The Sins of Rachel Ellis
This one was so long ago the details are kind of hazy, but it was my first success and therefore, the most exciting.
It was the mid seventies and I was living in a shared house in Barkingside with a bunch of amiable misfits, all of whom had a liking for alcohol and funny cigarettes. I'd been reading the Mabinogian and something called The Red Book of Hergest (well, skimming them would probably be a more truthful description) and had decided that my third attempt at a novel would be 'something about Merlin.' I decided to set the story in Wales, my birthplace, though perhaps typically I settled on Carmarthen, a part of the country I'd never even visited! The Avellenau Myrrdin (Merlin's Apple Trees) was a traditional poem which I found in The Red Book Of Hergest.
As the story developed in my head, I know that images from Jack Clayton's creepy film, The Innocents, were also helping to shape the events; and it doesn't take a genius to detect a passing resemblance to Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Grey, in the referent child who soaks up all of Aunt Rachel's lines and wrinkles. I also took a flying leap and made the lead character a 12 year old girl. Looking back, I can hardly believe my arrogance.
Anyhow, it sold (in America first, an unusual way to do it). Originally called The Sins Of Rachel Gurney the title had to be changed at the 11th hour because an actress of the same name was currently big on Broadway and the American publishers (St Martins Press) were afraid she might litigate. A panicked editor phoned from New York and 'Ellis' was literally plucked from a directory while she waited.
FACT: my editor at St Martin's was Lincoln Child, who would years later, become co-author of the best-selling The Relic.
X-Files type footnote
I invented the small village of Bryn Myrrydin and the ancient legend about Merlin's Hill... or at least, I thought I had. After the book's publication, various people told me they knew of the place and had actually been there. In the end, I decided to go to Carmarthen myself just to set the record straight. I and some friends spent most of a day searching for the place without success, until we stopped at a garage for petrol, and the mechanic told us of a half-hidden turn-off leading up to 'the old house'.
We approached the place with growing apprehension and I was stunned to see Aunt Rachel's three story mansion, just as I had pictured it, right down to the fact that the windows of the top floor were bricked up, exactly as they had been in the story. Stunned, I grabbed my camera and started shooting off some film. Suddenly, a guy popped up out of the foliage and asked me, not unreasonably, what I was doing. I explained and he told me that the top floor of the house had been boarded up some years earlier after a 'mysterious fire'. Then he led me around behind the house and pointed out the distinctive mound that gave the place its name. 'There's an ancient legend about that hill,' he told me. 'They say that Merlin sleeps beneath it and that one day he'll return.'
Exit one startled writer with steaming pants!