Contact: Carol Fass or Leah Black
212.691.9707 or fasspr@aol.com
A CONVERSATION WITH SALLY WRIGHT
1. When you write a mystery, you go far beyond what the average reader might expect to find
within one - i.e. your reader gets some “bonuses.” What are the extras you provide for your fans?
I’m trying to write something more than just a simple mystery. I want to put words together so that people
get that unexpected stab of satisfaction that only really comes from words when they shape a place, or a
person, or a slant on reality well. My characters get caught in complex tangles of good and evil that could
actually happen in real life. And I pick at human behavior in a lot of contexts, turning over ethics and
modern morality, hoping to help all of us consider our own lives and how we ought to live.
I also like writing about unusual undertakings and interesting places that most readers don’t have the time
or opportunity to learn about themselves. Which means I get the pleasure of traveling to places I wouldn’t
go otherwise, studying local history and figuring out how to use it, while getting ideas given to me by the
settings I visit and the people I meet. I ask strangers questions I couldn’t ask in polite conversation and I
often get answers that I wouldn’t have gotten if I were actually a friend.
2. Your main character, archivist Ben Reese, provides a fascinating mix of characteristics and
personal history. You said he is modeled on a real-life hero - a World War II veteran. What does he
represent aside from being a charismatic and very unusual sort of “amateur sleuth”?
Ben Reese is very much based on a real life academic archivist who was a behind-the-lines scout in
World War II. I knew the man for many years as a quiet, witty, self-deprecating, observant, gentle person
and then learned, much to my amazement, that he’d been part of a Scouting Group the GI’s called “The
Nighttime Special.” My friend would be sent out at night, in groups of two or four, to take German
command posts and photograph German documents. “Taking a command post” meant sneaking through
the German defenses, killing the men in the posts silently, photographing their documents but leaving
everything as you found it, so the Germans wouldn’t know Intelligence had been there and change their
material or troop arrangements, or the papers needed by the underground.
I find the two sides of my friend’s character fascinating. He’s a man of intellect and a man of action. He
didn’t enjoy killing with his bare hands; he did it because he thought the war was justified, and he was
handed a job that had to be done. He’s spent the rest of his life trying to heal, not hurt; trying to guide
students as he would’ve wanted to be guided himself, while studying artifacts that interest him as concrete
examples of human history. All of that made me want to create the fictional person I call Ben Reese and
get to know him over several books. Ben has both physical and emotional scars from the war, and his
dedication and masculinity and self-sacrifice, in spite of those scars, appeal to me. I’m interested in his
reluctance to injure as well as the decisiveness that kicks in when he knows he has to, the breadth of his
perspective in a lot of areas, and the way he works at not taking himself seriously. Yet, every time I refer
to specific events in the war - those events actually happened. My friend lived through them. I talk about
them accurately, in homage to him, because he never will. Still, our kids would probably tell you Ben’s a
lot like my husband. The personality itself, not the career or the past.
3. What other functions does Ben Reese serve in “Sally Wright’s world”?
Ben gives me an excuse to learn about all kinds of things he would know and I don’t, that I think would
be fun to study. Manuscripts, paintings, coins, rare books -all the kinds of things people bring to “The
Antiques Roadshow.” Working with Ben over a long period of time gives me a chance to contemplate
what it would be like to be a man too, which is an interesting exercise for me. I have to research real
soldiers and consider what it would have been like to fight in the Second World War, to face physical
danger and choose to take it on when I wouldn’t want to do that at all. Writing about Ben makes me learn,
change, and expand the way I see things. Working with the friend of mine upon whom Ben is based does
that for me even more, maybe. Getting to know the mind and soul of someone else, someone who is
interested in seemingly everything there is to know is a lot of fun for me.
4. How did you choose Cumberland Island to be the main setting for Out of The Ruins?
In early 1978 I read an article about Cumberland Island, Georgia in National Geographic. The
photographs made me want to go there that night, stay at the Greyfield Inn, see the wild horses, the miles
of unspoiled beach and marsh, and watch sea turtles lay their eggs. My husband and I did go the
following July and loved the lazy conversation late at night on the long verandah, the southern lady in her
sixties who knew how to be gracious and talk family and yet make anyone feel welcome in the
conversation. I loved the food (not wildly sophisticated at that time, but wonderful in its way), and the
walk from Greyfield to the beach, under sweeping live oaks that were two hundred feet wide, a hundred
feet high, and draped with Spanish moss.
It was also the conversations I had on Cumberland Island that helped turn me toward writing the book one in particular with another guest whose husband had fought as a green beret in Viet Nam. I remember
marveling at how calm she’d been about the whole experience - about raising kids with him in battle, not
knowing whether he’d ever come home, then picking up the marriage again with ease and humor, once
he’d reappeared. It was she who told me of a book written by her uncle and aunt about Nathanael
Greene’s widow and her long-gone house on the south end of Cumberland. Buying that book, and reading
about the Greenes, led me closer to Out of The Ruins.
After we left, Cumberland simmered in the back of my mind, as I saved articles on the island and the
towns nearby: St. Mary’s, where I walked the small shady side streets and liked the architecture and
sense of place, Fernandina Beach, Florida, on Amelia Island, with its clapboard seaport charm and its
convoluted history of Spanish and English and pirates from all kinds of places. I then found myself
clipping pieces on Charleston and Savannah, places I’d never seen, keeping notes, too, on Beaufort,
South Carolina, after a friend told me I should visit there any chance I got. We vacationed in North
Carolina (Asheville and the mountains around it, and Tryon too, with its horse farms and green hills),
and I tucked all of it away thinking I’d use it someday, in some book, when the right time came.
5. How did a woman with MS become a character in Out of The Ruins?
It was ten years after we’d been to Cumberland that a friend of mine in Ohio told me of a woman she
knew who was bedridden with MS, but who was also very much the center of a large network of former
and present care givers, friends, relatives and distant acquaintances who relied on her for advice and
perspective. My friend said, “She’d be a great character in a mystery novel.” And I went to interview her.
She was indeed an amazing person - a woman of goodwill and wisdom, of humor and a sense of
proportion, who made me feel very small (without meaning to) whenever I compared my own
preoccupations with trivial and petty complaints to her equanimity under severe and prolonged suffering.
She was a quietly religious person who set a startling example, all the while resisting the urge to judge
anyone else. I knew I wanted to write about someone like her eventually, and the way she approached her
own suffering.
6. What other research did you have to do to prepare to write Out of The Ruins?
Part of what I love about writing the Ben Reese novels is that I have to study a whole lot of things I’d
never study otherwise, including history of all kinds. For Out of The Ruins, I studied biographies of the
Lee family, the Nathananel Greene family, Eli Whitney, and James J. Hill, the founder of the Great
Northern Railroad. I also read about the history of Cumberland Island, Savannah, Charleston, Beaufort,
St. Mary’s and Fernandina Beach. I had to research the intercoastal waterway from Cumberland Island to
Fernandina Beach, and boats that would be suitable for that area. I studied antiques of various kinds, and
visited antique stores in Charleston. I read about a wide range of painters, and wildlife illustrators,
especially those working in earlier centuries, many of them in the south. I had to research opera singing
and voice training, the repertory of mezzo sopranos in particular. And I had to research MS and
pneumonia and related physical conditions. Finally, I visited and photographed all the places in which
Out of the Ruins takes place. This was obviously a great pleasure.
There’s also the never-ending work I have to do to deepen my understanding of what Ben Reese does as
an archivist, as well as what he lived through as an army scout. I have to read books about World War II
in Europe, and the areas and the battles Ben Reese was involved in. And this time, because of a very
small side issue in Out of The Ruins (which will become a central part of the plot in the fifth Ben Reese
book), I began to research the scientific and technical teams that were sent into Europe right behind the
front line troops. They were sent to gather German war-related science to help the Allies’ war efforts as
well as other kinds of technical research that helped British, Soviet and American industry long after the
war.
7. As part of your research into archivists’ work, you recently attended a three-day conference at
the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Can you tell us what this was like?
The conference involved microbiologists, conservators and archivists meeting to discuss the science and
art of cleaning, restoring, preserving and conserving all sorts of stone, paint, wood, paper, fabric and
metal art - all of which is disfigured and damaged by microbes.
The conservation work being done today uses all sorts of approaches that didn’t exist in the early sixties
when Ben Reese worked as an archivist in my books. DNA testing and manipulation, electron microscopy
(which existed, but was new and costly and not often available), sophisticated dating techniques,
everyday dependence on internet research and communication weren’t in use. Yet, there was still much
for me to learn from a very international group of impassioned art preservationists. I also discovered some
things about what Ben Reese would’ve done wrong in the early sixties - the techniques that were
generally used then that have long been discarded (the use of soft gum erasers, for example, to help clean
the surfaces of oil paintings), as well as techniques he developed himself (the surface cleaning of oil
paintings with day-old crumbling bread). Using either, we know now, provides a great source of food for
the very bacteria that destroy paintings.
8. Did you have any adventures while researching Out of The Ruins?
Early one morning when I was on my way to interview the captain of the Greyfield boat for Out of The
Ruins, I noticed a small, wild, dark bay stallion who raised his head and looked at me pointedly as I
passed by. You’re around wild horses all the time on Cumberland. They ignore you, or move away if you
try to get close. But there was something in this one’s eyes that made me pay attention.
He watched me carefully, attention utterly fixed, and then started walking after me in a very deliberate
manner. I was walking too, minding my own business, watching him over my shoulder - when he picked
up a trot that was still aimed right at me. This was not a good thing. Being trampled would not be my
favorite way to go, and I knew I had to make some kind of a stand. Running away would’ve been the
worst thing I could’ve done because horses find running people very exciting and quite intriguing. I
yelled, “Get out of here!” loudly and authoritatively. But the stallion paid no attention. I shouted
something else with even more menace. The horse stopped, and looked at me for a second. Then trotted at
me again.
I waved my notebook, and shouted something while slapping my hand on it - just as he broke into a
canter. He was probably ten feet away when he stopped dead and looked at me. And dropped his head to
the sand to bite off a mouthful of grass. He was still watching me. Carefully. Speculatively. And I
watched him too, even when I turned around and started on toward the boat, wondering what I’d do next
if he decided to come at me again.
He didn’t, fortuitously. And I don’t think he was mean. I think he actually just found it amusing to get
these two-legged talkers to run away from him. The manager of the inn later told me that he’d recently
been run out of the herd, and that he’d just started chasing people that very week. She’d found someone
on the mainland who was coming over the next day to take him and geld him and give him a home. And
he’s the only horse I saw on the island who ever gave anyone a moment’s concern. But he helped me. I
worked him into Out of The Ruins where I needed more excitement.
9. You spent part of your childhood in the South. Did you work any of your childhood memories
into Out of The Ruins?
I used something in Out of the Ruins that happened to me in Orlando, Florida when I was five or six. I
was sick a lot up north with allergies and lung diseases, but once they’d send me south after Christmas,
I’d be perfectly fine all spring. I lived with my grandparents in a small quiet house on a short sloping hill
above a small green lake where alligators sunned on my grandfather’s dock and a citrus grove across the
street scented the air with orange blossoms most months of the year.
When it happened it wasn’t at our house. It was by the beach four houses down where I wasn’t supposed
to be, in the yard of elderly sisters I didn’t know, on the edge of an encroaching jungle where I sat in a
broken stone fireplace pretending I lived in a castle. A large black yardman crept up on me quietly, which
made me marginally uneasy, especially when he raised his hoe menacingly above my head. He smashed it
down behind me, chopping off the head of a coral snake that probably could have killed me, as small as I
was then. He pulled me out very gently, dusted me off, quietly explained about coral snakes and why I
shouldn’t play in places like that next to piles of old leaves, thanked God he’d been there to help me,
while I thanked him fervently, and then went home and kept my mouth shut so I wouldn’t get into
trouble. I’ve liked finding a way to use that event in Out of The Ruins in honor of him, even though I’m
sure he’ll never know about it.
10. In Out of The Ruins, you bring up some controversial issues, such as euthanasia and eminent
domain. Can you tell us more about why you decided to write about these topics?
I’ve always been concerned with contrasting moral and ethical realities in American culture today with
what the culture was like in the early sixties when Out of The Ruins takes place. Many in today’s culture,
in my opinion, tend to run after split-second gratification and try to avoid anything personally unpleasant
even if it looks like a duty. Earlier generations - Ben’s generation, for instance, the World War II
generation that lived through World War I, the influenza epidemic of 1918, the stock market crash of
1929 and the entire Depression - his generation was not so pampered, not so easily overwhelmed, and not
so self-absorbed. There were then widespread ethical and spiritual underpinnings in our culture that we
abandon, as a country, at our peril.
There are many people I know who say routinely, “When I get old, I’ve told my husband (or my wife, or
whoever) to kill me if I get cancer, or senile, or debilitated somehow. And I mean it. I’m going to join the
hemlock society, and he is too, and . . . ” While, from my point of view, even though I see how appealing
the avoidance of suffering and dependence on others is, there is more to take into account. Maybe it
would be good for our husbands to care for us. Or for us to take care of them. Maybe our kids or our
friends would learn and grow from some of that too. I’ve seen a lot of good come out of many kinds of
suffering. Greater good for more people than there would’ve been without it. Which is not to say that I
don’t hate to suffer, and put myself out for others too, just like everyone else. The difference is, perhaps,
that I see intent behind what happens in a way that some others don’t. These are large and ancient
questions. They won’t be answered in Out of The Ruins. But they’re looked at, and pondered, and
hopefully the way it’s done may be thought provoking for those interested in such things.
The issue of eminent domain became an interest of mine on my first visit to Cumberland when I learned
about the conflict between the Carnegie family who owned Greyfield Inn and the National Park Service which had stated its intention of condemning the land and taking the island by “eminent domain,”
whether the owners wanted to sell or not. Although I love parks and am glad we have them, the issue of
personal property rights is not one to be trampled calmly underfoot (as any study of the Soviet Union, or
Communist China, or Germany under the National Socialist Party will make abundantly clear). Where
does the issue of private property rights come in? How would we like it if it were our land being taken?
What’s the right way to combat such a situation - if it should be combated? Are there other areas where
such governmental confiscation takes place? These are all questions that I was interested in, and which I
explored in Out of The Ruins.