Researching the dark side: travel, ancient libraries and the serendipity of the stacks
Guest post with bestselling author JF Penn
I’m thrilled that my guest today agreed to be interviewed about her research. J.F. Penn is the Award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers, dark fantasy, crime, horror, short stories, and travel memoir. Jo lives in Bath, England with her husband and two cats, and enjoys a nice G&T.
I first met Jo when we were both researching books set in Canterbury. We bumped into each other co-incidentally in the cathedral grounds and got chatting about our love of research. Jo subsequently hosted me on her podcast Books And Travel, and we’ve kept in touch, even though we’re now writing very different styles of book.
Hello Jo!
Thanks so much for having me, Anna. It’s lovely to talk research with someone who loves it as much as I do. I still remember meeting you in Canterbury when I was on pilgrimage and on the trail of Tomb of Relics, and you did an interview with me about your research in literary Canterbury. It’s great to reconnect!
Start by telling us a bit about your books, and where the original idea for the ARKANE series came from.
I write thrillers, dark fantasy, horror, crime, and travel memoir as J.F. Penn, and the ARKANE action-adventure series is my longest-running series with 13 so far. The stories follow Morgan Sierra and Jake Timber, agents of ARKANE, a covert British agency that investigates religious relics, supernatural mysteries, and the places where faith and history rub up against each other around the world. Each one is essentially a hunt for a sacred object — a MacGuffin, to use the technical writing term — that takes the characters across real locations of religious and cultural significance: Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Venice, Varanasi and beyond. Think relic-hunter adventures but underpinned by genuine theology and history. 90% of what lies beneath the books is real and then I spin the fiction out of that.
The original spark came from my own background. I studied theology at Oxford back in the 1990s and I’ve been fascinated by religion, death, and the big questions ever since. I’m not specifically religious, but I am a seeker, and there are deeper thematic questions about faith that run through every ARKANE book.
When I came to write the first ARKANE thriller, Stone of Fire, I started with the day of Pentecost in the book of Acts and asked a ‘what if’ question: What if the Apostles took stones from the tomb of the risen Christ as symbols of their brotherhood, and what if those stones could summon the fiery power of Pentecost today? Combine that with my love of religious relics and the global locations of the relics of the Apostles and the story came to life. I love digging out the odd links between ancient religious elements and the modern world!
How did you go about researching your first novel?
I guess that theology degree taught me how to chase a source and follow a footnote, but before I started writing, I worked more of a technical job. For thirteen years I was a management consultant, implementing financial systems and writing technical specifications for programmers. I didn’t feel remotely creative, and I genuinely couldn’t understand where story ideas came from. They seemed to happen by magic to other people.
But then I started to have ideas sparked by my travels, and then reading non-fiction books on topics, which is the process I still follow. For the relics of the Apostles, I leaned on books like The Search for the Twelve Apostles by William Steuart McBirnie to work out where the twelve might have scattered and where their bones might lie. Then I layered travel on top, going to the real churches, cathedrals and museums and standing in the actual spaces.
Years later, for my crime thriller Desecration, I spent several months working in the Wellcome Collection library in London, which specialises in medical history so I could access all the knowledge that underpinned that book. I’m a firm believer that you learn to research by researching. You don’t need permission or a particular degree. All you need is curiosity.
What is your favourite resource for research?
Travel, without question. Physically going somewhere, another country, another city, a museum or a gallery, helps me find story ideas that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. Some stories take years to emerge, particularly the ARKANE thrillers as they have global locations that I need to find a link between. For example, Valley of Dry Bones led me from Majorca and Toledo in Spain to New Orleans and San Francisco, following the trail of the Spanish empire.
When travel isn’t possible — and of course, budget is a factor! — I love physical libraries and the serendipity of the stacks where you bump into random books, and also museum exhibitions. I’ve now written multiple books and stories inspired by the British Museum including Crypt of Bone based on an exhibition of religious relics, Day of the Vikings inspired by a Viking exhibition with a sacred sword, The Dark Queen based on ancient Egypt, and Seahenge inspired by The World of Stonehenge.
Can you share two or three favourite ‘finds’ while doing your research?
These are my favourite moments, the synchronicity of finding something unexpected that suddenly leads to something else and the story just ‘fits’ somehow. It’s part of what keeps me writing!
As one example, we were in Amsterdam for a weekend away as my husband had never been, and I was intrigued to find the Portuguese Synagogue, home to Ets Haim, the oldest functioning Jewish library in the world, and who can resist an ancient library?! I wondered why there was a Portuguese synagogue in the heart of the Netherlands and in browsing their little shop, I found a book with an intriguing title: Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom, and Revenge by Edward Kritzler. What a title! The synagogue became the opening scenes of Tree of Life, and I followed that pirate book into the history of the Portuguese empire, which grew into the rest of the story.
The second example is gloriously macabre. For my English folk horror novel Blood Vintage, I was researching biodynamic viticulture, where bones and horns are buried in the vineyard to turn into sprays to enrich the vines. I did a day’s workshop at Limeburn Hill, a biodynamic vineyard near me in Somerset, and even saw the place where they bury the bones. This sparked a very English story set in the area I live, and who doesn’t enjoy researching at a vineyard?!
And one more, as a pure example of synchronicity. When I started End of Days, I only had the title and the Bible verse Revelation 20:1-6 about the ancient serpent Satan bound in the bottomless pit for a thousand years — but what if the thousand years has ended? Searching for art about serpents, I found Lilith, Adam’s mythical first wife, and then discovered that the Jewish Talmud literally calls her ‘the end of days.’ The book had named itself before I’d even written it. When that happens, I know the Muse is with me. It’s so much fun to find these connections in research!
What’s your best tip for authors approaching research?
Lean into your curiosity. Learn to follow that urge to look more closely at what you find interesting even if others might overlook it. What catches your eye in a bookshop? What stops your scroll? Which corner of the museum do you drift towards? For me it’s often Gothic cathedrals, religious relics, death culture and the stranger edges of faith, and the more I follow that itch of curiosity, I discover stories I would never have found otherwise.
You don’t need a plan either. I rarely set out knowing exactly what I’m looking for. I just go somewhere that fascinates me, take a notebook, and stay open to the thoughts and curious impulses that arise.
Also, don’t write what you know. Write what you’re interested in. If you chase the things that genuinely light you up, the synchronicities start to happen and you will experience the joy of research. (Just remember to stop researching and actually write the book at some point!)
Thank you so much, Jo! And yes, I do need that final reminder at times.
You can connect with Jo here: Instagram @jfpennauthor
Find her books here: www.jfpennbooks.com
Listen to the Books and Travel Podcast here: www.booksandtravel.page/listen
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