Plunging back into the heart of the epidemic by working at an AIDS organization in Portland, he eventually comes to understand his mystic connection to the Bogong High Plains and the significance of the old woman’s words: When he returned to the States, he brought back only his body.

With expected pathos and unexpected humor, As If Death Summoned testifies to the power of grief to erode a life, and—for those who can find a way through—the power to rebuild and renew it.

“Respecting the Ghosts”

Vikki J. Carter, producer of the podcast series Authors of the Pacific Northwest, interviewed Alan about As If Death Summoned.

VJC: Your novel comes out on the 40^th anniversary of the AIDS pandemic and in the midst of a new epidemic. Was that a coincidence?

AER: Definitely a coincidence. I never planned the Covid-19 epidemic. But I was hoping the novel would be ready by 2021, the 40^th anniversary since AIDS—Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome—appeared on our national radar.

VJC: The story is set primarily in Portland, Oregon.

AER: Yes, the book takes place over one long night in a hospital waiting room in 1995, where the narrator is keeping a lone vigil for a friend in the ICU. “Just me and a few dozen ghosts,” as he says, remembering the past 10 years. One of the questions in the book is who, which friend, is now in the ICU.

VJC: I had the sense that this vigil is for the narrator as well.

AER: It is. At this point, the narrator is exhausted, burnt out after working on the front lines of the epidemic. He’s lost more than 30 friends and colleagues, including his partner in Australia, and has returned to the United States, where he is working with a community AIDS organization in Portland.

VJC: I noticed you never name the narrator. Why was that?

AER: That was intentional. I see the narrator as representative. He’s like the Unknown Soldier in wars, representing all the unknown and lost soldiers. The narrator represents the stories of the epidemic that were never told. And there were many. At the time the book takes place, in 1995, more than 300,000 Americans had already died of AIDS, most of them gay men.

VJC: Foreword Reviews called your novel “as heartwarming and hope-giving as it is heartbreaking.”

AER: Yes, I was pleased to see that, because I feared people would think, “Oh, an AIDS novel. Must be a real downer,” whereas, I think it’s very life-affirming.

VJC: I was expecting the heartbreak. I was surprised at the humor.

AER: I included a lot of humor, because there was a lot of humor. Wonderful moments of humor amid all the grief and suffering. And I wanted to reflect that incredibly brave humor in the book.

VJC: Some of the flashbacks take place in Australia, especially on the Bogong High Plains of Victoria. What is their significance?

AER: At 6000 feet, the Bogong High Plains is a vast plateau in northern Victoria, about 150 miles north of Melbourne. They were sacred to the aboriginal people of Australia. And they become a kind of additional character in the novel, representing the mystical, the mysterious, the holy in human existence.

VJC: There’s a sub-theme winding through your book, about an actual event in Australia’s history called the Mt. Bogong Tragedy, and you connect the narrator to that event.

AER: Yes, in 1936, 3 skiers attempted to cross the high plains in winter. They were caught in a blizzard that lasted a week. Two survived the ordeal, but one of the men, Cleve Cole, died. In the book, his spirit continues to wander lost over the high plains, and the narrator comes to identify with Cleve Cole: he too is lost and dying, unable to find his way out of the blizzard that is the AIDS epidemic.

VJC: You employ magical realism in the book. The narrator has gone without sleep for more than 30 hours, and the lines between his dreams, memories, imagination and hallucinations begin to blur, playing with the reader by raising the question of what is real and what is not.  

AER: Go 30 hours without sleep and the world can become magically real. I did want capture the slipperiness of reality and the multi-dimensional nature of human consciousness.

VJC: I’m wondering how you came to write the book. The novel is autobiographical, inspired in part by your experiences and by those of others you knew. Was it a therapeutic exercise?

AER: All my books begin as therapeutic exercises. It’s how I work out ideas and feelings and memories. By turning them into stories. I had volunteered for an AIDS organization while in Australia, and when I returned to the States, I began working as the mental health specialist and later as the prevention program manager at Cascade AIDS Project in Portland, Oregon. It took me twenty years to process that experience before I could finally write the book.

VJC: What did you hope to accomplish in writing this book?

AER: I wanted to bear witness to a modern plague by telling these stories. How terrible it was, but also how there were moments of enormous grace and nobility and courage. I wanted to write it out and thereby make peace with that part of my life.

VJC: Silencing the ghosts?

AER: Perhaps more respecting the ghosts.

VJC: In a foreword, you reflect on writing about the AIDS epidemic during the current coronavirus pandemic

AER: Yes, we were wrapping up the manuscript in June (2020) and it was a good opportunity to consider the current epidemic in light of the earlier one, to weigh the similarities and the differences, and to find lessons and benefits that could help us through this difficult time of quarantining and mounting losses.

VJC: What were some of the lessons and benefits?

AER: There were benefits, gained at a terrible cost:  medical advances, advances in public health policy and strategies for tracking and combating epidemics. Also, societal advances in the decriminalizing and de-perverting of gay people in the public’s mind. And there were lessons: Trust the medical scientists. Be wary of politicians using a crisis for their political advantage. Let public health officials guide the administration, and not the other way around. It’s still too early to yet grasp the full impact of this current epidemic on our lives, but we already suspect it will be profound, deep and lasting. Many of us realize we will never be returning to Normal. And maybe that’s okay. We can do better.

VJC: The story suggests that a new birth and a new being can emerge from such tragedies as an epidemic.

AER: Truly. A crisis, whether personal or national or global, is a kind of cauldron. From it can come catharsis, renewal, even transformation. One way to understand this current pandemic is as another opportunity for us to re-discover who we are as a people, as one humanity.

VJC:  The story also tells of street kids and the homeless abused by local law enforcement that resonates with the news we’ve been watching this past year amid the protests and demonstrations. What would you like us to understand regarding the partnerships between communities and law enforcement?

AER: There are bad cops, but there are far more good cops, brave men and women who daily risk their lives to keep our communities safe.While depicting the abuse by some police officers, it was important for me to also embody the courage, integrity, and desire to understand and work with different communities by the police chief and particularly one young police officer.

VJC:  For the younger reader not as familiar with the AIDS epidemic of the ‘80s and ‘90s, what would you like to be the takeaways offered in this story? 

AER: The novelist E. L. Doctorow said the historian tells you what happened; the historical novelist tells you what it felt like. I would hope that readers unfamiliar with that time would get a sense of what it felt like: the fears, the confusion, the grief surrounding sad and terrible deaths, but also the courage and compassion and self-sacrifice that was common during those years.

VJC: What would you want people in general to take away from reading this book?

AER: On the historical plane, that amid something so terrible as a modern plague, we saw humanity rising up to its noblest and best, manifesting so much courage and compassion, so much grace and dignity, so much self-sacrifice and love. And humor—undying humor in the face of death. On a personal level, I wanted to recognize that profound grief and loss can erode a life, but when a person faces and finds a way through it, grief can also rebuild and renew life, and that a new and deeper soul can emerge from the crucible of loss.

VJC: There are many powerful and serious themes in this book. What is the dominant idea you would want readers to ponder long after they finish the last page?  

AER: That we are all temporary. That we have this brief time on earth and, to some extent, we can choose how we live it. Keats called existence this “vale of soul-making.”We can experience great loss and tragedy and emerge from it as better people, more whole through the experience of grief and grieving.

VJC: Finally, this is a profoundly personal narrative, what is your greatest joy as you hold the book in your hands and anticipate sharing it with readers? 

AER: That it is finished. That I bore witness. That the people whose stories I told might be satisfied that others will benefit from their stories, and in this way their lives will have mattered in ways they never would have expected.

Evie and Margot find the hotel to be more fixer-upper than spa resort, and they attempt to get to the bottom of things. But the foul-tempered hotel owner claims he’s never met the late Robert, even after Evie finds framed photos of them in his office. The rest of the island inhabitants, ranging from an ex-con receptionist to a vicar who communicates with cats, aren’t any easier to read.

But when a murder occurs at the hotel, soon followed by another, their frustration turns to desperation as they become the primary suspects. There’s no getting off the island at high tide and it falls to them to unravel secrets spanning generations if they want to make it back alive.

AER: With two successful mystery series going, what prompted you to start a new series?

HD: I actually didn’t intend to write a new series at all until I met a friend of my sister who told me about her life as an HR Director on a resort in the beautiful Isles of Scilly. She said that seasonal workers often fled to the islands because they were running away from something or hiding from someone. This idea intrigued me and I knew it would be a great foundation for a series.

AER: How do you know that an idea will carry a whole series?

HD: That is a good question. The first book I ever wrote – A Vicky Hill Exclusive! – was written as a one-off. I started writing it in a UCLA Extension Writers’ Program Beginner’s Fiction class because my daughter had gone off to college and I was suffering from the empty nest syndrome. I already had a background in screenwriting but not long-form fiction.

I soon realized that since Vicky Hill was an aspiring investigative reporter— though stuck writing obituaries in a small market town in England—there were no end of possible storylines for murder and mayhem. Anthony Horowitz (Foyles War, Midsomer Murders) says, “English villages are special places where hatred and mistrust and suspicion and anger and bitterness have a natural place to grow.” 

AER: Kind of spoils my idyllic image of English country villages. How did you use these elements that we usually don’t hear about from the UK Tourism industry?

HD: I found them very useful for the Honeychurch Hall series that feature a mother-daughter duo who live on a sprawling country estate (a contemporary Downton Abbey,) although now that I’ve just finished my seventh book in the series, I’ve had to give the estate a village since there are only so many times the butler can do it!

AER: So what are the key ingredients for a good mystery series?

HD: In a nutshell, you need a protagonist with an interesting occupation or, if retired, someone like Miss Marple; also, a setting that lends itself to mischief, and a small cast of recurring characters. I’ve found that readers who invest in a series do so because they feel each instalment is like visiting old friends. The books are just as much about the characters and their relationships as it is about the actual murder.

AER: You’ve completed your first book. How far ahead do you plan the other books in a series?

HD: To be honest, I don’t plan ahead. What interests me is a strange incident that I may have read or heard about where I think “Oh! Yes, that would be great for Vicky or Kat or Evie.” I’m constantly on the lookout for stories. Ask my family – they say a vague look comes over me and I mutter, “I must write that down.”

AER: How do you juggle the writing of different series at the same time?

HD: It’s very stressful because I write for two different publishers so I don’t have the luxury of picking my deadlines. However, I’m usually at a different place in the story process for the different books. I can be writing a rubbish first and second draft while working on revisions and copyedits of a “finished” manuscript, but I couldn’t create two stories from scratch at the same time.

AER: You’re incredibly prolific. What is your writing process that allows you to produce several books a year?

HD: I have to write early in the day. I get up at six and spend a solid three or four hours on the book that is at the hardest point to write or needs intense thought or revisions. I walk dogs, run errands (with a mask!) and after lunch, settle down for a couple more hours to play in the sandbox with the new idea that doesn’t need carefully crafted sentences. Yet.

AER: Which authors have influenced your own writing?

I think my favourite authors have influenced me by osmosis. I would include Agatha Christie, Mary Stewart, M.M. Kaye, Dodie Smith, Barbara Pym, M.C. Beaton and Jilly Cooper.

AER: Are there books on the craft of writing that you would recommend?

HD: There are so many that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. But my top five are Becoming A Writer by Dorothea Brande,  Making A Literary Life: Advice For Writers And Other Dreamers by Carolyn See, The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I also recommend Caroline Donahue’s Secret Library podcast series (it’s free) of interviews with writers discussing their processes and work.

AER: Any suggestions for aspiring mystery writers?

I have two pieces of advice: Make sure to develop your characters before starting to write. When writers get stuck, it’s often because they don’t know their characters. And second, finish that first draft. Only then will you be able to really start writing because writing is just rewriting. Think of it as a marathon, not a sprint.