To be drawn into such a war or made victims of that war’s violence, and yet Lots and lots of people just like her hoped never Has-a lot of meaning for me because, in essence, she spoke of what was But Lily, as the first-person narrator of this yarn, had-and still Not see even then, simply because you’ve been so close to the work for such a Stand back and look at it all from a distance.
But, of course, Lily’s husband steals their children back and she has to return to that “château.”Īlways I am drawn into the story I’m telling and that, in Only when Tommy takes Lily and the children to England, does she discover that he’s an insurance investigator who works for a very old, well-established firm in London that underwrites the underwriters.
He keeps coming back, but initially it’s not because of his interest in Lily, it’s because of something her son has found hidden-hidden by his papa, Lily’s unfaithful husband, for friends who are no friends of hers. A chance meeting in Paris during the first exodus in September 1939 brings a man named Thomas Carrington into her life. Hollis) is a wife and mother who, in 1938 and living in what she has come toĬall a “château” on the edge of Fontainebleau Forest to the southeast of Paris, feels increasingly that she must take her children and leave before the threat of war reaches her doorstep. In The Hunting Ground, Lily de St Germain (née However, the operation was a terrific success and I am extremely lucky to have come through it so well. And certainly, when I retyped the manuscript later on, I could have used both eyes, had they been working in sync and in focus. Those 14 recovery days eventually stretched into six months of work on The Hunting Ground. Immediately, it all came back, all those doors that had opened in my imagination, opening again and again into Occupied France during the Second World War.
That first day, I worked for 12 hours straight and totally forgot myself. And yes, I always use one of those rechargeable pencils: HB 0.5mm leads and no others. Head down, pencil in hand-for I always compose my stories in longhand and have for the past 43 years of full-time writing-I started in. Which was before I started writing Mayhem (1992), the opening number in my Jean-Louis St-Cyr/Hermann Kohler mystery series. It’s the book I first worked on after my thriller The Alice Factor was finally set to be published in 1991. You see, The Hunting Ground has been with me ever since 1990, and has been through at least six or seven revisions during those years. Retrospect, never any question of what I would work on during my convalescence. Out came the clipboard and the manuscript-there was, in The week but Sundays do for all that time? I managed 14, but what does someone who’s used to working every day of Operation on my right eye and was told to keep my head down for at least 10ĭays. In the essay below, he writes about The Hunting Ground, his new standalone thriller set during the German occupation of France during World War II.)Ī year ago last January I had to undergo a very serious Robert Janes, who I was so privileged to interview last year.
#THE HUNTING GROUND ESSAY SERIES#
(Editor’s note: This 42nd entry in The Rap Sheet’s “ Storyīehind the Story” series reintroduces us to Canadian author J.