I'd be sitting behind the issue desk in my cardigan, swiping library cards, and imagining that the swiping action made each customer in front of me explode. In fact, yes, that's the most likely option. Or perhaps I might have ended up as an embittered, passive-aggressive librarian. But (more likely), I'd still be teaching English as a Foreign Language somewhere. JH: I'd have been a supermodel or a porn star. JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer? I'm actually still amazed that I finished it and that I seem to have got away with it. This was difficult to achieve and, at times, I just didn't feel capable of it. There was a sort of balancing act or magic trick that had to be accomplished. I can't say too much here about the story, because there is a mystery at the heart of this book and I don't want to spoil anything for potential readers, but there are certain elements of the narrative that made it a technically complicated book to write.

I suppose the most surprising thing about this novel is that I ever managed to finish it. And so I began to work on a different kind of story, one that, ultimately, became more of a psychological mystery than a character study of a female artist. Befriending the Gillespie family, Harriet soon. I realised that there was no reason why this crime, (which happened in about 2004), couldn't have taken place over a century earlier. In 1888, young, art-loving Harriet Baxter arrives in Glasgow at the time of the International Exhibition. The crime was so bizarre, and involved such incomprehensible cruelty, that it haunted me. The piece in the newspaper was very short and gave only the most tantalising details about the case, which concerned a family, their daughter and a neighbour. The article gave the details of a court case that had just taken place in a seaside town in Britain. However, very soon after I began researching this idea, I came across an article in a newspaper.

Originally, I had thought that the novel might feature a female painter and her struggles to be accepted as a serious artist alongside her male contemporaries. Jane Harris: I had known for a long time that I wanted to write something about an artist in Glasgow at the end of the 19th century. Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Gillespie and i by jane harris