My career as a writer began, really, with writing plays for the Lower Fourth to perform. It was a convent school – St Joseph’s in Stafford, and the nuns were encouraging. (Not realising, perhaps, that I was visualising a glittering career alongside Pinter and Schaffer.) By age 16 I had switched to poetry, and the role models now were eighteenth-century aesthetes dying romantically in garrets. Between-times there were a few angry-young woman articles. (It was the Sixties, after all.) But let’s be honest, most writers have a touch of the vampire in their make-up. They like to watch and absorb. Urban gypsy So I moved around like an urban gypsy, working in different professions and places. Solicitors’ offices in tucked-away streets near to Stafford centre… A hotel where once Charles Dickens stayed, and wrote irritably about being served an indifferent meal, (the food’s great nowadays, by the way)… | "The ancient typewriter has long since been replaced by a computer, but Mozart is still with me, my constant companion while I work." | |
Even the Stafford Newsletter, in the era when it was printed on the premises and the flat-beds shook the entire building to its elderly foundations every Thursday. And then, shortly before the dreaded landmark of 30, I acquired a fourth-hand typewriter, and began to write books. Lucky I was lucky. After a couple of years – and that’s a short time in publishing – I got a publisher and an agent. But then came a twilight double-life, juggling writing with a career which, at that stage, happened to be in property. The trouble was that I was writing horror, and clients tended to be a tad nervous of someone whose leisure was devoted to devising ways to vanquish the undead or reincarnate ancient demons… Understandable. So I kept it secret, crawling into the office every morning, pink-eyed from lack of sleep, because all my evenings were spent in bashing out fiction, listening to Mozart while I worked. Pen-name And then – finally – to full-time writing, and four years ago to the persona of “Sarah Rayne” – not the first pen-name I’ve used, but probably the last. And on to the psychological thrillers that have been such a delight to write and are published by Simon & Schuster. 'Tower of Silence' – born from a Sunday newspaper article about Indian death ceremonies… 'A Dark Dividing' – two sets of twins, both born conjoined, but born a hundred years apart. 'Roots of Evil', the most gruelling of them all to write but the most satisfying, spanning the dazzling concert halls of 1920s Vienna to the darkness of Auschwitz… The ancient typewriter has long since been replaced by a computer, but Mozart is still with me, my constant companion while I work. | 
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