Eye of the Beholder locations with Emma Bamford

Submitted: 3rd July 2024

Emma Bamford’s Eye of the Beholder trail

Author Emma is very keen on location and setting…..

Eye of the Beholder Emma Bamford

Map of locations in EOTB

When beginning a new novel, some authors start with character or a plot idea – but I tend to start with the setting. To me, setting is a character in its own right. Not only does it influence the feeling or tension of the book, it can also affect how the human characters react.

Beach or woodland settings

Set a story in a certain place – a Greek island, for example (I pick that example as I am writing this by the beach in Rhodes!) – and everything seems sunny and bright, and the characters can feel relaxed and optimistic, happier to go with the flow and let any little arguments or differences float away. Drop those same characters into a desolate winter woodland, however, and it is likely they’ll react differently. They might feel worried, threatened or protective, and the stress of the situation could cause little niggles to quickly escalate into full-blown arguments and resentments with potentially huge consequences.

Map of locations in EOTB

Scottish Highlands.

In my psychological suspense novel Eye of the Beholder my main character Maddy is hired to ghostwrite the memoir of the reclusive cosmetic surgeon Dr Angela Reynolds and is sent to Angela’s pristine glass-walled house deep in the Scottish Highlands. Isolated places (islands, trains, country homes – think Agatha Christie) are great settings for mysteries. Authors love writing these ‘locked room’ stories because they allow greater control over a smaller cast of characters, with each one a suspect. Staying in one place also means you can take time to really describe the setting and make it stand out in readers’ minds.

Map of locations in EOTB

Eye of the Beholder is my reimagining of one of my favourite films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which in turn was an adaptation of a 1954 French novel called The Living and the Dead. The movie was set in San Francisco and the novel in Paris, and although some of my scenes take place in London (Richmond Park, Embankment, Dalston, and Tooting, near where I used to live), I knew I also wanted somewhere more isolated in order to really ramp up the tension for Maddy, Scott and Connor.

Fairy Pools, Skye (c) Emma Bamford

Map of locations in EOTB

As a child, my family went on holiday to the Scottish Highlands, staying on the shore of a small loch called Kishorn, and I had more recently headed north again on a work trip to Oban, Skye, Mull and Coll. Those visits were all in the summer months, when the sun glinted prettily off the lochs, but I knew these places would feel forbidding and dangerous in winter – which was exactly what I needed.

Kishorn

Map of locations in EOTB

I set about inventing my own little piece of the Highlands, creating a fictional loch, Varaig, and locating it some way north west of Loch Lomond, roughly about where the village of Inverchorachan lies. I mixed together elements of the places I’d been: the heather-clad hills and sheer, rocky promontories of Skye, the shingled shores of Lochs Lomond and Carron, the circling golden eagles of Colonsay.

Loch Lomond: Eye of the Beholder locations with Emma Bamford

Map of locations in EOTB

One of the book’s key themes is beauty, and in one scene Maddy and Scott look at a watercolour painting of a landscape as she explains to him that landscape paintings have been considered beautiful for thousands of years because they depict everything humans need to feel safe and to survive: shelter from predators (trees), a source of water (a river or stream), food (grazing animals). Looking out of the huge window onto the moor and valley ahead, Scott says, ‘Maybe that’s why I love places like this. Wild, unspoilt places. Maybe they’re speaking to us in a way that goes so deep we react instinctively.’ At first Maddy agrees – but then she notices there’s something missing here in Varaig. ‘No trees,’ she tells Scott, oblivious at the time to the impending irony of her words. ‘Nothing to offer safety.’

The writing retreat Eye of the Beholder locations with Emma Bamford

Map of locations in EOTB

As I was working on the book’s ending, I went on a writing retreat to Moniack Mhor in Kiltarlity(above) , near Inverness, during the cold heart of December when there were only seven or so hours of daylight a day. There, I headed out on walks and took note of the way things looked and felt around me: the sodden, spongy-feeling grass under my boots, the rain-laden bracken, a spiky gorse bush flowering just days before winter solstice. All of these details went into the book. Then one night, as I was holed up writing in my cosy room, a thick fog rolled in off the loch to cloak the farmhouse. It was eerie and disorienting; a disruptive and deadening, dangerous threat… it went in the book.

Thanks Emma!