Maureen Duffy

Orpheus Trail, The

"I've outdone The Da Vinci Code," chuckles veteran author Maureen Duffy, describing her 31st book, The Orpheus Trail. It's a modern-day thriller that incorporates ancient history and early religion, but unlike her last novel, Alchemy, there is no sapphic element this time around. The Orpheus Trail is inspired by the real-life discovery in Essex of the Saxon tomb of a wealthy man, nicknamed the Prittlewell Prince, who was buried with fantastic grave goods incorporating both pagan and Christian symbols. This caught Duffy's imagination.

She describes the initial germ of any novel as "the tiny hand-sized cloud of an idea" to which "things attach like barnacles on a ship". In this case, the barnacles were the themes of people-smuggling and "installation art - the violence and deathliness of much of it".

Themes in place, she always starts to write as if walking a tightrope, wondering if she'll get to the other side. "So much of it is confidence. And the energy expended is tremendous - you can feel it burning out of you. At the end of the book you feel completely drained, and also miserable, because you've lost your alternative world."

Inevitably, threads from her real world also tie in to her fiction. Her father was an IRA man (or so he said), who left when Maureen was two months old - and she finds herself unintentionally revisiting this theme. "Alex Kish, the museum curator in The Orpheus Trail, has no father. When I realised, I thought, 'Oh dear, here we go again.'"

Her mother coped well with their situation, despite the potential stigma of being single. "She bought herself a wedding ring in Woolworth's and called herself Mrs Duffy. A nosy neighbour once asked, 'What's happened to Mr Duffy, then?' My mother looked straight at her and said, 'We lost him with heart trouble.'" Which, in a way, was true.

Woolies has gone and the respected writer has clocked up three-quarters of a century, penning poetry, plays and non-fiction along with the novels. For lesbian readers, her 1966 novel The Microcosm was a standout work, featuring the capital's Gateways club at a time when there was little else written about their lives. So it's surprising to hear that this much-loved piece of fiction was originally planned as a sociological survey.

"Various things were being written about male homosexuals as part of the legalisation campaign," recalls the lifelong rights advocate, "but women weren't being seen. My idea was to cover a spectrum and show it wasn't just Radclyffe Hall and ladies who kept knitting shops, but people who were everywhere, leading all sorts of lives."

But no publisher would take her on for that kind of study without a degree in sociology, so somebody suggested she tackle the same subject matter in a novel. Duffy didn't worry about reactions to The Microcosm; she was probably the first lesbian to be publicly out in this country. "I wasn't prepared to go round hiding and pretending," she says. "I was lucky in that I'd given up my job and was writing full-time, so I couldn't get the sack as some people did then. In those days, you didn't consciously come out, you just lived your life openly." And blazed a trail for others to do the same.