Fiona McIntosh wishes she had a dollar for every time someone has asked whether her writing is just an excuse to travel.
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"I've been travelling since I was about three so I think it's fair to say that I have suffered itchy feet for a lot of my life," she says.
Born in Britain, she spent her formative years travelling and has lived in West Africa, Paris and, for 30 years, Australia, where home is now in South Australia. Such was her passion for travel that for many years she ran a successful travel company, until a writing course with Bryce Courtenay changed her direction.
"When I decided to write books at the grand old age of 40, I thought I was hanging up my globetrotting boots," McIntosh says.
"I sold the business, gave up corporate life in the travel industry and I took to our converted garden shed that served as a writing studio – and still does – and I locked a door on the world of travel.
"I thought I would sit very quietly staring down the garden and get lost in my imagination, never to be seen again. How wrong I was. If you write the sort of novels that the mainstream audience wants, then suddenly you're touring the country, or the world, because my books began selling globally . . .
"And then because of all the interest you start to think bigger, about more epic landscapes, more exotic locations, showing more daring in where you'll take your reader and if you want to get better, as I always want to, then you put more and more into the research side. Suddenly I was out of the garden shed and on the road, either touring or researching."
McIntosh has published more than 20 novels – fantasy, crime, children's fiction and most recently historical adventure-romance. Her new novel, The French Promise – a sequel to The Lavender Keeper – is set partly in postwar Europe and visits London, East Sussex, Lausanne in Switzerland, Paris, Strasbourg and various villages and towns of the Vaucluse department of Provence.
"It was a great deal of geography to cover and while I had no idea where the story might go in terms of its tension and events, my gut told me that these were the locations it would weave a pathway through."
McIntosh believes it's crucial to get location right.
"If I'm going to bring those landscapes to life for an Australian reader, one sitting on a wonderfully sandy beach at home, I have to make sure I get it so very right and rich with all the vital sensory information that my readers can even smell the lavender coming off the pages of my book," she says.
"To do this properly, I have to go to all of my locations. And that's why I travel so much. I am determined to make it feel real for the reader. While visiting Paris is a stupendously easy decision to make, albeit costly, I really didn't want to go to Auschwitz-Birkenau outside Krakow, for instance, but if I hadn't, that harrowing prologue to The French Promise would not capture the reader's emotional response in the way it does."
As much as she enjoys researching locations, she revels in the historical research as well.
"It begins with a lot of reading on the topics that shine a light back onto the mood, atmosphere, era, politics, culture that surround my story. When all the reading is done, I feel equipped that I've got the 'pervading atmosphere' of my tale right, then I start learning about the culture and social norms of the day."
She says the main part of her research – something that's "fantastically addictive and never dull" – is done with photographs. She doesn't take a lot of notes, preferring to look back at photographs that evoke memories. She also hunts down first-hand information.
"I talk to a lot of older people with fabulous memories of the past. I like to walk the streets of my characters and imagine what was there in their time."
Are there any places left to visit she would like to write about?
"I wrote about southern India in Fields of Gold and spent some time there researching, but I would love to explore northern India with a view to writing an epic story with that part of the world for a backdrop," she says.
"I have never visited Japan or China. I think it's high time I got myself to these wonderfully vibrant and ancient lands so rich in culture – I know both would trigger story ideas instantly . . . There are parts of the Middle East I want to see including Jerusalem and Beirut ... I'd definitely like to visit the region we know as Flanders [in Belgium] as well as Gallipoli . . . and I am gunning to do a pilgrimage like the Santiago de Compostela."
There should be material for plenty more novels.
The French Promise by Fiona McIntosh is published by Michael Joseph, $29.99.
