The Lamplighters

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Inspired by a real-life unsolved mystery where the keepers of a working lighthouse went missing in the early 1900s. Hello Emma and thank you so much for taking the time to answer our questions. I wondered if you could first tell our readers a little bit about your writing process. Has it changed over the past couple of years? Similar care is evident in the creation of the characters. Helen is central to Sharp’s investigation. She is still alone after 20 years, neither Arthur’s wife or yet his widow, and she is struggling to move on. Although Helen is the one who tells Sharp there must be a rational reason for the men’s disappearance, she’s also the person most haunted by the past. At the outset of the story,“the ghouls continued to slip between her clothes in the wardrobe, making her shiver when she got dressed in the mornings,” an example of the kind of beautiful phrasing that permeates the book and makes it a treat to read. Jenny has her children, and Michelle a whole new family, but Helen only has her memories – and they won’t let her rest.

Sharks are] cool torpedoes of blubber, sliced at the gills, equipped with teeth. Fat and teeth, that’s the thing. Needles in a bowl of curd.’ With all the elements of a gothic novel, this compelling and haunting narrative -with its complex, enigmatic characters, was inspired by the actual event in 1900 of the disappearance of three lighthouse keepers on the remote Flannan Isles. ‘The Lamplighters’ is adeptly partitioned with the disappearance of the keepers occurring in 1972, and an investigative reporter’s attempt to unearth the truth beginning in 1992; with the narration floating between the potent characters, and the action emanating from parallel time frames, the plot could quite easily have become fractured. Remarkably, Stonex remains in command of each critical, entangled thread as she seduces readers into her intricate web of intrigue and suspense; not once does she tolerate complacency as the labyrinths of loss, deception and intense psychological trauma are explored. In 1900 three lighthouse keepers disappeared from the Eilean Mor lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides. They were never found and there has been no explanation for their vanishing. In a well constructed novel, Emma Stonex reimagines this event by transposing the time to 1972 and the location to the rugged coast of Cornwall.The result is a multi layered novel that fuses atmosphere and mystery with personal and societal psychology.

For a while the working title was The Tower, but that sounded too hard, then The Watchmen, but that sounded too sci-fi. I hit on The Lamplighters by accident. It’s the title of a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, who was part of the Stevenson engineering family who designed most of Scotland’s lighthouses. I love the idea of a sensitive writerly type among these burly, technically minded engineers, and it’s compelling to see how the ocean finds its way into his writing. Lamplighters, traditionally, are nothing to do with lighthouses: they used to maintain gas streetlamps. But the word was right and applies to many of the themes in the book, as well as having the Stevenson connection. It feels warm and romantic, and human. I knew it was right straightaway.

Helen is touched by his dedication and says, “‘That’s a lot of work.’” Dan replies, “‘Yes, it was. I finished it. I know more than I did before. But as for knowing what happened on that tower, Helen, I’ll never be certain of that. I’m not foolish enough to think that I might. There are a hundred endings, maybe there are more.'”

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Stonex’s unique tale juxtaposes oddly compelling reality—the daily challenges of being a lighthouse keeper for the men and their families—against a series of strange, poignant, near-mystical happenings that will pull readers in and keep them mesmerized right to the end.” — Booklist I mean, honestly! I’m sure you’d prefer that, but I’m afraid it’s all ridiculous. We’re not in your world now, we’re in mine; and this isn’t a thriller, it’s my life.” One of the ideas that is explored in The Lamplighters is job automation and the sense of working in a manual job that won’t necessarily exist for much longer. Was this an idea you were keen to explore? It’s the descriptions, the language, that I think I will remember most about this novel, that and the eerie evocation of a liminal world where we are poised, characters and readers alike, on the cusp of knowing and of not-knowing, of knowing and of not-wanting-to-know. As a mystery it kept me engaged, though I felt that the ‘aha’ moments didn’t always live up to expectation. We find out the true identity of Dan Sharp, for example, right at the end, but I’m not sure it was worth the wait, given keeping him out of the narrative until that point forces some artificiality into the transcripts that grated a little. Although no one actually knows what happened, through the interviews with the women and some literary licence, Dan poses the story of what might have occurred. What Dan learns raises a whole lot of new questions. It wasn’t all sweet with the families, there were rivalries and jealousies and misunderstandings. On the part of the men, subjected to long periods of isolation there were also issues.