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BIOGRAPHY |
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To begin with, ‘Margaret Frazer’ was two
people, both interested in writing and in medieval England, one of
them with modern murder mysteries already published, the other
with file drawers, shelves, and notebooks full of research on
England in the 1400s. They met in a historical recreationist group
called the Society for Creative Anachronism and joined forces to
write The
Novice's Tale, the first in a history mystery series
centered on a Benedictine nun, Dame Frevisse, of a small priory in
Oxfordshire. Both character and setting were chosen for the
challenge they presented – a cloistered nun in a rural nunnery:
how does one go about being involved in murders in that situation?
-- and the chance to explore medieval life from a different
perspective.
During their collaboration, the authors worked
together by first laying out the general idea of a story. Then the
‘Frazer’ half of the team developed the plot and characters in
detail and wrote the first draft. The ‘Margaret’ half then
re-worked that into a second draft, the ‘Frazer’ half
re-worked that (and it helped they lived five miles apart and
couldn’t hear what each said about the other during these
stages!), and then they did the final draft together, never able
to argue over it too long because by then there would be a
deadline closing in. The collaboration worked well through six
books and two award nominations – an Edgar for The
Servant's Tale and a Minnesota Book Award for The
Bishop's Tale – before
the ‘Margaret’ half grew tired of the series and amicably
returned to the 20th century, leaving the ‘Frazer’ half to
continue the series, with an Edgar nomination for The
Prioress' Tale.
I write stories set in medieval England because I
greatly enjoy looking at the world from other perspectives than
the 20th century. My brief college career was as an archaeology
major with writing intended as a hobby, but with one thing and
another, my interest came down to medieval England with writing as
my primary activity, only rivaled by my love of research. But why
medieval England, especially for someone who grew up without any
interest in knights in shining armor and ladies fair? That’s a
tangled tale but the final steps were seeing a production of
Shakespeare’s Richard II and soon thereafter reading
Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of
Time. The complexities of honor
and duty and betrayal, mixed with a curiosity as to how the high
tragedies of the 1400s came about intrigued me and to understand
more I needed to understand how people then saw their world and
why they saw it that way. That set me into learning about medieval
English politics, religion, philosophy, sociology, economics --
all the multi-layered elements that go into making the lives of
people in any time period. I wanted to know the landscape of the
time not only outwardly – by way of many trips around Britain
– but inwardly – how the world looked and felt to the people
who lived then, rather than how it looks to us now. And when the
chance came to write a mystery series set in medieval England, I
wanted to do it from as far inside medieval perceptions as
possible, to look at medieval England more from their point of
view than from ours, because the pleasure of going thoroughly into
otherwhen as well as otherwhere -- the chance to move right away
from the familiar into a whole other way of seeing and behaving --
has always been one of my own great pleasures in reading. As a
writer I deeply want to give that same pleasure to others.
So – in everyday life, I’m Gail Frazer, living
in the countryside north of Elk River, Minnesota, with four cats
and not enough bookshelves. Over the years I’ve had a rag-tag of
various jobs, including librarian, secretary, reseacher for a
television station, gift shop manager, and assistant matron at an
English girls’ school. Married once upon a time but not anymore,
I have two well-grown sons who become uneasy if I read books about
poisons at the supper table and refuse to turn their backs on me
when I say I want to try something I might use in a story. I
write more days than not, and when once I moaned that "I have
to get a life," my loving family informed me, "You have
one. It’s in the 1400s." That seems to sum up things rather
nicely.
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