Stef Penney’s second novel, The Invisible Ones, sets the mystery
of a missing girl in the always mysterious world of “the
Travellers,” the English Romany gypsies.  What made you decide
to write about gypsies in the 1980s?  It takes place in the ’80s
because I wanted to set it before the Internet changed the
investigator’s job so thoroughly, when people couldn’t
communicate too easily. I’d had a lifelong fascination with
Romany Gypsy culture, possibly because it exists on the margins
of wider society, and not that much is known about it. I think
for most people, anything secretive and mysterious is
fascinating—and that seemed to chime with the idea of a noirish
story. In a noir the protagonist, classically, goes into a
closed, secretive world and has to negotiate the hidden shoals.
That whole world seemed very under-represented in news, culture,
fiction... I just hope that the more portrayals of Traveling
peoples exist in culture, the more balanced the overall picture
becomes.  Was it difficult to write about