A Small Thing for Yolanda – Jan Edwards reveals the background to her new novella!
Being asked to pinpoint where any story comes from can be tricky but in the case of A Small Thing for Yolanda there was a fairly easy trail to follow. I was first approached to write A Small Thing for Yolanda some four or five years ago. Or perhaps I should be more precise to say I was commissioned to write a novella for an anthology based around French mythology. Now, I’ve read a good many myths and legends from around the world and I didn’t think it would be that hard, but finding myths that were specifically French was surprisingly difficult.
A great many of our folk tales are common to Europe and Scandinavia. The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen made a good job of seeing that the most well-known are imprinted on us at an early age. Once you stray from the Mabinogion and roots of King Arthur, that most British of legends, the romantic legends of the Round Table are inextricably linked with French myth. Even the tales of Robin Hood are not entirely English in the form that we best know them.
Bearing all that in mind, I cast the net for French mythology a little wider and found a famous modern legend that came up time and again. Laetitia Toureaux was a real person. She was an Italian immigrant living in Paris between the wars. On 16th May 1937 she was found dead in a Paris Métro carriage. She entered an empty first-class compartment at Porte de Charenton and when the doors opened 90 seconds later, at the Porte Dorée stop, she was found alone and dying, with a knife embedded deep in her chest.
On the surface, it is not the product of a crime writer’s imagination but a genuine case of murder where no murderer could have been at hand, in what seemed to be the ultimate locked-door mystery. By day Laetitia was the widow of a well-to-do young Frenchman who, snubbed by his snobbish family, was forced to work in a factory. By night she was said variously to be a bar hostess in the Montmartre district; that she was planted in the club district to spy on the notorious La Cagoule for the French security services; that she worked for a detective agency; that she spied for the Italians and made many clandestine trips to their embassy.
Any or all of those things may well have some basis in fact. The investigation into her death did point toward La Cagoule, yet, at the outset of WW2, the case was set aside as a ‘crime passionnel’. And after the war ended the case file was ‘sealed’ by the French authorities until the year 2038. It’s a conspiracy theorist’s joy, but to me, wearing my folk-horror hat, the ‘real’ reasons were blindingly obvious. Her end was far less prosaic than a gangland execution.
The anthology in which A Small Thing for Yolanda first appeared has been and gone, as these books do, and it seemed a shame not to throw the story out to a wider audience. So here it is as a standalone Alchemy Press novella chap book. I adore the cover – which came courtesy of Alchemy’s talented editor and in-house designer Peter Coleborn. It’s available in both paper and digi-formats from all good sources.
A second major publication that I should mention, this time with my editor’s hat on, is the Alchemy Press Book of Horrors 2. A fabulous anthology of folk, strange and weird horror. It has a superb cast (including one that readers of this blog will recognise): Gail-Nina Anderson, Sarah Ash, Debbie Bennett, Mike Chinn, Paul Finch, Sharon Gosling, John Grant, John Howard, Tim Jeffreys, Eyglo Karlsdottir, Nancy Kilpatrick, Garry Kilworth, Samantha Lee, Pauline Morgan, Thana Niveau, John Llewellyn Probert and Peter Sutton. I know as editor it’s my duty to blow trumpets about our publications but I can honestly, hand on heart, say that this is well worth a read.
Moving forward, I also have the third in my award-winning WW2 vintage crime series coming out this summer. I have always had a soft spot for vintage crime and I have been having a lot of fun writing this series. The only drawback is my habit of falling down the research rabbit holes and getting lost in all those fascinating facts. Nothing supernatural is involved in Bunch’s world but there is a lot of intrigue and mystery. I was lured into crime fiction through writing Sherlock Holmes short stories for various anthologies, the next of which will be ‘The Case of the Missing Sister’ in The Book of Extraordinary Sherlock Holmes Stories coming from Mango Publishing in December 2020.
Listed Dead, Bunch Courtney Investigation #3, is set in November 1940. Following Claude Naysmith’s fatal car crash on the borders of the Courtney family’s estate on the Sussex Downs, Bunch Courtney can hardly avoid being drawn into events. When another corpse is found, with a list of names that includes Claude, Bunch and her cohort DCI William Wright throw their combined efforts into the investigation before any more of people wind up on the mortuary slab.
But fear not, I have not abandoned fantasy fiction. I have a story titled ‘The Devil’s Piss Pot’ appearing this autumn in The Mammoth Book of Folk Horror. And if the title of my story doesn’t intrigue you, I don’t know what will.
You can find more about my writing at https://janedwardsblog.wordpress.com/
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