PASADENA, Calif. — On the patio of the Langham Huntington hotel here, on a sunny afternoon tinged with smoke from the recent wildfires in the area, Deborah Harkness swirled a glass of Jules Taylor sauvignon blanc, sniffed and sipped, then pronounced the wine “zingy, really zingy. 2017, if I had to guess.” Not an unusual appraisal from an oenophile who once wrote a blog called “Good Wine Under $20.” But then came a less expected disquisition on the quasi-scientific history of winemaking: “There’s all kinds of lore about alchemists fortifying wines and liquors, boiling them down, evaporating, ending up with something they called the spirit of wine.”
Harkness’ wine blog may have won awards from Food & Wine and Saveur, but she is better known as a historian of science and medicine at the University of Southern California — and far better known as the author of a series of novels brimming with alchemy and magic, witches and vampires. All three of the books in her All Souls trilogy — “'Twilight’ for the intellectually restless,” as NPR described one of the volumes — as well as her most recent novel, “Time’s Convert,” have landed at the top or second spot on The New York Times best-seller list.
The trilogy — “A Discovery of Witches,” “Shadow of Night” and “The Book of Life” — has also spawned a fan wiki, an annual convention attended by hundreds of adults who self-identify as supernatural, and a merchandise line that extends to duvet covers. “The series has great brand recognition and some of the most loyal fans on Earth,” said Laura Tisdel, Harkness’ editor at Viking. “The books feel like guilty pleasures, but there’s nothing to feel guilty about, because with Deb you’re in the hands of a real honest-to-God historian.”
Until recently the All Souls brand lacked one critical asset — the splashy television adaptation. But onThursday, Sundance Now and Shudder televised the U.S. premiere of an eight-part series based on “A Discovery of Witches.” (Two more seasons, corresponding to the other books, have been greenlighted.) The show, produced by Bad Wolf and Sky Productions, stars Teresa Palmer as Diana Bishop, the Yale scholar and “reluctant witch” whose discovery of an enchanted manuscript attracts the attention of an assortment of magical beings, including Matthew Clairmont — a smoldering-eyed vampire scientist with designs on Diana — played by the suitably hunky Matthew Goode.
“It’s a very character-driven story, which is why I’m glad it ended up with Sundance,” Harkness said. “It means we don’t have to blow up so much stuff and have so much fake blood.” As executive producer of the show, Harkness had a hand in everything from the casting to the edits. She has been busy promoting both the show and “Time’s Convert.”
Harkness gives a lot of interviews in hotel rooms — which may be why her publicist stipulated that this one take place at the Langham Huntington, even though the author lives less than 2 miles away. In any case, Harkness, who arrived in jeans and well-worn cowboy boots, her blond hair staticky from the Santa Ana winds, fairly radiated spontaneity and sincerity. Maybe it was the wine.
She was, for example, expansive on the subject of new projects, a topic many writers would rather submit to a tax return than discuss. All Souls groupies will be happy to hear she is 200 pages into a book about Matthew grappling with the forces of religious radicalism in 16th-century Europe. She recently returned from a three-week cruise around New Zealand to research another book about Matthew’s nephew, the beloved soldier and mercenary Gallowglass. A deep dive into the history of witchcraft is also in the works.
Harkness is descended from a witch — or at least a woman hanged in Salem for allegedly practicing witchcraft. The supernatural seized her imagination at a young age. “I can still see ‘The Witch of Blackbird Pond’ on the shelves of the Horsham library,” she said. Horsham, a suburb of Philadelphia, is not a bad place to grow up if you’re interested in history, another early passion of hers. There were family picnics at battlefields, tours of historic houses. When she was 8, her father, the manager of a paint store, and her mother, who worked as a secretary, took Harkness and her younger brother on a trip to England — sparking a lifelong interest in Elizabethan history.
She went to college at Mount Holyoke, where she designed her own major, in Renaissance studies. A class called “Magic, Knowledge and the Pursuit of Power in the Renaissance” was transformative: “It was like somebody had taken a can opener to my brain and peeled off the lid. The teacher opened up the class by asking, ‘How do you know what you think you know?’ I’ve never stopped asking that question.”
Harkness studied the history of magic and science in early modern Europe at Northwestern University, where she received a master’s degree. Her adviser, convinced she was a natural storyteller on the strength of a one-page writing exercise, suggested she try her hand at fiction. Instead she went on to get her doctorate at the University of California, Davis, spending a year at Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship and writing her dissertation on John Dee, the alchemist and mathematician who served as the astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I.
At Northwestern she also met Karen Halttunen, a professor of American history who has been her partner since 1995: “Nothing happened for seven years, but when I started my first teaching job she was like a mentor to me and within a year it was clear to me, at least, that I was head over heels,” Harkness said. In 2004 the couple moved from Davis to Los Angeles to take jobs at USC, where Halttunen is the head of the history department.
One of the things about natural storytellers is that they can tell a tale over and over and it never gets old. Like this one: In fall 2008 Harkness took a vacation in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where, at the airport bookstore, she was surprised to discover racks of books featuring supernatural characters (the Twilight craze was at its peak). “I bought a notebook and began sketching out ideas,” she recalled. “I think I thought I was writing an op-ed piece about why are we today as fascinated by these creatures of myth and legend as my research subjects were in 1550.” Five or six weeks later she had 180 pages — and they contained dialogue.
The three-part narrative she had begun started with a romantic tale that became “A Discovery of Witches,” published in 2011. It was followed by “Shadow of Night” in 2012 (Diana and Matthew time travel to Elizabethan England to unlock the secrets of the ancient manuscript), and “The Book of Life” in 2014 (the quest concludes at Matthew’s ancestral home in Auvergne).
Harkness calls “Time’s Convert,” which came out in September, a “prequelly sequelly book,” spanning the life of Matthew’s son Marcus, from his days on the battlefields of the Revolutionary War to his contemporary romance with Phoebe, a warmblood turned vampire. (Vampires, remember, live forever.)
The author said her books do not cleave to the conventions of genre fiction. Rather, she sees her writing in the vein of J.K. Rowling’s: “What is the book you pick up when you’re done with Harry Potter? I’d like to think you’d pick up a big set of chunky books like All Souls, which similarly talks about real issues, but issues facing adults, not teenagers.”
Popular novelist Jodi Picoult — herself no stranger to best-seller lists — admires the intellectual heft of Harkness’ books. “Her storytelling may hook you first,” she wrote in an email, “but you’ll learn history, literature and science in the course of reading one of her novels.”
You will also encounter weighty themes. Differentness — the differentness of a daemon with a drug problem, say — is a dominant motif. “That’s sort of what the whole series is about,” Harkness said, washing down some wasabi peas with the last of her wine. “That eternal conflict between on the one hand knowing that difference and diversity is what makes us stronger and on the other being terrified of it.”
She is not a fussy writer. Her primary work space is her home office overlooking the swimming pool in the backyard of the English cottage-like house she shares with Halttunen. But she also writes in hotels and on planes. Playlists are essential — “a lot of period music, but not exclusively, so it’ll be like a loop of 16th century and then Mumford & Sons.” She relies on “a great team of beta readers” to review early drafts.
To clear her head Harkness rides her quarter horse, Blue. A year and a half ago she bought a getaway home, set amid the conifers on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, Washington. But she hasn’t been able to spend as much time there as she would like. In addition to her teaching and writing schedules, there are the demands of running a literary franchise — the TV series, the book tours, the social media.
From the FAQs page on her website: Q: Do you believe in magic? A: Absolutely. When asked about that claim, Harkness dialed it back just a bit. “I believe there’s more in the world that’s happening than we’re able to explain,” she said. “Do I believe that you could do something on the terrace of the Langham and it would have an effect on that tree over there? I’m not sure I do, but I could see why you might believe that.”
Maybe it was the wine again, but a skeptical reporter found himself focusing on the tree in question, a tall, skinny fan palm, and concentrating on movement: swaying trunk, fluttering fronds. The tree didn’t move — but that’s beside the point.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.