F E (Fiona) Higgins was born in London but grew up in Wicklow on the east coast of Ireland. After training as a primary teacher in Blackrock, near Dublin, she returned to London in the early 1990s to start her teaching career in Reception and later Year 5 classes in Harrow and west London. Between periods of teaching, she made and sold candles and latex moulds and returned to writing, which she had enjoyed as a child. Her early unpublished manuscripts are still stored in her attic. The Black Book of Secrets, published in 2004, is the first in a planned series of six novels set in a Victorian-style gothic fantasy world, with the action shifting between the big city, Urbs Umida, a village called Pagus Parvus and the mountains beyond. The second novel, The Bone Magician, is a paraquel, set in Urbs Umida while the action of The Black Book of Secrets is taking place in Pagus Parvus. In summer 2009, The Eyeball Collector took up the story six years later. Fiona is currently writing the fourth book, as yet untitled, set six years before The Black Book of Secrets. She lives in Kent with her husband and daughter. In this interview she talks to Geraldine Brennan

For the reader, the complicated timeline of the books means we are always reading the next book hoping that the mysteries of the last one will be explained, but in some cases we have to wait longer: for example Book 3 didn’t tell us what happened to Oscar, Pin Carpue’s missing father from Book 2. We know that Oscar was working as a carpenter in Pagus Parvus in Book 1, and we know from Book 2 that he had been wrongly accused of a crime, but we still don’t know what the crime was, what has happened to him since Pin last saw him or if they will find each other — although we do hear about Pin again at the end of Book 3.

The answer is that, yes, it is complicated and it’s going to get worse. Book 4 may make some things clearer, although it has the most convoluted storyline yet and I’m finding it increasingly difficult to keep track of the timeline myself. I have to work very hard to remember what I’ve written. Children like the complications and they love it if they think they’ve caught me out. They also like the ornate language and the long words. The books are aimed at the nine and 10-year-olds that I taught and the sorts of stories and humour that they enjoyed. I loved teaching that age group and I think they are ready for complexity in ideas and style of writing. I enjoyed Latin at school – I love the logic of the grammar – and some of my characters speak in quite convoluted sentences appropriate to the setting. I’m glad that it’s not putting children off and that I’m encouraging them to get the dictionary out. Hector, the main character in The Eyeball Collector, has been well educated and he shows his learning but in a fun way, by being an expert riddler. He is also someone children will identify with, as a young boy with a mission to avenge his father. Each book has an apprentice figure in it: Ludlow in The Black Book of Secrets, Pin the body-watcher in The Bone Magician and Hector in The Eyeball Collector.

Can the books be read as standalone novels?

Yes, but you will find much more in them if you read them in sequence. I use flashback to make links between books in different timeframes. For example, in a flashback in The Eyeball Collector we meet the villain of the third book, Gulliver Truepin, as a child. While he is herding hogs in the forest, Gulliver encounters Joe Zabbidou, the keeper of the Black Book, at a point in the past when Joe is looking for a new apprentice. Gulliver could have gone with Joe, and his life would have been very different. But Joe travels on without Gulliver to the city and it is then that he rescues Ludlow, who does become his apprentice in The Black Book of Secrets, while Gulliver takes another direction after the encounter. From The Black Book of Secrets we know that Joe can’t influence the course of people’s lives: he can only give them choices. Book 4, which provides the past context, will have lots of hints about the meaning of incidents in the first three books.

How did this world enter your imagination?

The idea that took root in my head was of an isolated village full of weird people who had a lot of gruesome secrets. I knew I would not set it in the modern day: I didn’t want everyone’s problems being solved on the internet. They had to be stuck with each other and work it out. I was drawn to creating a grim atmosphere with horrible situations, but lightened with humour. I always had it in mind that my heroes would have a struggle in life but although they might be living in spartan conditions they would be able to lift the experience with a good meal or a fire, in the way that in the first book Joe Zabbidou makes a cosy home for himself and Ludlow in my village, Pagus Parvus, which is quite a miserable place.

Pagus Parvus dominated The Black Book of Secrets with just a brief introduction to the city which is later the setting for The Bone Magician, by then called Urbs Umida. It is really two cities with a north-south divide between the rich and the poor. I am interested in exploring the way in which the rich people in the north of the city are more morally corrupt than the thieves and criminals in the south. The poor are kept in their place by drinking cheap gin, which is produced by the rich: in fact, by Hector’s father, and Hector has to resolve that in his head.

The books have a Dickensian flavour although I didn’t enjoy Dickens much when I was young. I didn’t have the patience to read him. I think I was more influenced by the historical romantic fiction that my mother read. I recently re-read one of our favourites, Sally Scarth by Naomi Jacob, about a girl who goes into service at the big house in the 19th century, and I realised how much of that world I had absorbed and put into my books, that sense of rich people having a completely different life. Some of my over-the-top details about Lady Mandible and Withypits Hall, the mansion in The Eyeball Collector, are inspired by the Naomi Jacob style of novel and also by the Round the Horne radio sketches from the 1960s about Dame Celia Molestrangler. I was brought up on jokes and gags from Round the Horne and The Goon Show, although for years I thought my father, who is very funny, had made them all up himself. Now I listen to them while I’m doing the school run.

How did you start writing?

At primary school in Ireland in the 1970s, we were often told to ‘write a story’, always in the afternoons. We weren’t given a theme or told to draft it or discuss it, we just got on and wrote a story. At least I’m not sure that everyone did always write one, but I did. At secondary school, that structured time for writing disappeared, but I kept writing poems and song lyrics, including some bad ones. I’m pleased with my character of Beag Hickory, who is a pretty bad poet, because through Beag I can find a home for my poems. While I was at university and starting teaching, I wrote short stories in the holidays. I always had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write. I answered those magazine ads that said ‘Why Not Be a Writer?’ and took courses at the City Lit in London. I did a course on writing magazine articles and wrote about everything I had done, my candle-making and so on, until I ran out of material and then I had to make things up. I enjoyed teaching but had points where I would try to escape from having a proper job, and teaching became more and more about meetings and record-keeping so from time to time I would try to do something else for a while.

I kept writing throughout but I didn’t feel that I was all that good at short stories (although I have now been commissioned to write a story for an anthology published by the Tusk Foundation, a development charity). It took me a while to find my voice and work out what I wanted to write, which I did in The Black Book of Secrets. I felt that it was really coming from me. Everything else I’d written had been shorter and more contemporary. The key is perseverance and the ability to take constructive criticism. When I had worked as much as I could on The Black Book of Secrets I sent four chapters and a synopsis to various agents I’d found in the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book and one of them, Curtis Brown, took me on. So it happened in a straightforward way but only after a lot of work.

What is your writing process?

 I’m very strict: I write every school day for about six or seven hours and the same at weekends if there’s a deadline coming up. I stop every hour to walk around and stretch for 15 minutes because I’ve had problems with RSI. Our house is very old and draughty so I wear lots of layers and I’m very excited to have found some cashmere hand-warmers. When I’m not at my desk I keep notebooks and pens in every pocket, every bag and beside my bed so that I won’t miss something that strikes me. Every few days I collect up all the scraps of paper and supermarket receipts that I’ve written half-sentences on. I have a Dictaphone in the car and if I’m in a car without the Dictaphone and I have an idea I use my hands-free mobile to leave a message on my voicemail. So I have voicemail messages from myself about horrible ways to murder people.

Each book takes about nine months of which the first six is mostly thinking time. I’m experimenting with voice recognition software so that I can talk to the computer at the thinking stage, which I am looking forward to doing it for Book 5. I write the whole book as a first draft, go through it again typing queries into the manuscript and print it out to read. I might take material out, put new material in and change many things after the first draft, but the thrust of the story will be the same. I just have to go through it again and again to make sure it works. This gets harder with each book. Working on Book 4, I have just discovered that I had written about a character sitting at dinner two days after he had been killed off.

Thank you F E Higgins for talking to Write Away.