PW Talks with Keith Miles

PW: Though you're best known by your pseudonym Edward Marston, you're really Keith Miles, originally from Wales. Have you written much under your own name?

KM: I was writing for shows in high school, a boys' grammar school in South Wales, and while at Oxford in the late '50s and early '60s, I performed, wrote and directed with the Oxford University Dramatic Society. Later I was a history lecturer at Oxford, and even taught drama at a maximum security prison in Birmingham for a while.

PW: Your first mysteries were about golf. Are you an avid golfer yourself?

KM: I've enjoyed the game since I played "pitch and putt" as a teenager. The four golf mysteries written between 1986 and 1991 took Alan Saxon, a professional golfer, to the British Open championship in four different countries. Since they were written in the first person, I had to go with him, a most enjoyable experience. Under another pseudonym, Martin Inigo, I wrote a fifth golf mystery and a tennis mystery in 1991.

PW: What prompted you to write another golf mystery after a 10-year gap?

KM: I was giving a talk at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore [in Scottsdale, Ariz.] when someone in the audience asked me when I was going to write another Saxon novel. "As soon as a publisher makes me an offer," I replied and—lo and behold!—Barbara Peters of Poisoned Pen Press did so there and then. The result was Bermuda Grass [reviewed on p. 46].

PW: How many more pseudonyms do you have?

KM: Just one, Conrad Allen, after my son, Conrad. As Allen, I've written three novels about George Dillman and his wife, Genevieve, who solve murders on ships of the Cunard line.

PW: Tell us something about the historical series you write as Edward Marston.

KM: The first is the Domesday series, so-called because the heroes are two of William the Conqueror's "Domesday" surveyors, Gervase Bret and Ralph Delchard, who travel the 34 counties covered by the Domesday book to determine and to collect the king's taxes. Every county they visit presents them with a problem to solve, usually involving murder. I'll probably not get through all 34 counties, even if I write three a year as I did in 1998.

PW: How do you manage to produce two or three mysteries a year on average?

KM: Good organization. I spent 10 years writing radio and TV drama. It was a rigorous discipline. You simply have to deliver the goods up to standard and to a strict deadline. The writing is the easy part. What takes time is the research. I spend ages in various libraries or out on location so that I have all the relevant material to hand. Moving from one series to another is a tremendous help. It's so refreshing to be able to deal with a new set of characters in a different location and time zone. A change is indeed as good as a rest.

PW: Your second historical series is set in Elizabethan England, isn't it?

KM: This series is about an Elizabethan theater company, Westfield's Men, whose bookkeeper and stage manager, Nicholas Bracewell, is responsible for the plays and the players.

PW: How about the two architect series—three centuries apart?

KM: Merlin Richards is my first Welsh protagonist, an immigrant architect who is inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright. Another architect, Christopher Redmayne, is featured in The King's Evil, which opens with the Great Fire of 1666.

PW: What are you currently working on?

KM: The Vagabond Clown, the latest in the Nicholas Bracewell series. For 30 years I lived near Stratford-on-Avon and never missed a season. I've also acted in or directed many plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, so it's a world in which I feel really comfortable. And it's not as far removed from golf as you may think. Mary, Queen of Scots played golf in Scotland until she acquired the insurmountable handicap of losing her head.