Carolyn Haines talks to Aileen Baron, whose real-life work as an archaeologist has provided the background for her international thrillers.
Aileen, you’ve had a very exciting life. First let me present a few of the facts. You lived in Jerusalem with your husband, who was a biochemist. You raised your children, and after your husband’s death, you went back to school and eventually earned a Ph.D. in archaeology/anthropology and taught for twenty years at California State University at Fullerton.
During that time, you were an NEH scholar working on digs throughout the Middle East, and you were also director of the CSU research campus at the Hebrew University.
Those are some pretty impressive credentials and exemplifies the old adage—write about what you know. Except that your first two novels are historical mysteries.
In the first book featuring Lily Sampson, the setting is 1938 Palestine. The second Lily Sampson book is set during the invasion of Northern Africa during WWII. So you’ve combined a setting you’ve explored as a working archaeologist, a character who seeks answers, and a murder to solve.
Answer:
Lily is an archaeologist, so I’m able to use some of the digging experience as well as archaeology in the books. For my first Lily Sampson mystery, A FLY HAS A HUNDRED EYES, the director of the archaeological site where Lily works is killed. The story is based, in part on the real murder of a British archaeologist who was killed, during the British Mandate of Palestine in 1938 on his way to the opening of the Rockefeller Museum. The police never bothered to find out who killed him. The story going around among archaeologists was that he was so nasty, so stingy, that nobody cared. It became a sort of standing joke among archaeologists, and my students would tell me “Don’t work us too hard, or we’ll pull a Starkey on you.”
When I began writing my first mystery, it seemed like the ideal basis for the plot, and I built the story around it. As I did additional research for the novel, I discovered that terrorist activities at the time were as bad as, if not worse than, today, so the mystery took on a political slant.
I used the memoirs of an archaeologist who worked for the OSS in Morocco as the liaison between Morocco and the Allied headquarters in Gibraltar in the second book of the series, THE TORCH OF TANGIER. During WW II, people as diverse as Julia Child and a number of anthropologists and archaeologists, such as Cora Dubois and Nelson Glueck were recruited by the OSS.
Lily works for the OSS on preparations for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, after Franco’s Spain took over the international city of Tangier and denied her archaeological team access to their excavations in the suburbs of Tangier at the Caves of Hercules that overlook the Straits of Gibraltar.
I’m working on the third book in the series now, which will take Lily to Transjordan, where she is supposed to do an archaeological survey for the OSS.
Question:
In your latest mystery, THE GOLD OF THRACE, which will be out this July from Poisoned Pen Press, you’re introducing a new protagonist, Tamar Saticoy. Would you mind talking a bit about the differences between Tamar and Lily, and also why you’ve decided to write about a contemporary setting. What hooked you into this particular story? Was the “seed of the story” character based or plot based or was setting or theme where it began?
Answer:
THE GOLD OF THRACE is a tale of the intrigue and deceit in the antiquities trade.
A friend of mine, the Director of Antiquities of Turkey, upset by artifacts disappearing from archaeological sites, including a mosaic floor that had been rolled up and stolen overnight, suggested that as long as I was writing mysteries, I should write one about the antiquities trade. Most of these stolen items end up in the lucrative antiquities market and are sold to collectors and museums. This was the germ of the novel. The idea was particularly timely in view of the scandals at the Getty and at Sotheby’s.
I had once been engaged to an antiquities dealer in Switzerland, and had some idea of how these things worked. My Turkish friend had told me that artifacts from Turkey were smuggled through Bulgaria on their way to markets in Switzerland and Berlin.
I went to Bulgaria to do additional research and discovered that the country was in a severe economic depression. When the Russians left after the fall of the USSR, they took the economy with them. Sofia had been rebuilt by the Russians with the broad boulevards and blocks of gloomy housing that the communists are so fond of, and now balconies were hanging from poorly built apartment buildings, roofs were sagging. Unemployment was at 50%, and the only way to make a living was by smuggling. I was intrigued by the archaeological evidence of the Thracians, an ancient civilization contemporary with Classical Greece and centered on the western shore of the Black Sea from Asia Minor to the Danube. Byzantium was founded by the Thracians. They were famous for their horsemanship and their gold workmanship, and according to their Bulgarian descendants, their good looks. Thracians have a prominent part in Greek mythology. Orpheus, the father of songs, who could charm wild beasts, inspire trees and rocks to dance, and change the course of rivers was Thracian. The Golden Fleece of the Argonauts was in reality Thracian gold.
The Bulgarian archaeologists that I talked to told me that Turkish artifacts were indeed smuggled through Bulgaria on the way to the centers of the antiquity trade, but cautioned that there was a window of time when most of it took place, after the Russians left in 1989, but before the Serbian-Croatian conflicts prevented the traffic going through former Yugoslavia. Lily would have been in her late seventies or eighties by then, so I needed a new protagonist.
The story begins with thefts from archaeological excavations in Turkey (including the theft of a mosaic floor from Tamar’s site) and takes us through Bulgaria, to Switzerland, France, and as far afield as The Hague.
Tamar is more sophisticated than Lily, partly because times have changed. I got the idea for the secondary plot in the story that centers around Thracian gold from a scandal that took place in the 1980’s in Turkey. The archaeologist involved in the scandal, also suspected of questionable digging practices is now persona non grata in Turkey. The character of Chatham is based in part on that archaeologist and in part on the venal curator of a museum that I had the misfortune to meet.
{mospagebreak}Question:
The first thing you wrote was a short story. Do you still write in the short form, and what do you like best about the long form?
Answer:
I began writing after I retired from teaching archeology at California State University, Fullerton and gave a few courses in the extension at the University of California, Irvine. They encourage their lecturers to take courses in other departments, and since they have a famous writing program, I enrolled in two writing classes in the extension--a short story class and a mystery class.
For the short story class I wrote a story called Petrie’s Head. The idea for the story came from archaeological lore and my experiences at the Albright Archaeological Institute of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem during my NEH year.
Sir William Flinders-Petrie is famous as the genius who single-handedly invented modern archaeology. He was also a nut. He went to Egypt to measure pyramids in 1882, and found that they were poorly dated, so he developed a series of sequence dates from tomb lots that could establish dates for Egyptian archaeology. The method, called a Petrie matrix, is used to this day. He then went to Palestine, and cross-dated the Palestinian material by using Egyptian artifacts found in excavations there.
He taught at University College, London. When he retired, he moved to the American School of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, where living was cheap, the sky was blue, and beds had inner spring mattresses. He was convinced that he was so brilliant that his head was growing. When he died in 1942, he willed his head with all of its miraculous knowledge to the Medical School at the University College, London. The Director of the American School duly cut off his head, put it in a hatbox on the mantel in the director’s house to send to London, and buried the rest of him in the Protestant cemetery on Mt. Zion.
The United States had just entered WW II and the director got a cable from Washington telling him to come immediately. Because of the travel restrictions of the war, it took him two months to get to Washington—through South America, up through Central America, and finally to Washington. When he got there, they told him to turn around and go back and do an archaeological survey of Transjordan for the OSS. After four months absence, he returned to Jerusalem, and Petrie’s head was gone.
Looking for Petrie’s head became a standard archaeological joke. When I was at the American School in 1983, we received a clipping from the Illustrated London Times with a picture of a head, severed at the neck, which looked like Petrie as a young man. The caption under the picture read WHO IS THIS MAN?
And that was the basis for the story.
I don’t usually write short stories because they take me about as long to write as a novel if I want to do them right. I know that might be my own idiosyncrasy, but I feel that short stories are a special kind of art form, just as poetry is, and they take a different kind of competence and mind set.
Question:
What tools do you use in your writing that spring directly from your training and experience as an archeologist?
Answer:
First of all, as you can see, there are all kinds of ready-made stories about archaeologists that can form the basis for a novel or short story. Most of all, my experience as an archaeologist has helped guide my research, so that I know where to look for what I need.
When I research an area for a book, I look over the local site reports and write ahead to the curators of the local museums, and ask to view some of their collections. We go to lunch, and I pick up strange tales as they cue me in to the local archaeological gossip. When I did the research for the latest book, THE GOLD OF THRACE, for example, I went to Bulgaria and spoke to archaeologists in Sofia and Varna, a city with evidence of ancient Thracian occupation and a museum with Thracian gold.
{mospagebreak}Question:
Has your education and training given you any advantages as a novelist?
Answer:
At first, it was a disadvantage. Scholarly papers are written in the passive and scholarly speak uses a speculative vocabulary and distances itself from the reader. It took me almost a year to break that habit in my writing.
Museum catalogues, on the other hand, are full of purple passages that mean very little (e.g. “These remarkable people are steeped in ritual.”) I had to recover from that too. But as a result of writing labels for museum exhibits, where twenty-five words or less must describe the function, history and place of origin of an artifact, I don’t waste words. So I end up with great descriptions, thin books, and what my editor has called a “spare writing style”.
Question:
Would you mind sharing one of the “finds” you discovered while working on-site, and has this particular experience been used in one of your books?
Answer:
When I was digging at Gezer in Israel, we came across the skeleton of a young woman who had been trapped in a burning building in the destruction of the city during an enemy raid. I used that experience in my first book, A FLY HAS A HUNDRED EYES.
Question:
What’s the most difficult element of writing for you (such as character development, plotting, structure, focus—something along those lines) and what’s the easiest? Would you talk a little about both?
Answer:
I have the greatest difficulty plotting and, especially, throwing in a few red herrings. I also find violent scenes the most difficult to write, and do endless rewrites until I get them right.
I feel that a good mystery should begin with a bang. Since I don’t write police procedurals, I don’t begin with a dead body. I start, instead, with a scene that is related to the theme of the book. I began A FLY HAS A HUNDRED EYES, for example, with Lily on the balcony of the archaeological museum at the YMCA watching a bloody riot on the street below. In the first chapter of THE TORCH OF TANGIER, Lily follows a pair of German spies through the streets of Tangier, and discovers them sneaking into her hotel room. THE GOLD OF THRACE begins with a murder and theft at Ephesus, and then switches to the Tamar’s site where she discovers that a mosaic floor from a Roman villa has disappeared overnight.
I find description and dialogue the easiest to write. I think that a few key words in a description can evoke a more vivid account than a detailed laundry list to describe a scene.
I try to outline a book before I write, but scenes keep popping into my head and I write them down before they get away. That may be why I find plotting the most difficult, and description and dialogue the easiest.
Question:
You’ve chosen to write THE GOLD OF THRACE in third person. Why?
Answer:
I wrote the short story, Petrie’s Head, in the first person because I find it easier to be humorous in the first person. I wrote the first two books in the Lily Sampson series in Lily’s point of view in the third person, partly because the first person is associated in my mind with police procedurals. I suspect that if I wrote it in the first person, Lily would be a very different character, indeed.
THE GOLD OF THRACE is more of a thriller. I used multiple third person point of view to heighten the suspense, alternating mostly between Tamar and the sleazy Chatham, but also wrote from the point of view of other characters. (Only one POV per chapter, however.) I hope it works.
Question:
In my books, all of the characters have something of me in them. IS Tamar anything like you?
Answer:
I think what you say may be true of all writers. I know that Tamar is like me in many ways, especially in her assessment of things. And she is an archaeologist, after all. I hope that I have little in common with the villains. But I don’t think I could write about them with any verisimilitude if we had nothing in common.
Question:
What’s up next for Tamar? And for you?
Answer:
I’m doing the research for the next Lily Sampson book, and writing the occasional scene. I haven’t worked out the full plot and cast of characters. I have an amorphous plan for Tamar’s next book, but it’s still hovering in my head. I’ll get to it after I finish Lily’s next book.
