AUTHOR’S NOTES:
Brian John on Sacrifice
Welsh author Brian John explains the origins of the seventh novel in the best-selling Angel Mountain series.
How many times can you kill off a good heroine? Well, Mistress Martha Morgan of Plas Ingli has gone into her coffin twice, and that is enough to be going on with. My old English master Fred Nicholls told me that to kill off a good heroine even once is foolish indeed. “But if you have to do it,” he said, “make sure you leave some gaps in the story.”
I started writing the Angel Mountain saga ten years ago, following a viral infection accompanied by a delirious episode, during which I was “given” the adventurous life story of a feisty and imperfect woman called Martha Morgan, who lived on a struggling country estate in the early 1800’s. Very strange. When I recovered, the story would not go away. I wrote down the first part of it and tried to find an agent and a publisher to take it on, with notable lack of success. So I published it myself. Ten years after the publication of On Angel Mountain it has become a Welsh favourite, reprinted seven times and with sales now above 25,000. I was told the other day that anything that sells 700 copies in Wales is counted as a best-seller. Does that make the novel a block-buster?
Buoyed up by the success of the first story, and with encouragement from a multitude of fans, I followed it with five other novels, written at the rate of one a year -- all featuring Martha and her family and friends, and all set in the rough and lovely landscape of North Pembrokeshire. The key location is the mountain of Carningli, which has become a place of pilgrimage for readers determined to experience the serenity and the magic of Angel Mountain. All the other novels have been reprinted; three of them have appeared in Corgi editions; and total sales for the whole series now approach 65,000. And I take some pride in the fact that those sales have been achieved without any grant aid or publishing subsidies.
At the beginning of 2009, a new story came to me, slotting very tidily into a gap of nine years in the middle of the story entitled Dark Angel. In the spring I did my research, developed the storyline, and wrote a detailed synopsis. Then, on holiday in Sweden in June and July, I wrote the book. In a long life as a writer, with more than 70 titles to my name, I have never before completed a book so quickly. I was not aware of being obsessed in my writing this time, but my wife might disagree! After much thought I decided upon the title Sacrifice -- for the first time leaving the word “angel” off the front cover.
From the beginning it has been part of my writing strategy to make each novel in the series unique in its style and “atmosphere”. This is difficult to do in historical fiction, especially when each novel features the same characters (except for the villains, who are always disposed of) and the same wild and beautiful places. But the novels are all written in a diary format, and each one deals with a specific phase in the heroine’s life. So, for example, in the first novel Martha is a pregnant, suicidal teenager who has just been through a shotgun wedding; and in the fourth novel she is a mature and energetic woman whose children have flown the nest, and who decides to become involved, for better or worse, in the Rebecca Riots. And in each novel I have been able to examine a different facet of her character. It’s a great privilege for an author to be able to devote seven books to one heroine -- and because she is now so well-rounded and “comfortable” many of my readers refer to her as “Mother Wales.”
And so to Sacrifice. It’s very different from the other books -- much darker, more distressing in its content, and containing a quota of drugs, sex and violence. That’s where the story led me, and that’s where I had to go. At the core of the book there are four very sinister and determined members of a secret society, who visit retribution upon a number of victims in a particularly brutal fashion. Martha is at the top of their hit list, and at last she is drawn into their trap. There she meets depravity on a scale that almost destroys her. In her diary she describes her attempts to come to terms with what has happened -- and in the end there is a sort of triumph for love over evil. In this book the story moves along very rapidly, and if I have to give it a label I think I would call it a crime thriller. And the customer response? On that score, I think I can sleep well, with 1400 copies sold within 3 weeks of publication and with a reprint ordered within six months.
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Sacrifice is published, like the other six novels of the Angel Mountain saga, by Greencroft Books. It costs £7.99.
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