mobile phones. Regardless of this time discrepancy, each book details intimate stories of young people who are still at school, emphasizing the relationships between them and the universal experiences of violence, abuse, and bullying that transpire from educational institutions.
Frankie asked the authors to elaborate on the inspiration for their novels. “Everything that happens in my books is either something that happened to me or something I heard happened to someone at school,” says Ellie, which speaks volumes to the systematic issues that stem from private schools and boarding schools across the UK.
Hugo goes on to describe his own private school experience in Scotland as “Spartan” and “Scottish posh” where violence and bullying was prominent. Colin outlines how the maintenance of social respectability underpinned so many awful things that were happening in Ireland and in Irish schools at the time his novel takes place in, saying that the political contexts of his country informed his writing process.
While fiction is often inspired by real life experiences, Colin also points out that “Not all fiction is autobiographical,” saying that it is often in the emotional tonality of the writing that the author’s experiences are present, not necessarily in the characters or in the narrative. Colin’s novel, Kala, is the only one that jumps in time, portraying his characters in their youth and their adulthood. Frankie presses him on the difficulties of this narrative style, to which he responds, “You become fluent in the language of the book you’re writing, and once you establish your characters voices it’s easy to hopscotch between the young and adult versions of them.”
Each author discussed their use of crime fiction to explore the moral code of institutions and how it influences the moral code of the individual. The talk was an emotional and acute rollercoaster of the mortifications, heartaches and losses that are universally experienced in our youth. The discussion concluded in a lighthearted tone when Hugo offered the audience some writing advice: “Writer’s block is an indulgence you don’t have to afford yourself,” so go write that crime novel you’ve been keeping on the backlog and let the secret histories of your past unfold.
Image provided by Emma Mackenzie