Katharine McMahon

Katharine studied English and Drama because she wanted to be an actress or an author. In the end, she decided she couldn't stand the cut and thrust of the stage so asked for a typewriter for her 21st birthday and wrote her first book. The stage still plays its part, though. She writes that she 'tends to see her books in terms of scenes rather than chapters'. When she's stuck, a visit to the theatre always does the trick - it's so immediate and vivid, and the actors are so generous with their emotions and talents that she hopes some of that immediacy transfers itself to her writing. Aside from being an author she has taught, and worked voluntarily as a magistrate - in the UK magistrates, who hear 90% of all criminal cases, are lay people, advised by a lawyer. This experience has been crucial to her writing - particularly The Crimson Rooms, which concerns a pioneering woman lawyer, Evelyn Gifford, who qualifies in 1924 and finds herself handling the most mundane of cases because nobody wants to be represented by a woman. But Evelyn also finds that she is in the thick of the most intense dramas - notably a murder and the removal of children from their 'unsuitable' mother. And these professional dramas are a backdrop to Evelyn's own intensely felt domestic life - the loss of her brother in the First World War, the sudden arrival of a stranger claiming to be that brother's lover, and the experience of falling in love. The Crimson Rooms, although a work of historical fiction, is therefore in some ways quite reflective of Katharine's own experience, and the experience of millions of women who juggle the demands of professional and domestic needs. And it ends in a courtroom drama. All court cases, even the theft of a pot of yoghurt, are little dramas, at least for the alleged culprit, but Katharine particularly loved writing about the intensity of the courtroom, where so much is at stake. She always finds that her characters take her to places she never expects, and The Crimson Rooms was no exception - the experience of the First World War haunts the book and everyone in it, and by allowing that post war world to play a leading role in the book, deeper and darker mysteries emerged...