Five questions with author Pamela Hart

As Pamela Hart, she has written five historical novels, The Soldiers Wife, The War Bride, A Letter from Italy, The Desert Nurse, the Charleston Scandal and, most recently, the murder mystery Digging Up Dirt.

As Pamela Freeman, she is best known as a children’s writer, and also writes adult fantasy novels, including The Castings Trilogy.

Regardless of her surname, Pamela’s output is not only prolific, but also award-winning and internationally published. 

She is also a much loved supporter of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. 

I know Pamela well, but even I was surprised by some of these very interesting answers.

You’ve written a lot of other genres of books – why mysteries now?

I’ve always loved mysteries – I was a big Trixie Belden fan and went on from there. And I’ve written mysteries for kids as Pamela Freeman. So it was something I always had in the back of my mind…and coming out of writing The Desert Nurse, which was about Gallipoli, I just wanted to write something fun with no research. Researching WWI had been quite confronting, and I needed a break.

So Digging Up Dirt was my holiday from historical writing, and I had so much fun writing it.

I recognised aspects of your own life in this book…was that deliberate?

I have to laugh about that. This was the first book I’d written without a contract for years, and I really didn’t want to do any research, so I just let myself be a bit lazy with it. I gave Poppy my old job at the ABC, and my the much-loved little house in Annandale  where I lived before I got married, and some of my friends wanted to be in it, so I said, ‘Sure!’. And, of course, my husband is an archaeologist, so the character of Tol Lang, Poppy’s love interest, may bear some slight resemblance…

So did you renovate and find bones under the floorboards? Is that where the idea for the book come from?

Yes, indeed I did – and yes, that’s where the idea came from. The bones we found were much less interesting…they were basically old chop bones. My father, like Poppy’s, was a meat inspector, so I know my bones! We also found bits and pieces of crockery and old china. The house was built in 1896 on Gadigal land, and before that it was farmland, so settler occupation of it goes back a fair way, just as with Poppy’s house, and there was evidence of that under the floor.

Some of the murder suspects come from a right-wing political party and Pentecostal church. Did you do that deliberately because of the recent coverage of the Prime Minister’s relationship with such churches?

No! In fact, I wrote the first draft of this well before that media coverage picked up. I’ve always had a problem with prosperity gospel, which I feel is diametrically opposed to what Christ actually said, so when I wanted people whom I could naturally dislike (always useful when you’re creating suspects), that’s where I went. I also wanted to critique that from a position of faith – so often, people talk about Pentecostal and Evangelical Christianity as being emblematic of Christianity, which they are so not. I wanted to contrast Poppy’s down-played but sincere belief with the highly monetized version the Radiant Joy church preaches. And it’s also a great source of some of the jokes.

Will there be more Poppy books?

There will! I’m very pleased to say that I’m working on the structural edit of Shooting For Fame, the second Poppy story. This time we’re in the worlds of social media storms and rock stars, with Poppy at the centre of it all. We follow some characters from Digging Up Dirt, like Aunty Mary and Boris the carpenter, and find out what happens to Poppy and Tol…

I’m just enjoying writing these so much, I suspect I’ll be doing it for quite some time!

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