Today we have with us mystery author, Aileen G. Baron. Here latest book, THE GOLD OF THRACE, was released by Poisoned Pen Press in July of 2007. We’re brewing some of her favorite tea, Twining’s Earl Grey, to enjoy while we chat.

Café:
Tell us about your latest book.

Aileen:
The Gold of Thrace. In addition, two of my other books have been re-released in July as trade paperbacks, The Torch of Tangier; by Poisoned pen Press, and A Fly Has a Hundred Eyes, by Academy Chicago Publishers. All of them are mysteries. The Gold of Thrace is an archaeological mystery centered around the intrigue and deceit in the antiquity trade. When the first member of the staff of her Turkish excavation is murdered and a mosaic floor disappears overnight from her site, archaeologist Tamar Saticoy plunges into the shady world of the antiquities trade in the quest to discover who is responsible for the theft of artifacts from archaeological sites. She traces the mosaic floor to Switzerland, and soon finds herself enmeshed in a tangle of deceit, theft, and forgery. Battling smoke and mirrors, she discovers that no one is who they seem to be. Two more members of her excavation staff are killed; the venal Chatham who has discovered a hoard of Thracian gold in Bulgaria, and Orman who, like Tamar, is following the trail of the stolen mosaic, and Tamar herself becomes the next target for murder. The other two books, part of the Lily Sampson series, are also archaeological mysteries. A Fly Has a Hundred Eyes takes place in British Mandated Palestine in 1938, when a British archaeologist is murdered on his way to the opening of the Rockefeller Museum and the British police do nothing to solve his murder. The Torch of Tangier takes place in Morocco in 1942, after the United States has entered WW II, and Lily is recruited by the OSS to work on the preparations for the Allied invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch.

Café:
How long have you been writing?

Aileen:
I began writing after I retired from teaching anthropology and archaeology in 1997. Before that, my writing was confined to scholarly papers and museum catalogues.

Café:
Wow, what an interesting first career. Must provide you with a lot of material for your fiction. When did your first novel come out?

Aileen:
My first novel, A Fly Has a Hundred Eyes, came out in 2002. I took a class in writing mysteries, and they told me to “write what you know”. There really was a British archaeologist who was killed on his way to the opening of the Rockefeller museum, and the British police did nothing about. The story going around among archaeologists was that he was so mean, so stingy, that no one cared. But with WW II on the horizon, and terrorist activities in the area worse than they are today, the unsolved murder seemed the ideal basis for a mystery.

Café:
Have you always written mysteries?

Aileen:
Aside from the scholarly papers and museum catalogues mentioned above, I also wrote a short story, Petrie’s Head, which was published in a literary journal called ZYZZYVA, my first attempt at fiction.

Café:
What brought you to choose the characters and setting in your latest book?

Aileen:
A friend of mine was the Director of Antiquities in Turkey, and he suggested that as long as I was writing mysteries, I should write one about the antiquities trade. A mosaic floor had been stolen overnight from a Turkish site. That’s how the book begins. When I told him that I knew where things ended up in Basel, since I had lived there for a time and knew several antiquities dealers and how they interacted with museum curators and directors. He said that the material went through Bulgaria, so I went to Bulgaria. That’s how I came to include Bulgarian characters and locations in Bulgaria. With over 50% unemployment, the only way most Bulgarians could make a living was by selling family heirlooms or smuggling. When the Russians left, they took the economy with them. The earliest manufacture of gold artifacts was in Thrace. Ancient Thrace was the area around the Black Sea in Bulgaria and the European part of Turkey. Spartacus was a Thracian. This was the place of the Golden Fleece that the Argonauts sought. According to Bulgarians, their descendents, .the Thracians were famous for their good looks and horsemanship.

Café:
What is the main reason that you write?

Aileen:
I enjoy it. It’s something that I do well, and that’s always rewarding.

Café:
Do you write to entertain, or is there something more you want readers to take away from your work?

Aileen:
I write mostly for my own enjoyment. In the course of writing a book, I learn something about the place and time that I am writing about, and then I want to tell it to my readers. I write about the Middle East, and am always surprised to find that I am writing about the roots of today’s problems in the area.

Café:
Do you have a schedule for writing, or just write whenever you can?

Aileen:
I write whenever I can. I begin by doing the research, but once I start the actual writing, I need to be at it every day. I find that if I try to write more than two to four hours a day, I am exhausted.

Café:
Do you outline?

Aileen:
I have a pretty good idea of where the book is going before I start to write it, then I try to outline, but as I go along, scenes keep popping into my head. Usually, I write the scene, and go on from there. By the time I have finished the outline, what I have is pretty close to a rough first draft. Then I write the book, and I rewrite it, and I rewrite it, and the edit some more.

Café:
What time of the day would you prefer to write?

Aileen:
To start the book, I write in the late morning, early afternoon. After it gets going, I find that I wake up with an idea that I have to get down immediately, so I write in the morning until I need to stop for breakfast.

Café:
Day job?

Aileen:
I’m a retired archaeologist.

Café:
Did you find it difficult to get published in the beginning?

Aileen:
I was lucky. After the manuscript for my first novel, A Fly Has a Hundred Eyes, won first place at both the SouthWest Writers Conference and the Pikes Peak Conference, an agent approached me. She sent the book out to twenty major publishers. None of them bought it. I asked her to send it to some small, independent publishers and she said they don’t give enough advance for it to be worth her while. She told me to try it on my own, to go to the library and look in Literary Marketplace under publishers of mysteries. I sent it out to the first five small publishers on the list. Three days after I sent it out by priority mail, I got a call from Academy Chicago Publishers, saying they wanted to buy it. When it was published, the book got favorable reviews, even one from the New York Times. I was naïve enough at the time to think that everyone got reviewed in the New York Times.

Café:
Do you have a great acceptance story that you would like to share?

Aileen:
After I retired from Cal State, Fullerton, I was at loose ends, and taught a couple of courses in the extension at the University of California, Irvine. They encourage you to take classes in other departments, and since they have a famous writing program, I decided to take writing classes in the extension program. I took a short story class for which I wrote a story called Petrie’s Head, about the legendary archaeologist, Sir William Flinders-Petrie, a genius who single-handedly invented modern archaeology. He was also a nut, who had willed his head-full of knowledge to the medical school of University College in London on Gower Street. I sold the story to a literary magazine in San Francisco called ZYZZYVA for fifty dollars and a tee shirt. I should have suspected something when the editor had asked if I would make the protagonist a lesbian. I couldn’t, of course; it didn’t fit the story. I also received ten free copies of the magazine that I asked them to mail to my children and grandchildren. When I got my copy of ZYZZYVA, I found that that issue was devoted to homosexuality, replete with graphic illustrations, and that I had sent my grandchildren a packet of porno literature.

Café:
That must have been a big surprise. What are your future writing goals?

Aileen:
Right now, I am working on a new book in the Lily Sampson series, bringing it up to 1943, when Lily is doing an archaeological survey of Transjordan for the OSS, and finding out some interesting things about the political situation in the area.

Café:
Heroes?

Aileen:
One inspiration for me as an archaeologist was Hetty Goldman, the first woman archaeologist to conduct official excavations. From the first decades of the 20th century until WW II, she led excavations at sites in Yugoslavia, Turkey and Greece, under the sponsorship of Harvard, Bryn Mawr, and the Archaeological Institute of America. In 1966, she was awarded a gold medal by the Archaeological Institute of America for the outstanding fieldwork she conducted on the prehistory of Greece. And of course, there’s Agatha Christie, the patron saint of archaeologists, who wrote many of her mysteries in a tent at her husband’s, Max Mallowan, excavations in Mesopotamia.

Café:
Person you would most like to meet, dead or alive.

Aileen:
At the moment, as a result of the research I am doing for my new book, I would like to meet Gertrude Bell. She was an interesting person — a bit of an egomaniac, a friend of Lawrence of Arabia, an avocational archaeologist, advisor to Lloyd George, and the one responsible for drawing the present day borders in the Middle East, and about half of the political mess they are in today. She was known as the Queen of Iraq after she set Faisal on the throne there.

Café:
What do you read?

Aileen:
Mysteries, of course, and biographies and histories. Some of my favorite writers are Ken Follett, Michael Connelly, and Dana Stabenow.

Café:
Good choices. Favorite TV or movies?

Aileen:
I think Citizen Kane is the best movie I have ever seen. I also like musicals with a little edge — something like All That Jazz, or Chicago. And of course, there’s Hitchcock, especially North by Northwest.

Café:
I love Hitchcock. Family?

Aileen:
I have four sons and eight grandchildren.

Café:
What part of the country do you live in?

Aileen:
I live in Southern California, Orange County, to be exact.

Café:
Any advice for aspiring or beginning writers?

Aileen:
Get a life. It’s the accumulation of experience that makes someone a good writer. Most writers have had other careers before they began writing, and use the knowledge gained to inform their writing. Once you begin a book, write every day, if only a page or two. And rewrite. Rewrite, rewrite. Hemingway rewrote the last chapter of A Farewell to Arms 31 times.

Café:
Good advice. Website?

Aileen:
My website is aileengbaron.com.

Café:
Where can people purchase you books?

Aileen:
Any independent bookstore, Borders, Amazon.

Café:
Thanks so much for being with us today, Aileen. And thank you for joining us for a cup of tea and a fun chat with another great author. Read a review of Aileen's latest book here.

©2008 Lorie Ham. All rights reserved.