Alice Fitzpatrick has contributed short stories to literary magazines and anthologies and has recently retired from teaching to devote herself to writing full-time. Secrets in the Water is the first book in the Meredith Island Mystery series inspired by her summers spent with her Welsh family in Pembrokeshire. Learn more about Alice and her writing at her website.
The harbor in Tenby, Pembrokeshire, Wales,
the inspiration for the Meredith Island setting.
I Have Always Been a Writer
Like most authors, I’m sometimes asked, “When did you know you wanted to become a writer?” The truth is, it was never a conscious decision. I’ve always been a storyteller. It’s how I comprehend and interact with the world. While other people arrive late and offer vague references to problems with public transit, I delight in recounting every detail.
My love of stories came from escaping into the books I received for Christmas and my birthdays from my English grandmother. I suspect she hoped reading British literary and historical classics would keep me in touch with my birthplace. But she also sent me tales of girls preparing for careers in ballet, which was my passion for many years.
However, it wasn’t simply being a voracious reader that sparked my desire to write. In Ontario, there was a children’s safety campaign featuring Elmer the Safety Elephant, a cartoon elephant wearing a silly hat. Each year public school students competed for silver dollars by writing four-line poems on the theme of safety. I always won. That taught me there was money to be made from writing, even poorly rhyming poetry.
When I ran out of my favorite stories—Pippi Longstocking and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books—I continued their adventures by writing my own, my first attempt at writing a series.
At the tender age of twelve, I received my first rejection letter when I sent Carol Burnett a sketch I’d written, a satire on the ballet Swan Lake called “Swan Swamp”. I was politely told that Carol’s show couldn’t accept outside submissions. It would be the first of many rejections, but it’s still my favorite.
The next year, I completed my first novel, The Dying Swan, once again picking up on the theme of ballet. I never set out to write a novel; it was simply a short story that got out of hand. Lots of people write books, so I never regarded it as anything remarkable.
My first publication was in my last year of high school when one of my poems was chosen for a student anthology edited by Canadian poet George Bowering. Emboldened by my success, I submitted my poetry to every publishing company listed in the Yellow Pages, determined to become the youngest person to win the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. Sadly, it wasn’t long before I realized I wasn’t a poet.
Once I entered university, academic writing demanded all my attention as well as the engagement of the restrained analytic rather than the spirited creative part of my brain. This continued for fifteen years as I completed three degrees. As a newly minted high school English teacher, I was now responsible for instructing the next generation how to write academically.
But I missed telling my stories. It was time to give my imagination free reign once more. In the 1990s, I published literary short fiction and attempted a novel about a group of young people whose friendship is based on their mutual admiration for Dylan Thomas. Because I’d spent many wonderful summers in Wales, it was begun as an homage to Wales’ most famous poet—not the best reason to write a novel. As a result, both the plot and its creator suffered from a lack of focus, and the book was abandoned. What I needed was a genre with a defined plot structure.
As a teenager, I’d immersed myself in my mother’s Agatha Christie novels. The quaint country villages, elegant stately homes, and exotic seaside hotels reminded me of the England I’d left behind when we’d immigrated to Canada. With each book, I took on the challenge of matching wits with Miss Christie, ever hopeful that this time I would identify the murderer. Like a jigsaw puzzle, every piece of a mystery has to fit perfectly, and I marvelled at the skill required to construct such intricate plots.
But when it came to writing these books myself, I was intimidated by the task of researching police procedure and forensic science on the off-chance my amateur sleuth crossed paths with a CID detective. However, my desire to write eventually overcame my fear of getting the details wrong.
So the Meredith Island Mysteries were born, a series featuring a retired English teacher amateur detective—with more than a passing resemblance to the author—eccentric characters, and a picturesque island setting reminiscent of my youth spent in a Welsh seaside town.
A Meredith Island Mystery, Book 1
When Kate Galway was just three years old, her aunt Emma committed suicide. Now Kate has returned home to her childhood island home off the Welsh coast to bury her grandmother where she’s confronted with the islanders’ conviction that her aunt was murdered all those years ago. But it's when she learns that her grandmother died believing she was responsible for Emma’s death that Kate decides to track down a killer who has eluded detection for fifty years. Along the way, she must confront shameful secrets from her family’s past and her conflicted feelings about the place which was once her home.
