Goodbye Ruby Redfort: an interview with Lauren Child


After keeping readers on the edge of their seats throughout six books, Ruby Redfort’s adventures, as told by Lauren Child, conclude with Blink and You Die. Nicholas Tucker spoke to Lauren about Ruby, James Bond, and mushrooms!


I am interviewing Lauren on a sunny day in her pretty London house, crammed with pictures and arty bits and pieces. She is wearing a fabulous dress made from material bought in America – just the sort of fabric she sometimes works into her collages. Lauren is looking fabulous too; sun-tanned from a recent holiday spent relaxing after coming to the end of her six part Ruby Redfort adventure series. The last of these, Blink and You Die ran to 565 pages. Is it a great weight off her shoulders to have finished with Ruby altogether or more a sense of loss? It’s a great weight off my shoulders! I know I’m not meant to say that and I’m sure I will miss it too. The thing about inter-connected stories is that when you have finished one there is never any real sigh of relief because you have deliberately kept some loose ends going for the next instalment. But at the moment it does feel is nice to have finally completed the whole thing once and for all.


But the wicked Count is still around! You haven’t killed him off for good, making him fall off a high building like some of Ruby’s other evil opponents. Well, I hope there are not going to be too many letters picking me up on any detail left unfinished, including anything about the Count himself. As for falling off high buildings, I am probably not supposed to say this either, but the American market hates any mention of guns in stories. So falling off a high building is one alternative way of getting rid of a truly obnoxious character. I grew up on a diet of quite violent films which I used to watch with my Dad on television


because when I was little there weren’t that many children’s programmes. So I quickly became immune to most violence, which could be why there is a touch of it in Ruby Redfort, but never any guns!


Mushrooms also play a large part into this last story. What’s that all about? I never plot in advance and they just happened. I was thinking about something that might give you a long life if you ate it. I also talked to a friend who is obsessed with the idea that meteorites could have brought mushroom spores with them when they first crashed into earth. These, according to him, could have been the origin of life itself, so it seemed like a good idea to bring them into my story too. And mushrooms are such weird things anyhow; they can be so nice and also so poisonous. A perfect metaphor for not always knowing what is good or bad.


When Ian Fleming started writing he asked a friend for suggestions about how he could vary ‘He said’ and ‘She said’ in passages of dialogue. You sometimes include pages of pure dialogue in these stories as if from a script rather than a novel. Was this because you too got weary of ‘He said’ and ‘She said’? I think it sometimes works better, whether it’s funny or dramatic, when you insert a section of a script with voices pinging straight back to each other. It also brings in pace, when there is a lot of information to impart and this way you can do it really quickly.


12 Books for Keeps No.221 November 2016


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