ELLY GRIFFITHS is a bestselling British crime writer who lives on England’s south coast. For adult readers she is best known for her series starring forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway. She has won a prestigious CWA Dagger, as well as an Edgar Award, which is considered ‘the Oscar of Crime Writing’. Elly has also writen an excellent children’s mystery series starring fearless and super-smart schoolgirl sleuth Justice Jones.
After first meeting at the Bute Noir festival in Scotland, Elly spoke with Good Reading’s young UK reporter MADELEINE GRIBBLE-SISTERSON.
You’ve written many award-winning adult mystery novels. What made you decide to write a series of kids’ mysteries?
The name came first. I was on a train, where I often have really good ideas. The countryside rushes past, and you wonder about the people there. Suddenly I had the idea of the name Justice, and I thought ‘who would be called that?’. I thought it’s a girl, and maybe one of her parents was a lawyer, one a mystery writer. Then I thought it would be fun to tell a story about her. Sometimes you have ideas when you’re thinking about something else. I was thinking about my Mum, who went to school in the 1930s and was brought up by just her dad, and she went to boarding school and didn’t like it, but always wanted to solve a mystery there. So, my mum was really the inspiration for Justice.
Of all the ‘Justice Jones’ stories you’ve written which is your favourite and why?
I’ve got a soft spot for the first one, A Girl Called Justice, because that’s when I introduced her to readers. It was fun to write about the school for the first time. If you write a few books about a place, it becomes a bit cosier, a bit more known, a bit less frightening. I really enjoyed the fact that when I first described Highbury House Boarding School, it was quite scary. I would say for my favourite I’m torn between the first book, A Girl Called Justice and the last book, The Spy in the Window, because it was quite fun writing about the war.
Did you always know you’d write a series about Justice Jones from the start, or
after you’d finished the first one?
I think I always thought of it as a series. When I was young, sort of your age, I really liked school stories and actually I still do, because I read ‘Harry Potter’ as an adult. There’s something about school stories that is fun to do as a series, because you have the whole structure, don’t you? Because you go into another year at the school, and that just allows you to do another book. It feels quite natural to write mysteries set at a school as a series. You have some ongoing characters, and some new characters each year, students and teachers. I thought it was quite fun to do.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
My name’s Elly Griffiths, except it’s not really. My real name is Domenica de Rosa and I’ve written four books under that name (see link above). I was born in London in 1963 and my family moved to Brighton when I was five. I loved Brighton and still do – the town, the surrounding countryside and, most of all, the sea. I went to local state schools and wrote my first book when I was a 11, a murder mystery set in Rottingdean, near the village where I still live. At secondary school I used to write episodes of Starsky and Hutch (early fan fiction) and very much enjoyed making my readers cry.
I did all the right things to become a writer: I read English at King’s College London and, after graduating, worked in a library, for a magazine and then as a publicity assistant at HarperCollins. I loved working in publishing and eventually became Editorial Director for children’s books at HarperCollins. All this completely put me off writing and it wasn’t until I was on maternity leave in 1998 that I wrote what would become my first published novel, The Italian Quarter.
Three other books followed, all about Italy, families and identity. By now we had two children and my husband Andy had just given up his city job to become an archaeologist. We were on holiday in Norfolk, walking across Titchwell Marsh, when Andy mentioned that prehistoric man had thought that marshland was sacred. Because it’s neither land nor sea, but something in-between, they saw it as a kind of bridge to the afterlife. Neither land nor sea, neither life nor death. As he said these words the entire plot of The Crossing Places appeared, full formed, in my head and, walking towards me out of the mist, I saw Dr Ruth Galloway. I didn’t think that this new book was significantly different from my ‘Italy’ books but, when she read it, my agent said, ‘This is crime. You need a crime name.’
And that’s how I became Elly Griffiths.
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