In The Raven Scholar, the first volume of the Eternal Path trilogy, award-winning historical mystery author Antonia Hodgson masterfully combines epic fantasy and a fair-play whodunit.

How long had you been thinking about what ultimately became this trilogy?

Since 2019. I had pretty much finished working on the previous series, the Thomas Hawkins quartet of mysteries set in Georgian England. At that point, I felt that it was time for me to do something else, and I'd always wanted to write fantasy. The first book that I wrote, which was never published, was a sort of Gothic fantasy, and I really wanted to go back to that genre. Other than that, I didn't have anything specific in mind, so I did something which I haven't done before, which was really just play. I went into the British Library, looked at a whole load of books about subjects I was interested in, and just waited to see anything that jumped out at me.

What did?

One of the books was about animal symbolism, particularly motifs in embroidery and visual arts and what animal symbols within them often mean in different cultures. Then I started thinking about these different animals and what they represent symbolically. My mind tends to work quite intuitively when I'm first thinking, and then goes to character. So, if there was this world that was guided by these guardian animals, how would the world be divided up? Would there be monasteries where people learned skills based around those guardians?

Then I started to build the world through a map. Maps are always great, in terms of not only giving myself a sense of the heft of the world, but also helping to move the plot along as well. For me, as soon as I put a map together, I think about, for instance, what happens if you live in the main kind of seat of power over there? Things like that. It all developed very naturally and organically.

You referred to your unpublished Gothic fantasy. Is there anything from your experience writing that book, or any of your previous books, that informed your work on The Raven Scholar? Was there a part of writing The Raven Scholar that you found particularly hard?

That was a classic first book. It took me five years to write, and ended up being about 230,000 words. It got away from me—I had set off without really quite knowing where I was going, and I learned from that. The Hawkins novels were set over a very short amount of time with a single narrator, and they got more and more hemmed in. I wanted to do something very different from that—something that sprawled out with multiple narrators and games. And so, weirdly, with this new series, I wanted to take some of that playfulness that I had in that first book, in terms of how to tell the story through different narrative techniques.

I think having a book that is both epic fantasy, and has a murder mystery within it, in terms of making sure that both fit in together. That was technically tricky. But it was, in many ways, such a joy to write.

Was a trilogy in your mind from the start?

It was key for me, really. I wouldn't have wanted to do it unless I could range it across three books. I wanted to be able to show characters going through transformations—particularly Neema, the book's title character, who, at the beginning of the book, does something really morally wrong. Neema weirdly benefits in a particular way from that choice on a material level throughout the course of the first book. And then, as we go on, I explore what that actually means for her, and where she really wants to be heading. But I don't think I could have told that story that in one book in the way that I wanted to, while also hopefully having the story stay entertaining, dramatic, and full of incident.

Was there a particular historical example that the Orrun Empire, where the book is set, was based on?

There really wasn't. I had the idea of a world where there'd been millennia of tyranny and how a society tried to prevent that, and had sort of successfully done it, but with compromises. So we're in this world that is kind of half in, half out of tyranny, and where there's always the potential threat of falling back into it. The book is set during a sort of slightly precarious moment in a history that's been semi-successful.

Did you research ravens?

I did loads of research into ravens, and that was partly just pleasure, because they're fascinating to me. Then I went and met Lloyd Buck, a very respected bird trainer who works with David Attenborough. He keeps a lot of birds, and one of them is a raven, Bran, who has appeared on many TV shows. He's sort of semi-famous.

I spent a morning with them, which is about as much as Bran will take—he definitely let us know when he was tired of us. But I got a lot just from that one interaction that then goes into the book, including this kind of fierce intelligence and, I'd say, some slight vanity. Whenever I wanted Bran to come onto my arm, I would wear a glove, and hold a little piece of food out, and he would come and take the food, but would instantly, go back to Lloyd. Bran wasn't interested in me at all. The only time he stayed on my arm was when Lloyd got out a camera to take a photo. Bran seemed to know what was going on.

You've said before that you plot like a raven, but write like a fox—could you expand on what you mean by that?

I think it would be more exact to say I plan like a raven, but write like a fox. In other words, before I write a word, I read around the subject, fill notebooks with research, draw maps, create detailed biographies of characters, etc. At some point, I usually put together chapter breakdowns—and sometimes I write these out and put them on my wall, even though I know I won't stick to them. Then I start to write.

Once I'm inside the book, all sorts of fresh ideas and avenues open up. Walk-on characters take on sudden significance. A tiny detail dropped in as if by chance becomes a major plot twist. I say “as if” because really it's my subconscious drawing on all the earlier planning. I need to do all that preparatory work, and then once I'm writing I'm free to explore, riff, and play, because I know I'm traveling on solid ground. And I like the creative tension between the two modes. It works for me. As I say in the book, it is good when the fox and the raven agree.