From Nun to Archaeologist to Writer | Author Interview | Episode 134

Daniel Holmes, welcome to the Bookaholic Podcast. Thank you for having me. Yes. Glad you're here. I so enjoy interviewing guests who have such a full scope of life and maybe they have started at one point and ended up at another. And it's just so enjoyable to see leaps of faith, just un undeniable fortitude and people being able to accept change and go forward and live out their dreams. I love it. So we're going to start this interview very linear line linearly and we're going to start at the top and your first say I will say official probably adult profession is that you started out as a nun and then you went to become an archaeologist. So one wonders how does one go from being a nun who those of us on the other side of being say outside of the church we feel like or I I say I feel like when people say that they are pastors or or priests or nuns they fully embraced for all their lifetime being in that space. And so for those who stepped outside of that space, maybe not outside of their faith, but just outside of that space, it makes you wonder why. How does one go from being a nun? Because then the public there's a nun on your best behavior, you know, how do you go from one place to the other? I wasn't born in the convent so that there was a already some interests and ties. I actually was an antiques dealer before I entered the convent. Oh wow. Yeah. Yeah. Even more varied. Yeah. There were quite a few little side trips along the way. But this was in the the 60s and we were all looking for meaning and what have you and some of my friends were joining ashrams and things and being Catholic and the convent was a radical choice that was obvious to me. I entered at the age of 21 and I stayed for 19 years. Wow. And at the sort of as the time went on, I began to have doubts about not about my faith or even religious life in general, but about certain things that were done in this convent, which was very conservative and has become even more conservative after I Oh, wow. But it was I felt like there was a sort of medieval sense of humanity that you were bad and stupid and therefore someone had to tell you what to do all the time. Yes. That you could swallow your objections and go through with it and all for the love of God. But at a certain point I saw that I was going to be elected priorus who was the like the head of the convent. Okay. And I just I had to face the fact that I didn't think I could in conscience take on that job if I myself had doubts about our life. It wasn't up to me to change the community, but rather to step back from what obviously I was out of step at that point. I went through all the legal things one goes through which takes a couple of years and was legally dispensed from my vows and immediately went back to school and picked up where I'd left off when I left college. Okay. First time. So that was where the archaeology came in. Oh, okay. Okay. And what did you really want to do with archaeology? Did you think that it would lead to be a backdrop for your writing or did you just really want to go on these I guess we could say field trips if you will to the past? That was it. I loved this subject and I actually more envisioned myself working in a museum or something with objects but I loved working in the field. I worked in Cit and in Israel and it was a great kind of chemistry. So that that archaeologists have that say linguists or historians don't. They don't get together very tight community for months at a time under hard conditions. You really form good friendships and it's just it's a very special bond that archaeologists form. Wow. So I love doing archaeology. I love to study of the past already. You could see as an antique dealer I was attracted to old things. Absolutely. I thought that I would work in a museum, but then when as a graduate student I was set to teach and I found I love to teach and so that became my focus even more than independent research or something. I liked very much to work with students and to think of ways to convey difficult material and make it evident, obvious, easy to people. I guess I had the same goal as as a writer that I did as an archaeologist, a teacher. That is to convince people that the people of the past are just like us. They're Absolutely. They're people. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. And that's another thing akin to what I was mentioning about the nun. Like I said, when you people see a nun, typically they walk a little straighter. They make sure they're not saying anything out of order. But that's the same ideals people have of folks of the past. They they feel like their great grandmother was a sacred person. And yes, she's probably respected memory is respected in your family, but she was a woman. Exactly. They had the same emotions that we have. No matter what strange clothes they wore or what kind of tools they used, they were like us. And that's what's been liberating about writing fiction as opposed to writing history that you can put yourself in their place and imagine what they would have felt. And it's in a way it explains better their actions, their decisions going to war, making a treaty. They were human beings doing this and they had a motive. So that's something I think we can understand. Absolutely. Absolutely. You again, you are a pretty busy person. Your span of life is marked that you are certainly been a busy person. You've written 13 books and and you're the creator of the Lord Hanny Mysteries. So tell us a little bit about the Lord Hanny Mysteries. It's a series of six books that each of which has a murder mystery in it, but there's also an overall arc that is historical. So, it it deals with this Lord Hani who was a real person. He was an Egyptian diplomat of the 14th century BC whose name shows up in some documents that we called the Amarna letters. They were a set of diplomatic correspondences that we just happened to discover from the reign of Akenatan and his father Aman Hotep III. So in reading those documents I found this character who recurs over and in some very interesting and serious diplomatic missions. And so I started thinking what kind of guy would this have been whose career spanned several reigns and was obviously very trusted. And at one point the king says of him, "Everybody's happy when Hanie comes." So I thought, "They must have been a really nice guy." Yeah. So this gave me my character. And then I took each of the little historical snippets in which he appears and turned that into an incident in one of the books. And so there's this political political intrigue that covers the reign of Akenatan period of about 17 years. And then also in each book there's a mis murder mystery. And then there's also a family drama that features one or another of Han's family as it goes along. So I feel you get to know him and his family pretty well over the course of the books. Oh wow. Okay. I like that. I like the sound of that. Oh man. So I'm really intrigued. I'm gonna have to read the first one out. And then now you also have the Empire at twilight series historical fiction set into the 13th century during the Hittite Empire. So tell us a little bit about that. Is it a spin-off of Hani? Uh it's not really it takes place about a hundred years later. And what I there it's not so much a series. There's no kind of connection of stories so much as a shared world. So what I've done is take the last couple of generations of the Hittite Empire. I'm going to follow it through till their empire collapses. Okay? And there are characters that recur in each book, but there the protagonist is different. So there's not the same kind of connection between them. Here I've used major historical figures or events, but then often I look at them through the lens of a minor character. So for example, one of the protagonist in the first book is a charioteer. He's a real person, but we don't know anything about him in real life. I it just we have his view of something that happens. In another book, it's the the queen's chancellor. Not that's not the word. at Chamberlain who is the witness and a kind of a participant to a real historical event which was her divorce from her husband who was the king of a little kingdom that was a tributary kingdom of the Hittite Empire. And this is really the incident that started my whole career as a novelist because I had given my students in a class these few little documents we had about this divorce and said here's what we know tell me what happened and it was pretty clear that you couldn't say much without going off into fiction. So I thought, well, gee, next time I when I retire, let's say, next time I get some time, I think I'll pursue this in a fictional way and fill in the gaps of what we know as they might have occurred. And so that's how that series started with this assignment that I made to my students. Oh, yes. Exactly. Exactly. Now, tell us about your latest series. That's more in the modern times, right? No, it's set in the same period as the Lord Hani mysteries. The protagonist here is the daughter of Hanie. Oh, and it's called the series called Han's Daughter Mysteries. Easy enough, you know. And we met her in the very first Hanie book at the age of seven and then of course she grows as the series progresses. And by this point, she's 24 and old enough to have her own adventures. Oh, okay. And it still sets the tone for mystery in each book. Yes, it this is these are completely separate cozy mysteries. So they're they're shorter books. They're much more simple plots. Cozy mysteries, just what you'd expect, but set in ancient Egypt. Yes. Yes. And so the latest one is titled what? Your latest novel is titled what? The latest one is the music of e the melody of evil. Okay. All right. So tell us a little bit about the melody of evil and is that part of the Hannie's Daughter? Yes, that's the fourth of the Hannie's Honey's Daughter mysteries. And what I've done with this series is each book looks at a different profession. Get to do a little research specialized in that field in ancient Egypt. This one, as you might expect, deals with musicians. So Nefrit, the the heroine, is a young physician. She and her partner Benner Eb are two young women who are highly trained. They've actually worked as the physicians of the royal women. They've started a clinic for workingclass people in a just an ordinary neighborhood and they Nephrid is married in fact to a very rich man. He's the treasurer of the kingdom. Okay. So he foots the bill for them and they set out to find some musicians for a party that her husband, Lord Thomas, is holding in honor of his own daughter. And when they encounter this family that's recommended, they find that one of the members has just been murdered. And so Nefrit in her usual impulsive way says, "We'll find the murderer. We've done this before." They jump into that and it begin to investigate. And they have with them a 14-year-old apprentice, a teenage girl who's the her father was a victim of a murder in the Lord series. And she's very eager to find killers and get them punished because she doesn't know who killed her own father. Okay. And they have with them a huge dog, a mastiff, who's lassie and red rolled into one. Helps them in their investigations. Okay. Okay. It sounds very interesting because I'm a lover of history. Now, when you describe these women and they're in the maybe the 13th century, we always see women especially from the 13th century, heck from the 19th century as demure, not being really bold and adventurous and certainly not seeking out murderers. So, how are how do you convey that for authentic reasons as you're reading that book and you're not saying women during this time period were not like that? How do you defeat that in your writing? Lucky for me, in ancient Egypt, women had a pretty prominent role in society. There weren't too many paths that were shut to them. For example, Nefrid and her partner are physicians and there actually were women physicians in those days. A lot of them were village healers, but there were recording certain physicians at least early on who were women. And so they m they must have been a little bit literate at least. Literacy was very uncommon even for men. But the fact that Nefred has in her family practically everybody is a scribe, every male. So she wouldn't have lacked for people to teach her how to read and write. So I don't think that's too implausible even though we don't have records of women reading and writing. Right. But then otherwise I think through the course of the Lord Hani mysteries, I've set her up as a a person who doesn't let social expectations stop her much. She's the youngest of five children. She's always out there with a boy scrapping. And people who have followed that series will expect her to get out there and push her way into things. But yeah, but in fact there were women in prominent positions in Egypt, including of course rulers, but also mayors of villages and they could sit on village councils and therefore act as judges and stuff. So they could be witnesses in cases. they could own property and they had equal rights with men even though it was still heavily weighted towards men. But that's today's situation, isn't it? I guess so. We won't talk about that. No, Egypt was a society where it's not implausible for a woman to have a career or to to jump into something like this and deal with men on a pretty much equal basis. And she obviously this character doesn't have any problems with her husband on that end either. He must be an understanding husband or a kind of liberated husband of that era. Yes. It's a peculiar relationship. Her husband is much older. He's actually a friend of her fathers. And they entered into marriage. She talked him into this marriage because he had just been widowed and was traumatized by it. Never wanted to see another woman. That sort of thing. Wow. And she is she's a lesbian. She and her partner physician are in fact life partners. So they used this white marriage as a kind of cover for their own relationship. And he was at that point serving in the diplomatic corps outside the country and everything. They agreed just to let each other live their lives however they saw fit. And he's very supportive of her. Oh, okay. Okay. Very good. Very good. Now, what do we have ahead of us? Are we continuing with the Han's Daughter series? Are we creating a new series? Where are we going? At the moment, I am working on the next Han's Daughter mystery, which will deal with cooks. So, that's a taste of evil, another profession. Yes, exactly. And also in the future, there's one last real life adventure of Lord Hani that I haven't used. Okay. So, I think I'll probably do a prequel to his series and insert this this adventure in which he is sent to another kingdom to bring back a royal wife for the pharaoh. So, that that should be fun. That should be fun. That definitely sounds great. And I am certainly going to dive into I can't decide which one I want to start with. So what which one would you advise anyone start with the if you want something quick and light and slightly humorous and not very demanding of historical knowledge? I guess the Han's Daughter series is the easiest place to start. Okay. But then of course it's the Lord Hani mysteries that give you all the family background and everything of of these characters. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And now why we didn't address this. Why does the Han's daughter address professions? Why is that? Just because I thought it was a cool gimmick and that would keep giving me new new settings for the books and yes, an excuse to research some new little area of Egyptian culture. That's part of the little coziness of it, too. Yeah, it's kind of fun. I will certainly say if you love history, particularly ancient history, and want to read about people who have the same types of lives as ours, except for they just live long ago, this is the perfect set of books for you to pick up by NL Holmes. Whether it's the Hannie's Daughter series or the Lord Honey Mysteries, Lord Hauntie mysteries, this is for you. It sounds so intriguing. And of course, little known secret in El Holmes. At one point, I think I was about seven years old. I wanted to be an archaeologist. I think I saw I did too when I was that age. And then as of course as you grow up and you look at those sites and you're like no I would have never made it on one. I like to dig. So what can I say? Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining the Bookaholic podcast today. I certainly enjoyed loving talking to you about your wide and varied life and certainly your books. Thank you for joining me. I look forward to another visit someday. Yes, absolutely. Feel free to come back anytime. Thank you. Goodbye.