Asked to reference her new mystery series, author L.J.M. Owen suggests a hybrid of Bones, the American television crime procedural based on Kathy Reichs' Temperance Brennan novels, and the bucolic potboiler Midsomer Murders.
Think forensic science in a cosy setting, Owen says.
Canberra replaces Somerset. There are complicated family feuds, long-buried secrets, fireside chats, purring cats and comfort food. The cases are cold – really cold – cases connected to archaeological finds from the sites of the world's greatest ancient civilisations and Owen's young sleuth, Dr Elizabeth Pimms, must use her skills as an archaeologist and working librarian to find answers.
The first in the series, Olmec Obituary, features the discovery of a royal Olmec cemetery deep in the Mexican jungle and a 3000-year-old sculpture of a female ball player.
The second, Mayan Mendacity, introduces readers to the court of Lady Six Sky, a long-forgotten leader of the Mayan Empire.
Like Pimms, Owen, known as LJ by friends and family, is a trained archaeologist, a qualified librarian, has a PhD in palaeogenetics – a study of genetic diversity in surviving dental records from Iron Age and Roman England – and has studied Spanish, Welsh, Chinese and French.
"I'd done all this endless study, I learnt all these languages and I was becoming quite ... well, other writers will understand what I mean, but there's a kind of compulsion or obsession that grows inside you that you've got to write," says Owen.
"I thought what I want to do is create another world that people who are like me can go into and explore and find it interesting and be entertained. A sanctuary from everyday life. I was trying to be sensible so I said, 'Here's all the things I know about archaeology, the library stuff, all these languages and other cultures. That's what I should write about'."
But she prevaricated until her partner sat her down one Christmas and said. "Enough talking about it, enough thinking about it, just write it now."
"He said, 'I want to see a draft by next Christmas.' I think I had driven him and a lot of people quite mad by talking about it. I could see the plot, I could see the characters, I could see the story world. I just wasn't doing anything about it."
By Christmas 2014, Owen had a manuscript of 70,000 words; her first attempt at creative writing completed while working full-time in the public service.
Warned by friends of the long odds of finding a publisher in the sub-genre of cosy crime, she self-published, raising $10,000 by crowdfunding. Five days into last year's Kickstarter campaign she was contacted by Angela Meyer of Echo Publishing, which has now published both books back-to-back..
As research, Owen reads deeply academic texts and papers until she builds a complete picture of the civilisation in which she is interested. "Whether in the end my picture is accurate or not, it's the absolute best one I can put together," Owen says.
Her grandfather, Meirion Quick, was an "armchair archaeologist extraordinaire". "From when I was quite little I would get to sit with him while he spoke with his wonderful Welsh accent and read to me out of old tomes of archaeology."
From Quick came one of the books' stylistic curiosities. When not picking over skeletal remains for clues, or stressing over a boyfriend's absence and betrayal, Dr Pimms takes short excursions into a library created in her mind.
"The concept of having a storeroom in your mind, especially for merchants, where you keep a mental catalogue of everything you have sold, everything you have bought and all the money people owe you, essentially your whole business – that's where I got the idea of the phrenic library."
To this fictional inner sanctum, Owen adds domestic touches of a rosewood door, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, Chesterfield couch, a ginger cat called Billy, a Tiffany lamp and an ornate fireplace.
Owen describes her books as one part autobiography, one part lamentation, one part personal salvation. The writing calms and redirects a "chattering mind". Quiet anger motivates her to restore to the public record the lives of important female historical figures absent from most historical accounts.
In her first year of high school Owen encountered "some fairly rampant chauvinism". Having topped her year in every test in science, she was placed third behind two boys because her teacher insisted a girl could not be dux. As she entered the workforce, time and time again she'd come up with ideas only to have them claimed by male colleagues.
"I've included as many mentions of woman in history and woman in science as I can," Owen says. "I want everyone to know the names of women scientists as readily as they know the male ones. I want people to know about ancient female leaders, philosophers, and mathematicians. It's my wailing at the wall."
Mayan Mendacity, L.J.M. Owen, Echo Publishing, $19.99
