C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 8

Miss Marple Returns

Like many others, I have long been a fan of Agatha Christie—especially her creation of Miss Jane Marple. At one time or another, I have read all the Marple books, most of them more than once. So the idea of twelve new mysteries written by a collection of accomplished authors immediately appealed to me as both a reader and a novelist. But interviewing twelve authors posed a technical challenge. So the publicist and I came up with the idea of asking a single question and inviting authors to send their answers. Not everyone chose to participate, but at least half did. So here are some of the thoughts behind Marple: Twelve New Mysteries .

But first, the book summary.

One doesn’t stop at one murder...

Jane Marple is an elderly lady from St Mary Mead who possesses an uncanny knack for solving even the most perplexing puzzles. Now, for the first time in 45 years, Agatha Christie’s beloved character returns to the page for a globe-trotting tour of crime and detection.

Join Marple as she travels through her sleepy English village and around the world. In St Mary Mead, a Christmas dinner is interrupted by unexpected guests; the Broadway stage in New York City is set for a dangerous improvisation; bad omens surround an untimely death aboard a cruise ship to Hong Kong; and a bestselling writer on holiday in Italy is caught in a nefarious plot. These and other crimes committed in the name of love, jealousy, blackmail, and revenge are ones that only the indomitable Jane Marple can solve.

Bringing a fresh twist to the hallmarks of a classic Agatha Christie mystery, these twelve esteemed writers have captured the sharp wit, unique voice, and droll ingenuity of the deceptively demure detective. A triumphant celebration of Christie’s legacy and essential reading for crime lovers, Marple is a timely reminder why Jane Marple remains one of the most famous detectives of all time.

And now, the question—and the authors’ answers.

What inspired your particular story, and was it a challenge to blend your own voice with Agatha Christie’s?
 
Alyssa Cole: My story, “Miss Marple Takes Manhattan,” has her traveling to New York City to see a stage adaptation of one of her nephew Raymond’s novels. It was also inspired by the somewhat bittersweet undercurrent of the later Marple novels, where she is undergoing the mundane decline of being elderly, very much aware of it, but also still has what it takes to investigate and solve mysteries!

My story is an homage to the fact that Christie is the most successful female playwright ever; I figured if I was going to bring her to Manhattan, theater was a great backdrop to the mystery! It was challenging, but also fun! I focused on the aspects that stood out to me from Christie's writing—the humor, the subversiveness hidden by the presence of an elderly British woman, and the observational nature of Miss Marple. These were the aspects that I connected with most, and that I then tried to convey through my voice and writing style, but following her general lead.
 
Jean Kwok: I was inspired by Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery while writing my story, “The Jade Empress,” in which Miss Marple meets an elderly Chinese gentleman and his daughter on the deck of the Hong Kong–bound cruise ship The Jade Empress. The next morning, it is revealed that the gentleman has died of poisoning. Suspicion falls on his caretaker, a Chinese woman who performs all sorts of unusual rituals, but the daughter is certain that someone else must be to blame. When the caretaker’s body is discovered the next day, it’s up to Miss Marple to uncover the truth.
 
It was a challenge to attempt to channel Christie, of course, but it was also a true pleasure. I loved trying to hear Miss Marple in my mind. She has such a delightful, wry, and humorous voice. It also made me appreciate how brilliant Christie was at plotting, especially the ways in which she would ensure that the reader had all the clues they needed to solve the mystery without making anything too obvious.
 
Ruth Ware: I always felt aggrieved that while Poirot has not one but two Christmas stories, Miss Marple doesn't really have a proper one—just a rather sad murder that happens while she's Christmas shopping. I know that Christie loved Christmas—she wrote a long essay about her appreciation of a proper country Christmas—and I felt a little sad that Miss Marple never got to enjoy a real St Mary Mead Christmas in fiction, so I wanted to give her one!
 
Lucy Foley: My story was inspired by Sussex, the part of England I come from, and the rather pagan goings on that can still be found in several of the local villages and towns! I was certainly a little nervous about stepping into the great Agatha Christie’s shoes, but reading and rereading all of the Marple books and stories and really immersing myself in all things Marple helped hugely with getting the tone right and feeling confident writing about that world.

Kate Mosse: Although Christie’s Miss Marple appears in a handful of short stories, and then her first full length novel in 1930 (The Body in the Library), most of Jane Marple’s appearances happen in the time after the Second World War when life in England was changing quickly, and sometimes bewilderingly. Like many of my fellow contributors, I reread all of the Marple short stories and novels before starting to write, looking for biographical clues to Miss Marple’s life. Once I realized Jane Marple had an uncle who was a canon in Chichester Cathedral, the city where I grew up and live, I decided to set my story there in the years after the end of the war when the National Health Service had just come into being. “The Mystery of the Acid Soil” is a story of two older women, Jane Marple and her friend Emmeline Strickert, who discover a murder that no one else had even realized had taken place. The writing was a joy from start to finish, and I hope that the story will not only please die-hard Marple fans like myself, but also introduce a new generation of readers to the one and only Miss Marple.

And thank you to all the authors who participated in this Q&A. May you have many readers!

Flower Children, Rich Families, and Crime

I have loved Laurie R. King’s Russell and Holmes series since I first stumbled over The Beekeeper’s Apprentice in a bookstore (remember those?) back in the early 2000s. The voice of fifteen-year-old Mary Russell, crossing the Sussex Downs with her nose in a book and almost falling over a much-older Sherlock Holmes, grabbed my attention immediately, and I remain a fan.

I had the fun of chatting with Laurie on the New Books Network when Russell’s twelfth adventure came out, and I’m delighted to host another interview with her about her latest novel, Back to the Garden —especially since the technology gremlins were having their fun with us during that earlier interview. Read on to find out more about the exceedingly eccentric Gardener family, the lingering effects of turning a wealthy estate into a 1970s commune, and King’s appealing new detective, Rachel Liang.

As ever, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Inspector Raquel Liang of the San Francisco Police Department has reached a crossroads in her career. A recent incident ended with her transfer to the Cold Cases Unit and strict instructions to do everything by the book from now on if she wants to keep her job as the SFPD’s psychological investigator. So when news comes of old bones found under a concrete slab at the spiffy Gardener Estate in San Mateo County—a modus operandi associated with a serial killer from the 1970s known as the Highwayman—Raquel finds herself dealing with a case outside her jurisdiction but definitely within her area of expertise.

An added incentive for Raquel is that the Highwayman has just been identified, but he’s in the hospital with terminal cancer—and even after fifty years, he’s still playing games with the law. If the police can identify one of his victims, he will cooperate by supplying information on another, unknown to them. But time is running out, and more than a dozen victims remain unnamed. The body at the Gardener Estate may therefore answer the questions of two grieving families.

Interspersed with Raquel’s search for information on the victim, we follow the events preceding the murder in 1979, when—for reasons explained in the novel—the pristine Gardener Estate hosted a hippie commune devoted to organic gardening, free love, and a steady supply of drugs. As we move back and forth between past and present, the complex story of one exceedingly troubled family slowly emerges, the link between the commune and the Highwayman is revealed, and Raquel’s commitment to do everything by the book is tested—until one final, dramatic twist forces her to decide what matters most.

Food for Bookworms

About two months ago, I received an unsolicited e-mail from the owner of a site called Shepherd.com. Like most of us these days, I get a lot of unsolicited mail—never mind the semi-solicited e-mails that result from purchases I’ve made or newsletters I once signed up for or authors who added me to their lists without my permission whom I nevertheless like enough not to block—so I almost deleted this one unread. But I decided to take a look and discovered that Shepherd is a book recommendations site, previously unknown to me, that has an interesting business model: it helps authors of both fiction and nonfiction to promote their books by getting them to recommend other people’s books.

I took a look at the site and realized that, although new, it’s serious. It has a lot of authors, many of them well known, and the recommendations follow a very specific format. Authors pick five books that are close in topic to their own area of interest and explain why these five are worth reading. The recommendations are short (not much more than a paragraph), and the topics are tightly defined. So I agreed to sign on.

Next step was to find a topic—preferably something that people would be eager to learn about. With Russia still set on annihilating Ukraine, I considered listing books on early modern Ukrainian history, but those would have to be mostly nonfiction and would overlap only peripherally with my novels. So instead, since most of my books are set in sixteenth-century Russia—which might as well be the planet Saturn as far as the Western literary world is concerned—I settled on the best five books set in the sixteenth century in areas of the world not ruled by Tudors. In retrospect, I should have specified “mostly without Tudors,” but we’ll get to that in a second.

After a bit of thought, I settled on my five books. P.K. Adams’ Jagiellon Mysteries, set at the glittering Renaissance court of Zygmunt I and his Italian wife, Bona Sforza, were an obvious choice; I picked the first one, Silent Water. The next three were also pretty straightforward, from my point of view: Anjali Mitter Duva’s Faint Promise of Rain (northern India); Laura Morelli’s The Gondola Maker (Venice); and Ann Swinfen’s Voyage to Muscovy (Russia during the regency of Boris Godunov, ca. 1590), which begins in Tudor England but soon moves east.

These are all high-quality books by self-published (or in the case of Mitter Duva, hybrid-published) authors. For the fifth book, I wanted to balance out the list with a well-known commercially published author, and I remembered with affection Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, a series of six books featuring Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny. Francis is a Scottish adventurer, the younger son to a barony who gets involved first in the politics of his native land, then in an ongoing conflict that takes him through France, around much of the Mediterranean, and even to Ottoman Turkey and Russia before a brief visit to England sends him off once more to France for the dénouement. Every novel in the series has a chess-themed title, from The Game of Kings to Checkmate, but I have always preferred books 4–6. I read those three in the 1980s, revisited the entire series in the 2000s, then bought four of the six as e-books a few years ago but due to general overload didn’t read them again.

However, my absolute favorite is The Ringed Castle, which is mostly set in Moscow and the surrounding area in the 1550s—the court of Ivan the Terrible, where so many of my novels take place. So I picked that novel even though it’s the fifth book in the series. I sent in the list, and on August 15, as promised, it appeared online at https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-16th-century-that-dont-involve-tudors.

Here’s where it gets amusing. In the twenty years since I last cracked the spine on The Ringed Castle, I had forgotten that although the hero is off in Muscovy trying to whip the tsar’s army into shape, the heroine travels to London and becomes a lady-in-waiting to Mary Tudor. In fact, there are more Tudors in terms of pure page count in The Ringed Castle than in any other book of the Lymond Chronicles.

To be fair, the Tudors I had in mind were Henry VIII and his wives, whom I consider to be way overdone. Edward VI and Mary receive almost no fictional attention (Courtenay J. Hall’s lovely romance Some Rise by Sin is an exception.) The publishing industry also loves Elizabeth I, but so much went on during her reign that the market doesn’t yet feel saturated. Henry VII also attracts a fair bit of notice, but more in the context of Richard III and the Princes in the Tower than for his own policies and abilities.

Enter the world of social media. Once the post came out, I tagged a couple of Dorothy Dunnett fan groups, thinking they would enjoy seeing their favorite author featured and that it would increase publicity for Shepherd, and by extension me. 

Boy, was I taken by surprise! The entire discussion revolved around the number of Tudors and the inadvisability of starting the series with book 5. My one-paragraph book description was subjected to line-by-line analysis and found wanting, while the other titles provoked gratitude from their authors but not much attention from anyone else. But as a result of this scrutiny, the post did get a lot of publicity—more even than the cute cat pictures I put up from time to time. So was that a plus or a minus? I’m still not sure.

This is, however, the world we live in. And compared to many Internet flaps, this one was small, contained, and in retrospect funny. I learned a useful lesson, if only that social media have an ethos of their own, and people don’t always react the way one might expect.

But most important, when you’re looking for a book or just want the fun of skimming other people’s lists of favorite books, you can’t do better than to browse the lists at https://shepherd.com. And if you’re an author interested in submitting a recommendation list of your own, you can reach out via https://forauthors.shepherd.com. Just make sure you count your Tudors first!

Bookshelf, Summer 2022

Long, slow summer days leave plenty of time for reading, and here is a sampling of the books that crowd my real and virtual bookshelves at present. Most of these will give rise to New Books Network interviews, although Dunnett may be considered research, and I’ll be featuring Andrea Penrose’s latest here on the blog in a few weeks. Some of these I’ve already finished, but the interviews are still in process; others will take longer. And of course, there are other titles I could list—not least the fifty-seven cases of the cat detective Max and his good friends Dooley, Harriet, and Brutus. So far, I’ve read just four of those, but they are like delightful palate cleansers between heftier reads. And what do summer days need more than reading that evokes love and laughter?

Dorothy Dunnett, Spring of the Ram (Vintage, 1987)
As you can see from this lineup, I read a lot of recent historical fiction—hard to avoid when one hosts a podcast called New Books in Historical Fiction. But once in a while, I have time for books that have, shall we say, had time to ripen on the vine. Having just re-read Dunnett’s The Ringed Castle—the fifth of her six-part Lymond Chronicles, set in sixteenth-century Russia and therefore contemporary with my own novels—I remembered that she had also written another series about Lymond’s merchant ancestor in the late fifteenth century.

In this second installment of the House of Niccolò series, Nicholas de Fleury travels to Trebizond and Caffa, near the khanate of Crimea. Dunnett was unsurpassed in the art of historical detail and her ability to create a sense of place; her research was pretty good too. I’m hoping to pick up tips for a later Songs of Steppe & Forest novel that will feature an Italian merchant as its hero. And if I like this one, I will also read book 6, Caprice and Rondo, where Nicholas visits Danzig and has to choose whether to risk becoming embroiled with the Tatars of Ukraine and Crimea.

Laurie R. King, Back to the Garden (Bantam, 2022)
I love King’s Mary Russell novels, so having the chance to talk with her again about this new stand-alone was an instant draw. And I’m so glad it worked out, because the book is a joy.  Stay tuned for news of an interview in September, when the novel releases to the public, but here is a snippet of what to expect.

Inspector Raquel Liang of the San Francisco Police Department Cold Cases Unit has reached a crossroads in her career as the SFPD’s psychological investigator. When news comes of old bones found under a concrete slab at the spiffy Gardener Estate in San Mateo County, Raquel is assigned to find out what happened. Interspersed with Raquel’s search for information, King reveals the events leading up to the murder in 1979, when—for reasons explained in the novel—the now pristine Gardener Estate hosted a hippie commune devoted to organic gardening, free love, and a steady supply of mind-altering drugs. As we move back and forth between past and present, the complex story of one exceedingly troubled family slowly emerges, and a series of twists keep the reader riveted to the page.

Ellen Lohuis, Echoes of Home
(Black Peony Press, 2022)
Sequel to The Horse Master’s Daughter and A Pilgrim’s Heart, also released in 2022, this novel follows the series heroine, Nordun, north from late thirteenth-century Tibet to the lands ruled by the Mongols. She travels to support her lover, Karma, who is attempting to discover the circumstances that led to his being abandoned as a child. 

Nordun has spent much of her life training to become a Buddhist nun, and she is still learning to accept that her spiritual journey may require her to adopt a different path—as the heir of her father’s horse farm and as Karma’s wife. Here the obvious draw for me is the Mongol element, since these are the ancestors of my Tatar characters. But the series itself is fascinating, with lots of insights into Buddhist philosophy, as well as the care and raising of horses. I will be hosting an interview with Elles Lohuis sometime in the fall.

Bárbara Mujica, Miss del Río (Graydon House, 2022)
This novel follows the career of Dolores del Río, one of the first Mexican actresses to become a star in both Hollywood and her home country. Add to that a dramatic tale of the fictional María Amparo (Mara)—Dolores’s hairdresser, confidante, and wry chronicler—and you have a novel that breaks new ground in interesting ways. Mujica follows the lives of both women as they interact, overlap, and at times separate throughout Dolores’s career. But Mara has a story of her own, a tale even more compelling than Dolores’s, and it pulls us along to a dramatic finale and a satisfying conclusion. My interview with Mujica will post in early October.

 

Andrea Penrose, Murder at the Serpentine Bridge (Kensington Books, 2022)
It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of Andrea Penrose’s Wrexford and Sloane series. I discovered them by chance through an Amazon recommendation and a well-timed promotion, and I’ve never looked back. I interviewed the author last year when Murder at the Botanic Gardens came out, and I would gladly interview her again—except that there’s only so much you can say about a mystery series without giving away spoilers. So instead I’ll post an excerpt and short summary here in a couple of weeks when the book releases.

Interview with Liza Perrat

Although I know that the 1960s, even the late 1960s, technically qualify as historical fiction (set fifty years or more before the time of writing), it still knocks me back a bit when I see events I remember from my own childhood showing up in a historical novel. Such is the case for the student protests in Paris in 1968, which form the backdrop to Liza Perrat’s latest novel, Lake of Echoes .

I should mention that although Liza and I have never met in person, we became acquainted on GoodReads a decade ago and bonded because we were both publishing with writers’ coops. Hers, Triskele Books, is now in abeyance; mine continues, albeit with a changing list of authors. I consider her a friend. But when I recommend her books—Lake of Echoes is the sixth I have read and enjoyed; she has written another that I have not yet read as well as a short story collection—I do so unreservedly, as a blogger/reviewer/fellow writer, without considerations of friendship. As you’ll see if you read on, this latest novel has elements of mystery and suspense. What you can’t see from Liza’s answers is that the book is fast-paced and twisty, utterly gripping, and emotionally wrenching. Do yourselves a favor, and give it a read. You won’t regret it!

Lake of Echoes starts off a new historical series for you. What drew you to this particular story?

After writing a French historical trilogy, then three Australian-set drama novels, I hankered to return to a backdrop of rural France, where I live. I’ve always loved history, but wanted this book, the first in a new French village series, to take place more recently—i.e., the 1960s—rather than much further back, as in The Bone Angel trilogy. The 1960s in France was a time of interesting social change, revolution, and feminism. Given that I like to write about strong female characters, this seemed like a good time period.

Also, I have always been fascinated by psychopaths and cult leaders and by child abduction. So I was able to explore these themes in Lake of Echoes.

The background to your novel, France in 1968–1969, is tense even without the specific events that you introduce. Why are people so worried about communists and similar social movements?

The French Communist Party peaked in strength around the end of World War II, and by the time the German Occupation ended in 1944, the party had become a powerful force in many parts of the country. The party supported the May 1968 student riots and strikes. So during the period my novel takes place, the party was still strong, and people were fearful of not only the communists but the Soviet Union and the Cold War.

Tell us about Léa, your protagonist although not your only point-of-view character. She’s not in a great place at the beginning of the story.

Léa is exhausted from running her lakeside inn—L’Auberge de Léa, which is busier than ever during this summer holiday period. Whilst she is happy to have her independence and a venture of her own, she is disappointed and frustrated at her husband’s lack of both physical and moral support. This situation leads to the couples’ increasing arguments.

Her husband, Bruno, has agreed to her managing a country inn, but he’s not exactly supportive. What’s his story?

Bruno comes from the old school of men who believe a wife’s place is in the home, and her sole purpose in life is to take care of her family. Like so many men at that time, he cannot conceive of a financially independent woman.

And how does their daughter come to be missing?

During the summer school holidays Juliette frequently overhears her parents arguing and runs off, taking refuge in the auberge grounds. But one final argument is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, so she flees again. Unfortunately, a storm is raging, and young Juliette loses her way.

Although we don’t know until the end who The Lion is, we meet him early on. Without giving away spoilers, what can you tell us about him, and why did you decide to include his point of view and that of his twin sister, Alice?

He’s a narcissist who suffered from the death of his mother when he was just eight years old. He believes he’s The Lion, king of the animals, and superior to other people. This leads to his warped, deluded ideals and projects. His role in the story, as well as that of his twin, Alice, is very important, so I wanted to give his point of view in the hope the reader might better understand him. I also wanted to portray why Alice is under his thumb and acts the way she does.

This book has just come out. Are you already working on something new?
 

Ideally, I would like to write several stories in this Sainte-Marie-du-Lac series. I am currently mulling over a few ideas for book 2, which has the working title Lake of Widows.
    
Thank you so much for answering my questions!

Thanks so much for inviting me onto your blog, C. P.

Liza Perrat is the author of the Bone Angel trilogy, which follows three women from one French family during the French Revolution, World War II, and the Great Plague of 1348. All three books can be read as stand-alones.  She has also written a second historical series set in 1960s Australia: The Silent Kookaburra, The Swooping Magpie, and The Lost Blackbird.

Find out more about her at https://lizaperrat.com, where you can sign up for her occasional newsletter about new book releases and receive a FREE copy of Friends & Other Strangers, her award-winning collection of Australian short stories. If you enjoy Liza’s books, follow her on Bookbub.

You can also learn more about The Bone Angel trilogy from my 2017 “Interview with Liza Perrat” and the Australian trilogy at “Changing Times.”

Medicine, Herb Lore, Witchcraft, and Race

It’s a curious coincidence—but only a coincidence—that this summer I happen to be featuring two widowed novel heroines named Maddie who practice medicine. The first, Anne Louise Bannon’s Maddie Wilcox, earned a medical degree in Boston (possible but difficult for a woman in the 1860s) before accepting what turned out to be an unhappy marriage to a friend of her father’s and accompanying her husband west to Los Angeles, then little more than a cow town, where her unsatisfactory husband fortunately met his end in short order. Widowhood frees this Maddie to make a life for herself as a winemaker—a big industry in LA in the 1870s, before the vineyards moved north—although she uses her professional qualifications to help those around her and supplement her income. Her doctoring skills also bring her into contact with suspicious deaths, which she then solves, as described in my New Books Network interview with her creator.

Adele Holmes’s Maddie Fairbanks—the main character in Holmes’s debut novel, Winter’s Reckoning —has a somewhat different history but faces similar issues. Like Maddie Wilcox, Maddie Fairbanks grew up in Boston and left that city to be with her husband in Jamesville, a small town in the Appalachian Mountains, but she married for love and regrets her husband’s death. Again like Maddie Wilcox, Mrs. Fairbanks faces prejudices against women and even more severe instances of racial discrimination, aimed not at herself but at people she is close to, because certain men of the town don’t approve of her belief in integration and equality. By 1917, when Holmes’s novel opens, the Ku Klux Klan is resurgent, making the costs of opposing segregation a matter, literally, of life and death.

Unlike Mrs. Wilcox, however, the medicine Maddie Fairbanks practices is herbal, the result of a long tradition of female healers in her family who sometimes suffered from persecution as witches because of their knowledge. As Adele Holmes and I discuss in our recent New Books Network interview, this family tradition, combined with the forty-year time gap and a different geographical location, intensifies the threat to Maddie Fairbanks when she chooses to confront Jamesville’s newest resident, a charismatic preacher of dubious qualifications who is determined to put Maddie in her place.

As ever, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction:

Madeline (Maddie) Fairbanks has created a satisfying life for herself in Jamesville since the death of her husband, Samuel, one of the town’s leading citizens. An herbalist from a long line of female healers, she provides medical care to local residents at all levels of society, traveling into the hills and from house to house with Renetta Morgan, her young assistant. Although Ren is black and Maddie white, the townsfolk accept their partnership, since the only alternative is a circuit-riding doctor who appears a few times a year. Race relations in Jamesville are tense, with restrictions on who can walk where and which door to the general store serves which type of customer, yet for the most part, Ren and Maddie manage to skirt the rules without drawing undue attention to themselves.

Then Carl Howard arrives in town. At first, he intends merely to pass through, but when he discovers that the town is waiting for a vicar who has not appeared on schedule, Carl sees an opening and announces that he is the reverend assigned to Jamesville’s Protestant church. On his first Sunday, he preaches a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon condemning outspoken, independent women and racial integration. Maddie opposes his point of view, and he fights back by declaring her interest in herbal medicine the equivalent of witchcraft. Before long, the two are at loggerheads, Ren is caught in the middle, and the Ku Klux Klan is riding the wave of Carl’s approval to threaten the people of Jamesville.

In Winter’s Reckoning, Adele Holmes has created an unflinching portrayal of how one narcissistic individual can wreak havoc on an entire community, fanning the flames of underlying conflicts until they explode into violence and hatred. But she also shows how the strength of family, friends, and a powerful, committed heroine can overcome such challenges—producing a novel as heart-warming as it is thought-provoking.

Interview with Jessica Ellicott

In a time when even e-mail has become old hat—replaced by texting, instant messaging, and ever-changing social media—the idea of mischief delivered several times a day through letters (or, for that matter, a postal service so functional that it can deliver several times a day) seems rather quaint.

But it’s supposed to be quaint. Jessica Ellicott’s Beryl and Edwina Mysteries follow the adventures of a pair of school friends, reunited years later in 1926. Beryl Helliwell needs housing in a hurry, and who better to provide it than her old school pal Edwina Davenport? Even though Beryl’s choice means abandoning world travel for life in a quiet English village, she soon discovers that more goes on under the surface of that village than anyone would suspect.

Six cases later, we get to Murder through the English Post , where a series of anonymous letters threatens to expose old tensions in the village and spark new ones. Jessica Ellicott was kind enough to answer my questions, so read on to find out more.

This is your sixth mystery featuring Beryl Helliwell and Edwina Davenport, as well as the adorable Crumpet. What inspired you to start this series?

I have always loved mysteries set in England, especially those set during the Golden Age of Detection. I also enjoy books about friendships between women. My best guess is that the series sprang into mind from those preferences in the magical way that such things do!

You have two leads. Tell us first about Beryl. Who is she, and what is she like as a personality?

Beryl is an American adventurer who has become a celebrity by her verve and panache. She hasn’t met a speed record she wouldn’t like to break, and she is up for most any sort of experience that does not involve tending children. She is an outgoing and exuberant soul who has little experience staying put.

Edwina’s background and personality are quite different. How would you describe her?

Edwina is the sort of person who helps make a community work. She is a genteel woman who knows just which words to say to soothe ruffled feathers or to inspire confidences. She is open to change so long as she can feel convinced of the merit of it.

And what brought these two together?   

Beryl and Edwina first met at Miss DuPont’s Finishing School for Young Ladies. They were reunited years later when Edwina faced financial difficulties and decided to advertise for a lodger. Fortunately for her, Beryl was looking for a room to let. They’ve been living and working together ever since.

No novel set in an English village would be complete without a dog. Tell us a bit about Crumpet and his role in the books.

Crumpet is Edwina’s faithful shadow. He loves to take her on long rambles throughout the countryside, which can offer her a convenient excuse for a bit of surveillance. While he is not central to the novels, he is a cheerful little fellow to include in the stories.

The current  mystery, as the title suggests (and it’s a great title, by the way), involves letter writing, which is almost a lost art these days. Set the situation up for us, please.

I am delighted that you like the title! I had not yet written a novel centering around a poison pen campaign and was eager to do so. This mystery involves a deluge of such letters, which expose secrets and point fingers at most of the residents of Walmsley Parva. Ultimately the ugly accusations and insinuations lead to murder.

Beryl and Edwina’s relationship with the local police officer, Constable Gibbs, seems to have improved quite a bit since Murder in an English Village. But the constable is an interesting character in her own right. Why cast a woman in this role, given that the series begins in the 1920s? And how does Constable Gibbs approach her job?

I was intrigued by the jobs women performed during World War I and how the end of that conflict impacted the trajectory of those careers. Women were generally forced out of positions as constables after the men came home, and I was interested in imagining the sort of woman who would not be set aside. Constable Gibbs dedicated herself to serving her tiny community with the same sort of professional rigor as an officer in a more populated locale. Her fellow villagers generally appreciate her performance, and besides that, given her forceful personality, no one thought it wise to ask her to vacate her position!

This novel just came out. Do you already have another in the works?

I am working on the seventh Beryl and Edwina mystery right now. In it the sleuths return to the finishing school where they first met. The school’s head, Miss DuPont, has asked for their help in discovering who is behind a series of incidents that appear intended to damage the school’s reputation and sabotage her business. Both of them are too well-mannered, thanks in part to Miss DuPont, to leave a lady in the lurch, so they cancel their plans and head directly for London.
    
Thank you so much for answering my questions!

Agatha award nominee Jessica Ellicott lives in northern New England, where she indulges her passion for all things British by writing the Beryl and Edwina Mysteries. She also writes mysteries under the names Jessica Estevao and Jessie Crockett. Her books have twice received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly as well as one from Library Journal. Her first novel won the Daphne du Maurier award for mystery. Find out more about her at https://jessicaellicott.com.

Falcons Caged and Free

Like Francesca Stanfill herself, I first encountered—at least in a way that caused me to sit up and take notice—Eleanor of Aquitaine in the stunning film portrayal by Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter (1968). Alternately conniving, coquettish, contemptuous, and loving, Hepburn held the eye every moment she was on screen, and only Peter O’Toole as her equally conspiratorial and estranged husband Henry II had a hope of standing up to her. Just writing this makes me want to watch the movie again.

The real Eleanor was every bit as complex, both admired and reviled in her own time. For reasons explained in our New Books Network interview,  Francesca Stanfill chose to approach her main subject by focusing on a fictional young woman in The Falcon’s Eyes . Read on to find out more.

As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction: 

Twelfth-century Europe was not a good time or place to be born female. Even queens had few rights, garnered little respect, and were tolerated largely for their ability to produce male heirs—preferably in quantity and without exhibiting any unfortunate qualities such as independence or intelligence. One notable exception was Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen of England thanks to her marriage (following a scandalous affair and divorce) to Henry II of England—although Eleanor spent many of her later years imprisoned by her no longer loving husband, who suspected her of conspiring with their sons against him.

In this engrossing novel, Eleanor appears first as a shining if distant example for Isabelle, a young countess whose impoverished family is delighted to marry her off to the wealthy if less distinguished Gerard de Meurtaigne. Isabelle initially welcomes the match, but her new husband soon shows a disturbing need for control over his dependents, including his wife. Budding friendships with her maid, her steward, and even the noble Lady Fastrada attract Gerard’s ire, leaving Isabelle yearning for the one sure escape available to medieval women: the convent. Specifically, she longs to join the convent at Fontevraud, which attracts both nuns like Lady Fastrada’s sister and well-endowed laywomen in search of a quiet refuge. But she never expects to find herself face-to-face with Eleanor of Aquitaine herself.

Francesca Stanfill’s multilayered story offers a rich and absorbing picture of medieval life at all levels, from the sorceress living in a hut in the woods to the falcons’ mews and the exigencies of travel. Her sure hand and light touch make this both a memorable and an enjoyable read.

Image: Anthony Frederick Sandys, Queen Eleanor (1858), public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Interview with Louise Hare

It is sad but true that Big Publishing has been slow to recognize that writers come in many diverse types. No doubt there are economic reasons, just as there are economic reasons to favor the tried-and-true (or at least the tried and assumed to be true) over books that push the boundaries in terms of setting, subject matter, or lead character.

Fortunately, the editors at Berkley didn’t take that approach when presented with Louise Hare’s Miss Aldridge Regrets . Her heroine, Lena Aldridge, is a jazz singer down on her luck. It’s London in the 1930s, and almost everyone is down on their luck because of the Great Depression, but Lena has additional troubles and challenges that send her off on a trans-Atlantic adventure. Too bad that she’s traveling with a murderer … 

Read on to find out more.

The main part of Miss Aldridge Regrets takes place on the Queen Mary in 1936. What drew you to this setting and this story?

I wanted to write something fun, and I love the glamour of travel in that period. I was thinking of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile and also, although set in a later period, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley. I was drawn to flawed characters and those wealthy families who crop up in those twentieth-century crime novels.

The book has such an interesting structure. The first person we meet is actually the murderer, who interjects diary entries throughout the story. Why open the book this way?

Mostly, it was to hook in the reader. I also wanted a dramatic opening! As a reader I always enjoy knowing more than the protagonist so I hope that other readers feel the same. Seeing a little bit of the backstage plotting allows you to see what’s happening when Lena’s not looking.

Describe your heroine, Lena Aldridge. What is she like, as a personality, and where is she in terms of her life and career when the novel begins?

Lena is a vibrant but flawed personality! When the novel begins, she’s in a mess. Her father recently died, her career as a singer/actress is going nowhere, and her married lover has just dumped her. She has nothing to lose when a stranger walks into her life and offers her the chance of a lifetime: a role in a Broadway musical and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary.

How does she come in contact with Charlie Bacon, and why does she decide to accept an offer that seems too good to be true?   

Charlie Bacon is the stranger who turns up at the London boarding house where she’s been living. She’s not stupid, but after the first murder, which takes place in the nightclub she works at, she decides it’s a good idea to get out of London for a while and the ticket, at least, is genuine.

Once on the boat, Charlie pulls some strings to have them assigned to a dining table with the Abernathy family. Who are they, and why does he do that?

The Abernathys are a very wealthy New York family, with lots of influence. They also have plenty of secrets! The initial plan for Charlie and Lena is to ingratiate themselves with the Abernathys because their sponsorship might open doors for her.

And what can you tell us about Franklin Parker, the second murder victim?

He’s the patriarch, a bit past his best after suffering from a stroke. Even though he’s wheelchair bound, his influence is still felt strongly by his daughter’s family, the Abernathys. In his younger days he was definitely a tyrant who used his power to get people to do his bidding.

Lena soon decides that the only person on the ship she can really trust is Will Goodman. Who is he, and how do he and Lena become friends?

Will is the leader of the band that plays in the fancy first-class nightclub on board the ship. Lena is biracial but passing as white. When she meets him, he’s the only person she’s met onboard who sees her for who she is. She’s drawn to him because with everyone else she has to put on an act; with him she can be herself.

This novel just came out. Do you already have another in the works?

I do! I’m currently writing a sequel to Miss Aldridge Regrets, which will be set in Harlem and will follow Lena’s adventures once she arrives in New York.
    
Thank you so much for answering my questions!

Louise Hare is the London-based author of This Lovely City and Miss Aldridge Regrets. Find out more about her and her books at http://louisehare.com.

Image: RMS Queen Mary public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The Wild, Wild West

If ever there was a perfect setting for murder mysteries, the ever-advancing US frontier in the nineteenth-century seems like that ideal location. Imagine a time when Los Angeles was a two-bit town surrounded by ranches and vineyards, when California was literally full of gold diggers, and even the train didn’t yet run directly from San Francisco to LA. Guns were ubiquitous, alcohol and gambling poorly regulated, and crime frequent. The problem wasn’t finding dead bodies but separating those that needed further investigation from the many where perpetrator and cause of death appeared all too obvious.

This is where Anne Louise Bannon has chosen to set her historical mystery series featuring Dr. Maddie Wilcox, the widowed owner of one such rancho and vineyard, whose unconventional profession is both welcome and eyebrow-raising in a town where “good” women remain literally and metaphorically confined within the boundaries of hearth and home. Maddie is also distinguished by her beliefs that charity demands her services and, more shocking still, that all men and women were created equal. And thanks to her forthright temperament, she has little compunction about sharing her views with the many other less enlightened folks whom she encounters along her path. As Anne Louise Bannon explains in our recent New Books Network interview, this combination of professional knowledge, place in society, and relative independence make Maddie the ideal go-to person when suspicious deaths are uncovered.

As ever, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Los Angeles in the 1870s is not the sprawling city we know today. A rapidly growing pueblo of perhaps 7,000 residents, it features vineyards and ranchos, worked by an army of transient men as likely to shoot one another up in bars as stagger home after a heavy night’s drinking. Although ethnically diverse, it is riven by racism, and its relatively small female population is relegated either to the home or to its brothels. When the son of Robert Gaines, one of the pueblo’s wealthier citizens, sets out to rob his sister of her lawful inheritance, he raises eyebrows, but even the town judge has to admit that the son’s behavior is entirely within the law.

In this simultaneously repressive and unbridled town, Maddie Wilcox stands out. As a widow who owns her dead husband’s vineyard and rancho, she has a degree of freedom that most women lack (although Maddie takes care not to defy convention too obviously). And as a licensed doctor, her profession takes her all over Los Angeles as she visits patients in need of care. So when Lavina Gaines, that young woman whose inheritance is now filling her brother’s pockets, dies of strangulation, Maddie sets out to seek justice for her friend. This is, after all, the third suspicious death in the pueblo since the court ruling against Lavina, and Maddie has been called in to assess the circumstances of all three.

This is the fourth Old Los Angeles mystery by Anne Louise Bannon, and readers may want to begin with the first, Death of the Zanjero, before working their way through the series. But even if you start here, you’ll enjoy plunging into Maddie Wilcox’s world. These are fast-moving, well-paced mysteries that often incorporate actual historical incidents and personages and open a vista on Los Angeles that we seldom see.

Images: Photograph of the Los Angeles Plaza in 1869, showing the terminus of the Zanja Madre, mentioned in Bannon’s novels; line drawing of Los Angeles ranchos in the 1840s—both public domain via Wikimedia Commons.