Erin Hart Talks About Ireland, Music, and Haunted Ground

From the moment a farmer's hoe digging turf unexpectedly reveals the perfectly preserved severed head of a beautiful young red-haired woman, Erin Hart's debut novel, Haunted Ground (Scribner), captivates the reader with its parallel tales of two women -- one recently mysteriously missing and the other executed during the 17th century. The gothic mystery, set in the modern-day midlands of Ireland, was a July/August 2003 Book Sense 76 pick.

Haunted Ground follows Irish archeologist Cormac Maguire and American pathologist Nora Gavin as they team up in an attempt to discover who the red-haired girl was and why she was beheaded. Along the way, they are ultimately caught up in another bit of intrigue when they find out that, two years before the gruesome discovery, Mina Osborne, the Indian-born wife of Hugh Osborne, a local landowner, went for a walk with her young son and never returned. The mystery casts a shadow of doubt and suspicion over Osborne, a secretive man descended from the English, who puts Gavin and Maguire up in nearby Bracklyn House, his stately home, while they conduct their dig.

Author Erin Hart

In nominating the book for the 76, Carrie Sutherland of J.W. Beecroft Books & Coffee in Superior, Wisconsin, aptly described Hart's tome as "filled with folklore, Irish history, and gothic intrigue" and called the novel "a wonderful blend of classic suspense and modern-day forensics."

The book also owes a debt to the Irish traditional music that is a significant part of the nation’s cultural fabric: Folk songs help solve parts of the puzzle of the red-haired girl's death. Irish music plays a key role in Hart's life, too. She is married to renowned Irish accordion player Paddy O'Brien. And though she and her husband are based in Minnesota, they travel frequently to Ireland.

BTW recently spoke to Hart about Ireland, music, and, of course, the inspiration and challenges involved in writing Haunted Ground.

BTW: I read that Haunted Ground was inspired by a real incident that occurred in Ireland?

Erin Hart (EH): Yeah. Actually, how it happened, I'd been reading a lot of poems by Seamus Heaney, and he had the whole series about bog bodies and bogs in general. And there was a particular one called "Bogland," where he mentions butter -- found 100 years later, dug up salty and white. I was just astonished by this idea that the bog preserved things. I had no idea about what bogs could do at that point.

We were visiting Ireland [in 1986], and I asked a friend's mother if it was really true that they found butter in the bog, and she said, "Oh yes!" And what I didn't know was that her son-in-law is a famous archeologist and the son of a famous archeologist. And so she started telling all kinds of things that he had found in the bog: wooden practice swords that are 500 years old, and then she told me this story about a head -- that when [archeologist] Barry [Raftery], her son-in-law, was a child, his father was head of the National Museum, and they were called to a site somewhere in [County] Sligo or Mayo -- or somewhere around there -- and these two farmers had found a head in a bog.

She didn't really know much more about it than that, just that she was a beautiful red-haired girl, perfectly preserved. The minute I heard that I thought, Now, that would be a great opening for a mystery, you know! But I was not a writer, so I just thought, Oh, that would be a great mystery. I wrote a little thing in my journal: "Must work on mystery novel about red-haired girl in bog."... So, I blame the whole book on Seamus Heaney basically!

BTW: In your books the mystery is solved, but did they ever find out what happened to that red-haired girl in real life?

EH: No, not really. In fact, I've been searching for her. They have these lists from all of the bog remains that have been found -- and not just actual remains that are recovered and put in the museum, but even what they call paper bodies -- which I mentioned in the book, too -- reports of remains that have been found in earlier centuries when there was no preservation or anything.

So, I'd been looking through these lists trying to find a description that matches the description that I got from Barry, and I can't find her anywhere…. And then I remembered that … my friend's mother had said that she had been sent to the British Museum. I don't know what happened to her after that. I know they were trying some preservation techniques in those days, which, about that time, would have included continuing a tanning process. But I don't know what happened to her or where she ended up, or if she was ever returned to Ireland.

BTW: You said at the time you heard this story that you weren't a writer, but is it true that you have always written?

EH: That is not true! I really came to writing quite late. I wrote essays in school and school papers and things like that, but I never did extra-curricular writing like people always say, "I've been writing since the age of nine months!" That was not me at all.

I really started when I decided that I had to go to graduate school because my brain was shrinking from working for the state. The only two things on offer were an MBA program or creative writing, and since I don't do math, it was a really easy choice. But I didn't really write, either, so I had to become a writer. And the thing that helped me a lot was doing journalism because I had to write on deadline, I had to turn things around, I had to be able to organize my very disorganized thoughts. So that was really excellent training.

BTW: So you were a journalist?

EH: I became a freelance theater critic and found out that I did have things to say. That was my big fear, being a writer, is that I didn't have anything to say, or, that if I did have something to say, it came out so disorganized that nobody wanted to read it!

But I was trying to write essays, which are a totally different form…. So, when I went to grad school, I decided I would concentrate on nonfiction writing because this would be easier, you don't have to make it up. Famous last words! I couldn't believe how stupid that was….

So I was kind of discouraged after grad school. I'd spent all this time and money getting a nonfiction writing degree, and I had only written one piece of fiction in all my eight years in grad school, which was a short story, also based on a little true-life incident; the characters are kind of based on my grandparents. After school I sent the story out, thinking, I wasted all this time in grad school, I better send something out and try to get published anyway.

I sent my one little story out to Glimmer Train [a quarterly fiction publication], and the reason I sent it to them was: A) It was run by two sisters; and, B) they had a $1,200 prize, which was wonderful compared to a lot of other contests. And it sort of accidentally won their fiction contest that year ... in 1996.

BTW: How long did you work on Haunted Ground?

EH: I actually started writing it the day that I got the call from Glimmer Train, because I was sick in bed with pneumonia and reading all kinds of mysteries … library books that I borrowed from my upstairs neighbor because I [was too sick to] go to the library. And I was feeling terribly unsatisfied by all these stories I was reading; they weren't involved enough, they weren't chewy enough for me. I thought, well, I can write a lousy mystery! So it was that very day. And it helped to have the affirmation to have something published. And part of it was a lot of ignorance ... about how hard it is to write a novel. It took about six years of writing it until it was done enough to be sent out to publishers.

BTW: In terms of Haunted Ground, you certainly seem to know Ireland, and I was wondering what drew you to Irish culture. I know you're married to Paddy O'Brien -- is that what brought you into the culture, or is it your heritage?

EH: I think it goes all the way back to the fact that … when I was a little kid people used to ask me, "'Erin' -- what's that mean?" I was named after my grandmother who's Irish-American, and I would always have to say, "Well, it means Ireland." So, of all my siblings -- you know, we're German, and Belgian, and English, and Irish, a real mixture like all Americans usually -- but I'm the Irish one.

I'm the one who always loved Irish music and dancing and culture and all that kind of stuff. I didn't get into the traditional music as much until I was probably in college, but I learned all the Irish songs in our folk songbook and just the melodies appealed to me. So it's something that goes way, way back.

Of course, being with Paddy, we travel there, several times a year now, hang around. It's just an endless source of material. There are so many layers of history, there's so much that is kind of unspoken in the culture. It's a kind of hidden way of speaking I find really appealing as a person writing dialogue and writing dramatic scenes. Very indirect communication. There's a great quotation, and I will probably use it in my next book, from a Greek ethnographer writing in the years B.C. describing the Celts, saying, "They speak in riddles, leaving much to be understood."

BTW: So, did you confer with Barry Raftery about the archeology?

EH: Oh, yes, absolutely. When I decided I was actually going to make a stab at writing this book I e-mailed him. He's very nice and wrote back and told me the whole story about how this had happened and described in detail the red-haired girl's face. He said, "Forty years later she's still with me." So the description of her in the book is exactly what he told me, pretty much word-for-word.

He put me on to all kinds of other really great and interesting people. A woman named Maire Delaney, who is a doctor of anatomy, was the bog body expert for Ireland. There isn't any sort of official job, Bog Body Expert, but she was doing graduate work in archeology that concentrated on physical and chemical changes that happen in bog preservation -- whenever a bog body was discovered, she would always be consulted by the state pathologist and archeologists whenever bog remains were found. She had all kinds of really good and interesting information.

I had a whole plot point that was around DNA evidence, and, of course, nuclear DNA is destroyed in the bog environment…. So that blew that out. I then later found out that mitochondria DNA can remain, so I had to change my plot a little bit to incorporate that scientific information. It was really important to me to get the science stuff right, and I'm hoping that I have. The people who've read it for me so far said, "It'll do" -- you know!

BTW: So is this story going to continue?

EH: Yes, there's a second book now, [and] we're still haggling over titles, so I can't even give you the title of the next one. But it's the same two main characters. Cormac and Nora will come back, and there's a whole cast of secondary characters who are all new, and it's a slightly different place. This one is actually set in the bogs of West Offaly, where Paddy worked during the '60s. We went to the place where he used to work from '61 to '68 or '69, and we're walking in and I said to him, "Do you think anyone here will remember who you are?" And he said, "Nah, I don't think so." And the first guy walks up to him and says, "O'Brien, what do you want!"

BTW: The way music is used as a key thread in the book -- in the fact that a woman helps answer some of the mystery in the song she remembers -- I felt that it was very interesting. Would it be safe to assume that Irish traditional music played a huge role on how this story developed?

EH: It was always kind of an inspiration. I would listen to certain tunes while I was working, and, in particular, there's a slow air called "Dear Irish Boy" that sort of became the theme music for the red-haired girl. When I wanted to be thinking about what had happened to her, I would put that on. And the recording is [performed by] our friend James Kelly -- it's a long, nine-minute version of the air, and it's just a heartbreaker, you know? So I would put that on, and lie down and listen to it and get into the red-haired girl's mindset. And other tunes as well.

I made all the characters musicians not just because that reflects my experience of Ireland -- that all these professional people also play music -- but also because I wanted to put that flavor in for people who don't have any connection to traditional music -- to show … and share that part of Ireland that I have experienced, and I think is really wonderful. One of the major themes in the book is that people keep doing these things, keep practicing folk ways and repeating the same things over and over again without really knowing why…. There is no reason, but there are sort of deep, subconscious reasons that they keep doing these things and music is part of that theme.

BTW: One last question, which is off the subject of the book -- can you tell us what you're favorite independent bookstore is?

EH: Probably Ruminator Books, which is going through some really tough times right at the moment. I also love Northern Lights in Duluth, a great store -- I love being there, I did a book signing there this summer. --Interview by David Grogan