"It doesn’t take much to turn a city like York into something otherwordly..."
Author Q&A: we catch up with Ben Sawyer as he looks forward to Sci-Fi Scarborough this weekend.
Ben Sawyer is the author of the fabulous Holly Trinity urban fantasy series including The Ghosts of York and Monsters at the Gate. His books mix the paranormal with the quirky, gothic horror with the fantastical, and historical folktales with modern pop culture. All based in the wonderful city of York, they have a charm of their own. His short stories range from weird to disturbing and are always a cracking good read.
We catch up with Ben as he looks forward to Sci-Fi Scarborough this weekend.
Q: Where and when did Holly Trinity as a character appear to you, and what do you like best about writing her?
A: It’s been so long now, I’m not entirely sure where it began (maybe she’s always been here, who knows…) I wanted to write a modern-day fantasy story set in York, because frankly this city deserves one, and I was very taken by the idea of centring it in a Holmes and Watson-style partnership, with a larger-than-life hero and their perfectly normal friend. A buddy comedy with monsters in the dark. The first thing I ever wrote for Holly was a scene of her interrogating a possessed tour guide, which evolved into one of my favourite sequences in the first book.
Urban fantasy is all about the collision between real life and the fantasy world, and I always love writing Holly trying to navigate that normal world. She doesn’t always get it and usually says exactly the wrong thing, but does it with supreme confidence.
Q: You live in York… how much research do you have to do to bring the city alive in your books? Do you ever go to a place to check what it looks like or walk from one location to another to see how long it takes?
A: I’ve never done the walking thing. York has a lot in a very small footprint so getting from one location to the next doesn’t take long! Whenever I go anywhere in York, I tend to start thinking about the kind of scenes that could play out there, even before I started writing the stories. I once said that York is a city that was designed for a hero… I’m not sure how much that’s what it’s really like or just how my mind works. Years ago, when I first saw the church where the big final showdown in the first book takes place, it instantly felt to me like a Roman arena.
Once I’ve picked a place, I usually end up revisiting it a lot to keep it fresh in my head, especially for a major location. There’s always new details to be found. The funny thing is that place can change but once something’s in a book, it never can. You can walk the same streets as ancient Romans, and yet see them completely transformed in a few years. I recently visited the Yorkshire Museum, which is a major location in Monsters at the Gate, and they’ve had a big refurb, so it looks nothing like what I described! I like the fact that it’s preserved as I remembered it in the book.
Q: What is it about the city of York and its history that is so mesmerising and intriguing, and is there anywhere in York you’d advise visitors not to miss?
A: Everyone rolls their eyes when a writer says, “The city is like another character in the story”, but York really is a bit of a character, a Great British eccentric with house numbers. It’s a funny sort of place. A place that birthed Guy Fawkes, married Anne Lister and hanged Dick Turpin. A place where hidden passageways lead you to who knows where and a ghost story can be told on every corner. We really do have more ghost stories than any other city in Europe. We also have streets called Nether Hornpot and Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate. You can’t tell me that’s normal. It doesn’t take much to turn a city like York into something otherwordly.
It would be remiss of me not to nudge visitors in the direction of Holy Trinity Historic Church on Goodramgate, which is the site of Anne Lister’s aforementioned nuptials and has ended up being Holly’s sanctum sanctorum. It really is a magical little place, that feels like you’re entering a whole other world, tucked away in its own little pocket dimension behind the comic shop.
Q: Have you ever come across anything in your research – or has anything ever appeared out of the blue in your writing – that has creeped you out and made you think twice?
A: This happened with my story for the next Harvey Duckman Presents volume, the Steampunk edition due out in June/July this year. When I first wrote the story, I came up with a very creepy turn of the plot, where some of the characters had done something truly unspeakable involving human remains. When it came time to submit it, I felt obliged to check whether anyone had ever done something so horrific in real life. Indeed they had. No second thoughts about putting it in the story, however, as the real events were simply too fascinating not to go in. Suffice to say the story told towards the end (you’ll know it when you read it) is all true.
Q: What are you working on now and what’s the next book we can expect?
A: I’m just starting to get back into writing after concentrating on the release of Monsters at the Gate for the last few months, alongside the more pressing demands of wrangling a one-year-old! Right now, I’m working on the third Holly Trinity novel, and trying to wrestle the various books the early drafts wanted to be into the one it needs to be.
It’s got a cursed play, a haunted historic festival, a terrible homecoming, and my favourite monsters of the series so far. The unusual way they communicate was an idea I was really excited about, but it’s been seriously hard work keeping it going for a whole novel.
It’s at an interesting stage now, since I’ve committed myself to five books, meaning this is now the halfway point. A lot of ongoing plotlines are gathering pace in ways I didn’t expect to happen in this particular story, but that play into the story really well.
Q: If you could time-travel back to any period in history, when and where in the world would you go?
A: Would I be a noble or a pauper though? Any historical period is a fun trip if you end up at the top of the pecking order. Lower down, not so much…
Q: Is there a novel you’d love to write if you had infinite time available?
A: I’ve become very tempted lately to give high fantasy a go. I’ve had a short story published about a father and daughter who travel the world awakening slumbering monsters, and I think they might have more in them. The worldbuilding feels like a massively intimidating challenge though. In a short story, you just get a glimpse of their world, but a novel would mean creating the whole thing from the ground up.
Q: What short story ideas are you working on for future Harveys, and which basket excites you the most?
A: This is where another stab at high fantasy comes up. I’m working on a story about a playwright who receives an unexpected offer the day after demons overrun the world. It’s got a lot of dark humour in the face of surreal, fantastical horror.
A lot of the stories I’ve written in the past have been horror of one sort or another, even Holly is horror-adjacent in a Buffy-ish kind of way. I didn’t really set out to be a horror writer, it just sort of happened, but I’m looking forward to seeing what terrors rise from that basket. (And, quite honestly, creating monsters is probably my single favourite thing to do as a writer.)
The one that jumped out at me, however, is the Sci-fi basket. I’ve never really written a proper sci-fi story, and I’d love to give it a try.
Q: What advice would you give anyone starting out on their writing and publishing adventure?
A: Write and write some more! Get something down on the page, even if it’s terrible. If a first draft is terrible, it’s because it’s a first draft, not any failing on your part. Surround yourself with trusted advisors, editors and readers who will ask you difficult questions you maybe don’t have the answers to. Traditional publishing is hard to break into, but if you don’t try you may wonder what might have been, so if you go down that road, maybe give yourself a deadline – there are many other options. Have an answer in your back pocket to “What is it about?” that you can pull out at a moment’s notice. If you’re anything like me, this won’t come naturally, so practise.
And above all, get used to approaching people. This weekend, I’m off to Sci-fi Scarborough, which is where I first met team Harvey many moons ago. I was dressed as Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor at the time. So my final word of advice is this – if you walk up to people dressed as Doctor Who and say “I’m a writer”, people will believe you!
Find out more from Ben at bensawyerauthor.wordpress.com
Buy the Holly Trinity and the Ghosts of York books on Amazon.
THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO YORKSHIRE
A Holly Trinity and the Ghosts of York story
by Ben Sawyer
First published in Harvey Duckman Volume 10, September 2022
The music had vanished from York’s streets so slowly that even Mira didn’t notice. In the months that had passed since she’d become Holly’s friend, she’d grown more and more attuned to the strange things that inhabited her city, whether she wanted to or not. But the subtle world was sometimes subtle, and you missed things if you didn’t pay attention. Fortunately, Holly was there to point out the otherworldly if it was important or likely to kill you. Usually both. Today, the first supernatural threat to Mira’s life was Holly herself.
The door of the book shop crashed open dramatically while Mira was standing on a stepladder, straining to place a battered antique volume of 18th century poetical amusements in its place on the top shelf. Holly burst into the room in a flurry of purple greatcoat, floundering curls and flapping umbrella, proclaiming in a loud burst of Yorkshire brogue, “Mira, come quick! I know where they’ve gone!”
