Spirits In The Mist

Elaine Thomson reveals how the landscape of rural Scotland brings atmosphere and unease to her ghostly new novel

- by DAWN GEDDES

NOVELIST and academic Elaine Thomson is best known for her Jem Flockhart novels, the dark and sometimes gruesome historical crime fiction series that explores the medical history of Victorian London, published under the pseudonym E.S. Thomson.

But now the Edinburgh-based writer has swapped the world of crime for the supernatural with Hawthorn, the first novel in a quartet of ghost stories.

“I'd wanted to write something different for a while,” Elaine tells us. “When I was writing the Jem Flockhart books, I always had an idea of what the next one would be.

“The books explored the history of medicine, so I wanted to write about psychiatry,” she adds.

“I wanted to write about tropical medicine. I wanted to write about cholera and sewers, but then when I got to the end of the sixth book, I felt like the well had run dry.

“I began to wonder if I could write something supernatural. So I decided to give it a shot.”

Set in Caithness in October 1871, Hawthorn centres around Robert Sutherland. When a strange vision leads the cartographer out onto the moor, an accident leaves him inches from death.

He is taken to Leask House to recuperate under the care of Mrs Sinclair and her beautiful daughter Isabel.

At first, Robert thinks the dreadful visions that plague him at Leask House are the result of the laudanum he has been prescribed, but as events take ever stranger and more terrifying turns, Robert begins to wonder if his presence at Leask House is really a coincidence at all. Someone — or something — has summoned him here, and they don’t intend for him to leave.

When she began to work on the haunting tale, Elaine says she quickly realised there was one big difference between penning crime fiction and ghostly tales.