I'm so happy to have Sally Wright visiting again. Please welcome her as she talks about her new book, Breeding Ground.
About the book:
BREEDING GROUND
A Jo Grant Horse Country Mystery
Lexington,
Kentucky, 1962:
Another
painful death in Jo Grant’s family . . another injured relative she suddenly
has to care for while running the family broodmare business she wants to leave
behind . . another casualty from WWII turning-up in need at her door – right when
she and a WWII OSS vet are trying to stop the killer of a friend caught in the conflicts
of another family horse business in the inbred world of Lexington Thoroughbreds,
where the family ties from grooms to estate owners have tangled together for a hundred
years.
What do I love
about this book?
I
love the horses, and most of the folks
in Breeding Ground who take care of
them on working farms around Lexington.
When I visited there on a book
tour years ago, I met two Woodford County women who opened their homes as B&Bs.
I stayed in their classic 19th century brick farmhouses and grilled
them about the history of the houses, and local tales as well.
They and their husbands and
friends became friends, and I kept going back - till my husband and I wished we
could move there.
Friends from Ohio too - who’d had
a broodmare farm next to us (caring for mares that belonged to other people,
birthing and training their babies) - had moved to Versailles (in Woodford
County just west of Lexington) to start another broodmare business, and they took
me to meet owners and trainers – and then I met Secretariat at Claiborne, and
became obsessed. (I had a horse for years, which was part of the Lexington
appeal, and I’d still be riding now if I hadn’t gotten hurt.)
But it wasn’t till I did research
there for the Ben Reese mystery, Watches
Of The Night, that I knew I had to write a series set in that world of hills
and horse farms and well-remembered history.
I’d been reading about the French
Resistance too, and the British (SOE) and US (OSS) espionage services that
helped them in WWII. I got so caught up in the stories of the agents and the
danger and the death, I wanted to work with that too.
I saw the horse people and the
OSS veterans as part of an on-going horse country community in which most would
be workers in three family businesses – a small hands-on broodmare farm, a ma-and-pa
horse van manufacturer, and a family firm making equine pharmaceuticals.
I grew up in a small family business.
For my father was an orphan, raised in a Christian orphanage, who (because a teacher
helped him get a college scholarship in 1929) was able to become a chemist, who
dreamed for years about inventing a product and starting his own business – and
did, with my Mom, when I was four.
It’s been a pivotal part of my
life, and I wanted to examine the conflicts that come when whatever-family-members-are-in-charge
have to choose between what they think is good for the business (all the employees
and customers included) and their children’s (or siblings’) feelings. Christian
decision makers can find the choices especially difficult, and with eighty
percent of American businesses still family owned, I thought I ought to talk about
it.
I also decided to write about a caregiver
who’s reached her emotional limits – or at least feels as though she has. Jo
Grant put aside her work as an architect to care for a mother with terminal
brain cancer, then has to cope with her brother’s sudden death, plus two more situations
that force her to abandon everything she wants – again - and care for them too.
God’s place in all that –
allowing the suffering, and helping you through it – gets considered (subtly, I
hope, and indirectly) in Breeding Ground
as the fundamental struggle we face living on this earth. God’s gotten me
through two years of pancreatic cancer, and I’ve wanted to talk about something
of what I’ve experienced – the peace and joy and sense of God’s care in spite
of outward appearances.
Tell us something you
learned doing the research, and any research tip you’d like to share.
After I’d read a biography of Mack
(MacKenzie) Miller, interviewing him meant a lot to me. He’s a Hall Of Fame trainer,
and a self-effacing Christian gentleman, who trained for years for Paul Mellon,
and he and his wife couldn’t have been kinder. He’s a well-documented example of
how, even though racing can bring out the worst and the ugliest, honesty and
family commitment and real concern for the horses still exists and succeeds (or
did, when he was training).
It was my research on the French
Resistance, and the US Office of Strategic Services that nearly drove me to
distraction.
I read book after book on the French
Resistance – all over France, all through the Nazi occupation – and became totally
overwhelmed. I couldn’t make sense of it without going to France. But my mother
(who was ninety-nine, and lived next door, and was very sadly demented, with
care-givers round the clock) was my responsibility, and I couldn’t stay long. I
also had no one in France to help me the way I’d had in Scotland when I wrote
the Ben Reese mysteries.
So God led me to the book I needed,
then to a tiny B&B in an old mill in the Loire Valley where He gave me a
gift I’ve been given before – the kind that saves books.
Sitting beside black-and-white
ducks, green glass river sliding by, the mill owner spoke of the Resistance in
the Lorraine with real knowledge and passion. He’d filled the whole mill with
WWII books, and though we talked hour after hour, it was his description of a
real event in the village beside the mill – and the local reaction in 2010 –
that I put into Breeding Ground (which
takes place in ‘62) that gave me the perspective for the OSS backstory that
helped drive three characters to do what they needed to do.
Which leads me, finally, to a research
tip. Studying the French Resistance across France was too broad an approach. A
History professor at Hillsdale College handing me a paperback on the French
Resistance in the Lorraine region alone narrowed my focus to the Loire Valley -
and made the research doable.
So. When you get bogged down in
research that seems overwhelming, narrow the search till it’s manageable.
Just as importantly: If your
setting’s a real place (and you can get there) take a ridiculous number of photographs;
Interview as many people as you can think of who relate to the book, and record
every conversation; Make yourself stop when research becomes an excuse for not
writing the book.
How do you hope
readers will talk about the book after they’ve read it?
I hope readers will be drawn to the
horses. They’re not pets. No, but they can be twelve-hundred-pound partners. They
can read your mind and your body. And
we need to train and treat them well. As Jo Grant says in the preface, “. . . the
horses we’ve got here, I’ve got to tell about them. The ones that run our
lives, and get planned and pampered and brutalized by us too, for the best and
the strangest and the worst of reasons.”
I hope readers will be interested
in the folks who plan and pamper and care for them – the grooms, white and
black, the aristocratic owners, the everyday folks doing their best to make
horse vans, and de-wormers, and teach a foal manners.
I want readers to feel as though
they understand more about family businesses from the inside out, and that knowing
a little about the stresses involved ends-up being useful.
I’d also like readers to learn enough
about the OSS and the French Resistance in Breeding
Ground that they want to read more. There’re wonderful books about both that
have a whole lot to teach.
I also hope that by the end of Breeding Ground, readers – like Jo Grant,
the narrator - see the mercy of God at work in her life, and in others’ as well,
and recognize the good that can come out of suffering.
It’s enemy occupied territory here (as
C.S. Lewis said). And character comes with living through difficulties; for as
strength and perseverance develop, they can
lead to joy and hope - the kind that’s a gift from God.
About the author:
Sally Wright is the author of six Ben Reese mysteries: Publish And Perish, Pride And Predator, Pursuit And Persuasion (a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award Finalist in 2001), Out Of The Ruins, Watches Of The Night (published in June 2008) and Code Of Silence, a prequel to the series (published in December 2008).
Wright was born obsessed with books, and started pecking-out florid adventure stories with obvious endings by the time she turned seven. She wrote and performed music in high school and college, earned a degree in oral interpretation of literature at Northwestern University, and then completed graduate work at the University of Washington. She published many biographical articles, including pieces on Malcolm Muggeridge and Nikolai Tolstoy, Leo's grandnephew, before she wrote her Ben Reese books.
Reviewers repeatedly compare Wright's work to that of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. Wright herself says that her literary influences range from all of those to Tolstoy and Jane Austen, from P.D. James to Dick Francis.
Sally Wright moved with her husband many years ago from Cape Cod to the country near Bowling Green, Ohio, but they think they'd like to someday live outside Lexington, Kentucky. Their daughter is an opera singer (a la Out of the Ruins), and their son works for a industrial manufacturing company. The Wrights have a young boxer dog, a young mare (who’s a lot less reliable than the old one-eyed gelding), and too many gardens to take care of the way Sally would like. She loves to cook, and wants to play with painting again, if she ever stops trying to learn dressage.
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