
Opening doors – an interview with M.G. Leonard
Michelle Pauli talks to bestselling author M.G. Leonard about her time-travelling new series.
From beetles to birdwatching and trainspotting, MG Leonard has always found a quirky niche in the children’s book market to make uniquely and perfectly her own. With her bestselling debut trilogy Beetle Boy, and then the Twitch series, she’s succeeded in delighting those children who were already budding entomologists or ornithologists while introducing hundreds of thousands of others around the world to new interests through her fast-paced adventures and compelling characters.
Now, however, with her new Time Keys series, she’s entering the packed field of time travel tales. Hunt for the Golden Scarab, the first in the four-book series, introduces us to 12-year-old Sim Lockier, his unusual family – and a world of portals, music, string theory and ancient Egypt. Because, of course, being Leonard, even a topic as well-covered as time travel was always going to have a truly original twist.
‘This is probably the most complicated concept I’ve ever had. It started with my obsession with doors. Doorways are a thing for me,’ says Leonard, somewhat unexpectedly.
It turns out that doorways were also a thing for architect-turned-band photographer Kevin Westenberg, who she worked with in her music industry days in the 1990s. Known for framing rock musicians from Radiohead to Nirvana in the beautiful doorways of Venice or Vienna, he introduced Leonard to the idea that doorways could act as portals.
‘I suddenly realised that lots of my favourite moments from books when I was a kid involved doorways, like The Secret Garden, where it’s a doorway into nature. And then there’s the back of the wardrobe and the door into Narnia,’ she explains. ‘But there are also some real-life doorways where, when you go into an incredibly historically important building, whether it’s York Minster or the Houses of Parliament, they have a presence. You’re like, oh my God, this is a doorway. Then imagine if those doorways were actually time doors that opened into the time in which they were hung when there was a historically resonant moment…?’
However, despite developing a habit of obsessively snapping doorways on her phone, the idea of portals simply lurked in Leonard’s notebooks for years until other pieces of the puzzle that create a book concept slotted into place. Her love of music and background in the music industry – but also frustration with the downgrading of music in state education in England in the last 15 years – was one of those pieces. The next involved her habit of falling asleep listening to audiobooks when in hotel rooms on book tours. Multiple listenings to Benedict Cumberbatch’s reading of the audiobook of The Order of Time by Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, a specialist in quantum gravity research, introduced her to string theory – and another key turned in the series’ genesis story.
‘String theory posits that everything in the cosmic universe is made of vibrating strings like a giant musical instrument. And string theory is the theory that allows for the possibility of time travel,’ she explains.
Finally, she discovered the fact that would make the story sing – that human hearing is acute up until our late 20s, at which point we start to lose both the high and low end of our hearing, so there are pitches that only children and young people can hear.
‘I thought, hang on a minute (which is always the beginning of a book)’, says Leonard. ‘What if these amazing historical doors, that have the capacity to open into the time in which they were hung, resonate at a frequency that only children can hear, and only the musical children who can play an instrument can open the door into the past? Those children are the time keys, the keys to opening the door in time. When all those different parts of the idea fell into place, I realised that if you’ve got children who can open doors in time, there will also be nefarious adults who wish to control time but cannot open the doors themselves because they are too old and so they will try to gather and control the time key children.’
The result is Hunt for the Golden Scarab. But, of course, a concept alone is not enough. The book hooks the reader immediately with a mystery – why can Sim and his mum never live anywhere for long and why are they being chased by dangerous strangers? Sim is joined in the adventure by his rebellious, trumpet-playing cousin Jeopardy and a time keys partnership is born as they pair up to travel back to Ancient Egypt to find Nefertiti’s lost tomb.
The historical details in the story will be a joy to all key stage 2 children who have studied Ancient Egypt in school. Given depth by Leonard’s first-hand experience of visiting the Valley of the Kings, all the talk of canopic jars, obsidian knives and general mummification lore will thrill young Egyptologists and take those who know a little bit about the topic on a deeper dive without ever overwhelming the story with too many facts.
However, alongside the vibrant descriptions of Ancient Egyptian life and culture, the story is also rooted in present-day reality with glorious settings in London landmarks, from the Sir John Soanes Museum in Bloomsbury and Liberty’s department store to Bar Italia in Soho. Leonard is also insistent that the time travel story itself has a foothold in reality rather than fantasy.
‘Several people have referred to this series as having a magical system or having fantasy elements, and it really doesn’t,’ she says. ‘Everything in it is scientifically possible and plausible. There are quite a few scientists that will talk to you about the music of the cosmic universe and how everything has a frequency. I’ve not invented anything. Like a magpie, I’ve taken lots of jewels and put them together in my little tiara of fun. But there’s no magic. It is as real as I can possibly make it.’
Eight years on from Beetle Boy and 20 books into her career as a children’s author, Leonard has lost none of her enthusiasm for burrowing deeply into a topic.
‘My favourite way of learning is to write a book on a subject that I’m attracted to but I don’t know a lot about. And then I go on a massive deep dive of learning … one of the things that I love about history is how much context it gives you for the present. We’re all just minims on a beat in the existence of the planet and humanity, after all.’
The next books in the series will be set in Viking Norway, then Ancient Rome and possibly medieval England, published every six months, and then – who knows? As Leonard says,
‘I’m contracted to write four, and hopefully this will be a success which will enable me write more. In an ideal world, I’d really like to write eight because there are eight notes in an octave. And I feel like an octave of books would be nice, wouldn’t it?’
Michelle Pauli is a freelance writer and editor specialising in books and education. She created and edited the Guardian children’s books site.
Hunt for the Golden Scarab is published by Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-1035005963, £7.99 pbk