In Morton’s fifth novel, The Lake House, the toddler son of an aristocratic English family disappears in 1933 during the annual midsummer party on a wooded estate in Cornwall, influencing his sister, then a budding writer, for the next 70 years.
At the core of The Lake House is a mystery involving a missing child. Did you base the story on an actual event?
One of the most famous unsolved cases in Australian policing history is that of the Beaumont children: three siblings who caught the bus to the seaside on a hot summer’s day in January 1966 and were never seen again. Although the details of the case bear no real similarities to those in the disappearance of my character, Theo Edevane, the missing Beaumont children were in my mind when I contemplated writing about a child who’d vanished without a trace.
Your descriptions of shell shock in one of your main characters, a returning WWI veteran, is vividly real. How did you research this key plot point?
I read a lot about shell shock and the experiences of soldiers returning from the First World War, but when it came time to write I approached my character’s pathology as a unique response to a specific traumatic event. I also wanted to explore the effects of his post-traumatic stress disorder on those who loved him and sought to shield him from the disappointments and difficulties he faced as he attempted to resume a life interrupted so dramatically by war and its aftermath.
You’re a native Australian, and still live there, yet most of your books take place in England. What attracts you most to that country?
I became an Anglophile as soon as I learned to read and started slipping regularly into The Enchanted Wood. England became for me a place as magical and ‘other” as Narnia; when I was 17 and made my first real-life visit, it was as if I’d stepped through the wardrobe and into the world of my childhood imagination. I’ve come to know the place better since then, and adore its landscape, architecture, history, literature, and people.
The Lake House takes place primarily in Cornwall, an area that has been a consistent setting in your other books.
I’m attracted to so much there: smugglers, windy coastlines, abundant gardens, Tintagel, the Lost Gardens of Heligan, Daphne du Maurier, the mingling of the present and the past, folktales and fairies, history and mystery, myths and magic... the list goes on!
The character of mystery writer Alice Edevane has similarities to the late Ruth Rendell. What part in your creative life has Rendell played?
I have enormous admiration for the grande dames of the crime-writing world and was determined that Alice Edevane should be just the sort of woman who could take her place beside P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie. Mystery novels were my first love as a reader and Ruth Rendell, or, more accurately, her alter ego Barbara Vine, is the writer who most inspired me to take up a pen myself.
