A. Rae Dunlap’s The Resurrectionist is a heartfelt yet gruesome historical thriller following two body snatchers as they fall in love and evade Burke and Hare.
A. Rae Dunlap’s The Resurrectionist is a heartfelt yet gruesome historical thriller following two body snatchers as they fall in love and evade Burke and Hare.
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Behind the Book by

How many times a week do you put your life in the hands of a cook you don’t know at all? Perhaps too often to count, in our restaurant-obsessed culture. The idea of a malevolent cook hidden down in the depths of the kitchen has always struck me as a frightening one. 

As Grace, one of the narrators of A Taste for Nightshade, says: “Do you honestly know whose fingers touched your food? Do you give a moment’s attention to the mind that devised its method and ingredients?”

Grace’s adversary is a sinister cook who arrived in my head when my husband and I lived for nearly two years in New Zealand. When the Christchurch earthquake struck in 2011, my son Chris and his partner were working in the city and, though shocked and homeless, were thankfully unharmed. After a few frantic months, my husband and I joined them by way of a house-swap in a tiny town on the remote East Cape. By then I had news from my agent that my debut novel, An Appetite for Violets, was to be published, and she needed an idea for a second book. In my debut, I had written about a feisty, recipe-mad cook caught up in a murderous journey across 18th-century Europe. My research had led me to cross Europe, peruse recipe archives and cook historic food in archaic kitchens. Now I stared out across the wild Pacific and wondered what to write next.

I grew curious about what life must have been like on that isolated shore a few hundred years ago. Out across the Tasman Sea, the year 1788 had witnessed a remarkable experiment: the transplantation of Britons into the upside-down seasons and harsh emptiness of what we now call Australia. To clear overcrowded British prisons, 11 ships had sailed to Sydney Cove, carrying more than 1,000 convicts, marines and seamen. I was especially intrigued by Mary Broad, a Cornishwoman who escaped from Sydney’s prison colony by boat and eventually returned to England.

But what if a storm had sent the escapees’ boat straight to where I stood in New Zealand? My -adopted town had been settled by Maori, a warrior-like people with rich mythologies and customs. Early contacts between Maori and European visitors had varied from friendly trading to violent attacks by both sides. A small number of European women were captured by Maori, and these harrowing accounts of lives forever changed were another influence on A Taste for Nightshade.

Returning to England as a confidence trickster known as “Peg,” my devious cook whips up puddings, trifles and cakes for the sweetest of sweet tooths, but she secretly compiles remedies and aphrodisiacs to unleash a campaign of revenge. Wanting each chapter to be headed by an authentic recipe, I searched the archives until realization dawned that these would not have been written down. Instead I found remedies such as soporific Poppy Drops, with their hint of arcane knowledge, and Twilight Sleep, narcotic herbs once used by women in childbirth. On my travels I also sampled Maori dishes cooked in a hot-stone hangi pit, grubs, sea snails, crocodile and kangaroo. Though never quite poisoned, my over-enthusiasm for sea-fresh fish soon made me sick from some unknown toxin that no doubt lurked in crustacean shells. 

Nevertheless, most of A Taste for Nightshade is set in my homeland setting of the Yorkshire moors, the shops and assemblies of York and London’s Golden Square. Like many migrants I felt like two people: the new adaptor trying to learn and cope, and the old self haunted by thoughts of “home” far across the globe. Reflecting this split, I wrote alternate chapters in the voices of my two main characters and developed sympathies for both women. By the end of the novel, I struggled over who should prevail: sensitive but privileged Grace, or Peg, the eternal underdog trying to claw out a decent life by means of her wits.

In 2014 we were happy to return to England for the launch of An Appetite for Violets. When I started writing culinary mysteries, I had learned Georgian cookery with renowned food historian Ivan Day and was keen to return to his Cumbrian farm to learn advanced sugarwork. I have also tried historic re-enactment to familiarize myself with a tinderbox, write with a quill, pluck poultry and cook on a fire. Not all of my cookery has worked out—however long I boiled wheat frumenty, it was always as hard as pebbles!

Now I have become fascinated by tiny sugar ornaments, such as a doll-sized bed to be placed on a bride-cake and a tiny cradle and swaddled baby. Just as we might treasure the cake topper from a wedding or christening cake, these were powerfully symbolic foods, beautiful but also fragile, lifeless and ultimately edible.

I still love the poetry of historic recipes, but this time I wanted to tell a different, darker truth—about quackery, seduction and taboo foods, and the extraordinary trust we reveal when we eat food made by a stranger’s hand.

 

Martine Bailey combines 18th-century recipes, clever mystery and thrilling historical detail in A Taste for Nightshade. After young criminal Mary Jebb is condemned to seven years of transportation to Australia, she vows to seek revenge on Michael Croxon, the man who sent her there. When Mary returns to England, she is hired as a cook by Michael’s naïve wife, Grace, which sets into motion an entertaining game of double-dealings and fraud. Bailey lives in Cheshire, England.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

How many times a week do you put your life in the hands of a cook you don’t know at all? Perhaps too often to count, in our restaurant-obsessed culture. The idea of a malevolent cook hidden down in the depths of the kitchen has always struck me as a frightening one.
Behind the Book by

Beth Lewis drops readers into an unexpected and brutal world with The Wolf Road, the story of a girl who has just discovered that her savior, a man she calls her father, may be a serial killer. Lewis shares a look behind her debut.


When I pull back the curtain and actually think about where The Wolf Road came from, rather than what single moment inspired it, I realise writing it was pure escapism. It was a novel partly born of frustration at city life. There’s too many people, too much concrete and glass and noise, not enough trees and fresh air and wildlife. Elka’s attitude to and love of nature is mine, her mystification at certain peoples’ behaviour is also mine. Whenever I would put pen to paper, or more accurately, fingers to laptop, I would be transported to the forest and mountains, away from my too-small middle-floor London flat. It was wonderful and I hope is something readers can experience too.

When I dig deeper, pull the curtain back further, this frustration diminishes and I realise there are other reasons behind certain aspects of The Wolf Road. I grew up in the countryside. Two fields stood between me and the wild Cornish coast, the sheer cliffs and hidden coves, bristling with tales of smugglers and pirates. The weather bore down on us from all sides, and sometimes the squall lasted all night. It was a visceral, evocative place, and I’d never realised before how much it’d fed into my writing.

In the fields and along the coast stood two Second World War watchtowers. Both abandoned and given up to the elements. One tall and thin, three storeys of red brick with open sides on the top floor. The other squat, made of dark grey stone, walls two-foot thick and further away, on an area of moorland at the lip of a valley. We’d play in them, make them our dens, then flee when we saw the farmer coming. My brother and I would wander around these valleys and scrubland, populated by straggling sheep and too many rabbits, and we’d find dozens of shell casings, unexploded artillery rounds, ammo boxes, even an old, crumbling rifle. They were remnants of another world, a past of violence and gunshots and invading forces that I knew almost nothing about. At 10 years old, I had a vague sense of WWII, but it wasn’t a real event to me. It was what we learned in history class or were forced to hear about from grandparents. I knew it was Big and Bad and it left its mark everywhere, but it was never in the forefront of my mind. At that age, I never needed or wanted detailed and thorough explanations of the cause or its repercussions throughout the country. It didn’t affect me. It was done and dusted years ago. I just lived where a piece of it had happened.

The fact that this huge, world-changing event could happen and, eventually, be largely forgotten about, was fascinating to adult me and perfect story fodder. I figured the people alive generations down the line would not be all that interested in why their world was the way it was, instead, I thought, they’d be concerned with just living their lives. That’s really the origin of the post-apocalyptic element of The Wolf Road and the reason the Damn Stupid, Elka’s term for the decades-ago war that changed the world, is only touched upon. Even with scraps of history all around her, tales handed down from grandparent to parent to child, Elka’s concerns were of the “here, now” not the “back then,” as were mine at her age. She was worried about where her next meal would come from, where she would sleep that night, how she could reach the top of the ridge and there is a beautiful purity in those most simple of motivations.

 

Beth Lewis was raised in the wilds of Cornwall and split her childhood between books and the beach. She has traveled extensively throughout the world and has had close encounters with black bears, killer whales and great white sharks. She has been, at turns, a bank cashier, a fire performer and a juggler, and she is currently a managing editor at Titan Books in London. The Wolf Road is her first novel.

www.bethlewis.co.uk
Twitter: @bethklewis
Facebook: facebook.com/bethlewisauthor

Author photo credit Andrew Mason.


It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

Beth Lewis drops readers into an unexpected and brutal world with The Wolf Road, the story of a girl who has just discovered that her savior, a man she calls her father, may be a serial killer. Lewis shares a look behind her debut.

Behind the Book by

My grandfather was a teacher. My parents were both teachers. Their friends were all teachers, which meant that at home, their conversation revolved almost exclusively around teaching. For me, as a child, that meant a constant stream of school stories, drama and intrigue. It also meant that for many years it was more or less accepted that I, too, was destined for the teaching profession.

And when, age 9, I timidly dared to challenge this decree and suggest that I might try writing books instead, my mother showed me a room in our house, in which stood a wall of books—all by 19th-century French novelists, all having died in poverty, of syphilis and TB—after which she said to me: “And that’s why you need a Proper Job!”

And so I became a teacher. I liked it—I was good at it—and yet I kept on writing. During that time—over 15 years, most of which I spent teaching in a boys’ grammar school in Yorkshire—three of my books were published, though it was only after the unexpected success of Chocolat that I was able to give up teaching for good. And my mother’s advice served me well, for during those 15 years I was able to collect enough wild tales, dreadful scandals, quirky characters and everyday moments of drama to fill a hundred books.

I realized during those 15 years that a school is a factory of stories. Small communities so often are, and schools, with their volatile chemistry, cut off from the rest of the world by arcane rules and rituals, are a kind of microcosm, a mirror for the outside world. And it is from the events and experiences of those 15 years that I built my books—especially Gentlemen and Players, and my new book, Different Class: both set in St. Oswald’s, a fictional boys’ grammar school in the north of England. 

Knowing this, it must be tempting for readers to assume that the events depicted in my books are based on some kind of real-life event. The fact is that real life is nowhere near as plausible as fiction, at least as far as schools are concerned, and if I were to base my books on actual, real-life incidents encountered during my teaching career, the critics would scoff and refuse to believe that any such thing had happened. Having said that, schools are filled with stories; they’re communities in which tragedy and farce are only ever the turn of a page away. My teaching career saw plenty of both, and it is inevitable that certain stories, incidents and characters remained in my writer’s subconscious.

The writing process is very much tied up with memory. But St. Oswald’s is a construct, rather than a portrayal of any single place. It contains elements of schools (and universities) at which I was a pupil, as well as the schools in which I taught. Some minor incidents are based on things that really happened. The main plots, however, are mostly made-up or loosely based on current events.

As I was writing Different Class, I was also watching the unfolding of the Operation Yewtree police investigation, the results of which rocked [the U.K.] and implicated a number of TV and radio celebrities in a series of accusations of historical sex abuse. This scandal, with all its complexities, seemed to have disturbing parallels with the book I was writing. Again, I didn’t plan it this way. Ideas are like dandelion seeds, landing where the wind takes them. That year, the wind was full of tales of past and present abuses. Some of them must have made their way into the book I was writing: a story about the past, about memory and perception, about loyalty and childhood and guilt and of the dark side of friendship.

I find my “dark” books at the same time curiously satisfying to write, and emotionally and intellectually draining. But I believe that stories should contain equal proportions of light and shade in order to be meaningful. The monsters of our daily lives are not the demons and werewolves of fairy tale, but sexual predators, murderers and those who hide their malevolence behind an everyday façade. Stories enable us to face our monsters, and sometimes, learn to fight back. Facing them isn’t always easy, but maybe that’s the point.

During her 15 years as a teacher, Joanne Harris published three novels, including the bestselling Chocolat (1999), which was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Since then, she has written 15 more novels, two collections of short stories and three cookbooks. Her new novel of psychological suspense, Different Class, is set at an antiquated, failing prep school. A new headmaster arrives, bringing changes that seem more corporate than academic. While curmudgeonly Latin teacher Roy Straitley does his best to resist these transformations, a shadow from his past begins to stir—a boy who haunts his dreams, a sociopathic young outcast from 20 years before. Harris lives with her husband and daughter in Yorkshire, where she writes in a shed in her garden.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a review of Different Class.

 

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

My grandfather was a teacher. My parents were both teachers. Their friends were all teachers, which meant that at home, their conversation revolved almost exclusively around teaching. For me, as a child, that meant a constant stream of school stories, drama and intrigue. It also meant that for many years it was more or less accepted that I, too, was destined for the teaching profession.
Behind the Book by

It was July 16, 1991, and 17 November, the Greek terrorist group, had just attempted to assassinate the Turkish charge-d’affaires in a car bomb attack. I had driven through the very intersection where that attack took place with my family, 10 minutes before the fateful event took place. Despite varying our routes and times of departure every day on our way to work, we could easily have been the victims that morning.

“In Zero Day: China’s Cyber Wars . . . I was able to draw upon 30 years of experience as an Operations Officer in the CIA to portray true-to-life operational scenarios.”

Years before, in China, I had faced a very different sort of menace. The Chinese security services viewed foreigners, particularly American diplomats, with a great deal of mistrust, even animus.  Local citizens, the Public Security Bureau, and the counterintelligence professionals surveilled their targets constantly, monitoring their every move. From the moment we left our residences until we returned home in the evening, American diplomats were under some form of surveillance. Even the housekeepers we hired to clean our apartments were required to report on their employers’ contacts and patterns of activity.  It genuinely felt as though we were living in a goldfish bowl.

In the late 1990s, I was part of the NATO SFOR Stabilization Force in Bosnia Herzegovina. There were snipers in the hills between the embassy and my location at Camp Ilidza, SFOR Headquarters. There were mines and other unexploded ordinance strewn all over the country. A misstep here, or a wrong turn there, could spell disaster. But I had a job to do and I accepted those risks as part of my everyday life as a CIA officer deployed to a war zone.

These are just a few examples of the types of threats CIA personnel all over the world face day-in and day-out as we go about fulfilling our respective missions. We accept these risks because we view ourselves as the first line of defense against America’s enemies, foreign and domestic. We have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution, and we take that pledge seriously.

In Zero Day: China’s Cyber Wars, as well as my two previous novels, Cooper’s Revenge and Unit 400: The Assassins, I was able to draw upon 30 years of experience as an Operations Officer in the CIA to portray true-to-life operational scenarios imbued with the kind of rich contextual detail that only comes from actually having lived and worked in the cultures and geographic locales that I portray. It’s the difference between gazing down on a scene from 10,000 feet and being plunked down in the thick of it. One’s senses are sharpened from participating in the real life experience on the ground, and with any luck, the author is able to transport the reader to that same place with a measure of authenticity that enriches the reading experience like no other. As John le Carré famously said, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

The methods of espionage, known in the business as tradecraft, have evolved over the years, with the most modern technological advances typically cloaked in secrecy decades after they are added to the ‘toolbox,’ unless they are somehow compromised and are thrust into the public domain. But the age old techniques of running surveillance detection routes and conducting recruitment operations remain very much the same as when they first appeared in the early days of spy literature. These methods have been bountifully described in the espionage literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. This might lead one to conclude that anyone could write a convincing scene describing the lead-up to a clandestine meeting in a high-threat counterintelligence environment, or the planning that is involved in conducting a recruitment operation against a high priority foreign target.  

Would you trust your mechanic to do your heart surgery? I’m sure that anyone could read Gray’s Anatomy and come away with some sense of where to start, but you would not want that person wielding the scalpel.  There is a reason why people gravitate to experts in all things. It is because we intuitively understand that they are the best at what they do. That’s no less true when you are looking for an authentic voice in the books you read.

T.L. Williams ran clandestine human intelligence (HUMINT) operations in Asia and Europe for over 30 years as a CIA operative. Now retired from active duty and living in Florida, he has written three espionage thrillers, including his latest release, Zero Day: China’s Cyber Wars. The CIA was so concerned about Williams’ extensive knowledge of sensitive national security information that it prevented the book’s publication for months while vetting the manuscript for classified information. 

A CIA operative for more than 30 years, T.L. Williams uses his extensive experience in the intelligence community in his latest spy thriller, Zero Day.
Behind the Book by

The reason I started writing about the death penalty is that almost everyone gets it wrong. In the worlds of thrillers, television and movies, the people sentenced to death are either depraved killers, or else innocent and wrongly convicted. Police detectives and prosecutors risk their lives to bring conscienceless murderers to justice. Defense attorneys—young, brilliant, and well-funded—swoop in to save their guiltless clients at the last minute from the death chamber.

The reality is that inmates on death row are about as diverse as people outside prison, and their stories are much more nuanced than a simple up-or-down of guilt or innocence. The death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the worst of the worst, but the processes by which it is imposed sweep up people as young as 18 and as old as their grandparents, people who have long criminal histories and people with no criminal background at all, defendants who committed horrible crimes and others who were minor accomplices—as well as those who were innocent and convicted by a miscarriage of justice. A disproportionate number of them are black or Hispanic, and many are mentally ill or developmentally disabled.  

"The reality is that inmates on death row are about as diverse as people outside prison, and their stories are much more nuanced than a simple up-or-down of guilt or innocence."

Another fact is that yes, there are heroic figures among criminal defense attorneys, but there are a lot of people on death row, and the heroes can't rescue them all. So most of us are more or less footsoldiers in the ongoing war, and we do the best we can for our clients with the skills and resources we have and hope that what we can do will be enough. And a lot of us are not young; capital defense is a complex practice which requires skills that take time and work to develop, and for many lawyers who enter into it, it becomes a calling and a lifetime commitment.  

Real capital cases aren't resolved quickly or dramatically. The years of legal proceedings between conviction and the end of a case are a long march that can take decades; and the reward at the end may not be exoneration, but just a reduction of your client's sentence from death to life in prison. Once a defendant is convicted, attempts to overturn that conviction are obstructed and slowed by laws that create obstacles to revisiting cases the system considers resolved. The courts are often stingy about giving attorneys money to reinvestigate old crimes, so that evidence that might establish a defendant's innocence may take a long time to find, if it is ever found at all.

In Two Lost Boys, I tried to be faithful to these realities in describing my character Janet Moodie's experiences as the lawyer for a death-sentenced defendant. Her client's case, when she signs on to it, is over a decade old. Even though I compressed Janet's part into a shorter-than-usual timeline, her work on the case has gone on for nearly two years by the time the novel ends.  

When I try to understand the impulses that moved me, as a young lawyer, to criminal defense and then capital work, I keep coming back to one of my favorite childhood fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen. It is a story of rescue, of a young girl, Gerda, who makes a long and hazardous northward journey to find the place where the Snow Queen has taken her friend Kai, and, once she has found her way into the Snow Queen's ice palace, solves a puzzle of ice pieces that frees Kai from the Snow Queen's spell. Two Lost Boys incorporates elements of that story, but infused with the ambivalence of adult experience.

Janet makes her home in a place I love, the rugged coast of northern Sonoma County, California, where the isolation and natural beauty help her heal after her husband's suicide. Her life up there is a bit of wishful thinking for a part of me that would like to settle there myself some day. The highway to the north coast, a twisting two-lane road with steep hills on one side and the Pacific stretching to the western horizon on the other, is beautiful and dangerous, but in the book it is a part of Janet's journey toward peace.

L.F. Robertson is a defense attorney in California who has handled death penalty appeals for two decades. She is the co-author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Unsolved Mysteries, and her short stories have been included in the anthologies My Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes: the Hidden Years and Sherlock Holmes: The American Years. Her first novel, Two Lost Boys, is the story of a recently widowed attorney who struggles to represent a mentally challenged man who's been sentenced to death in a murder case.

Attorney L.F. Robertson, who has worked on death penalty cases for two decades, explains why she was inspired to write a thriller about a death row case.
Behind the Book by

In 1977, I was 10 years old and on holiday with my parents in an uninspiring (and no doubt rain-soaked) coastal town in North Wales. We were walking down the high street when we passed a bookshop. Something in the window caught my eye and I stopped, refusing to move a step further.

As I stared at the book on display—the posthumously published autobiography of Agatha Christie—I became possessed by a sense of longing that took me by surprise.

At that point I don’t think I had read any Christie, but my grandmother was an avid fan, and as a precocious aspiring writer, I wanted to know all about the Queen of Crime, particularly the secrets of her success (she is still the bestselling novelist of all time).

My parents dragged me away from the shop, refusing to purchase the book for me—they thought it was too “grown-up”—yet my interest in Christie only increased, and I soon devoured book after book. At 12, when my English teacher asked his students to write an extended piece of fiction, I handed in a 46-page story entitled “The German Mystery,” which I still have. From its opening lines it’s not hard to spot the source of my inspiration:

“Dr Bessner’s frail hand reached inside the ebony box and took out a white cyanide pill. He placed it in his dry mouth and swallowed with a loud gulp. There was a small whimper, his body jumped and fell back in his black leather car seat, gave a last gasp and he was dead.”

Throughout my teenage and adult life I kept returning to Christie’s books, especially when I was writing the biographies of dark subjects such as Patricia Highsmith, Sylvia Plath and Alexander McQueen. Yet it wasn’t until I moved to Devon, the location of Christie’s Greenway estate (now operated by the National Trust and open to the public), that I started to think about writing a novel about her.

I had always been fascinated by the 11 days in December 1926 when Christie disappeared—she abandoned her car in Surrey, leaving behind her fur coat and driving license. The police suspected that she might have been murdered by her husband, Archie, who wanted to leave her for his mistress, Nancy Neele. The search for clues involved 15,000 volunteers, airplanes and sniffer dogs, and the sensational story even made the front page of the New York Times. Christie—who was discovered at a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, after checking in under the name Mrs. Neele—always maintained that she had been suffering from amnesia, but there were many elements of that claim that simply did not add up. My imagination started to work, and using police and newspaper reports as a framework, I came up with a crime story, an alternative history about why she disappeared.

We meet Christie when she is at her most vulnerable: Her mother had died earlier in 1926, her writing is not going well, and she has just discovered that her husband wants to leave her for another woman. In London to visit her literary agent, she is waiting for a tube when she feels someone push her into the path of the oncoming train. At the last minute, a doctor pulls her back to safety but the medic, Dr. Patrick Kurs, turns out to be a blackmailer with a sadistic streak.

At the end of the first chapter Kurs outlines his sinister plan: He wants Christie to kill on his behalf. “You, Mrs. Christie, are going to commit a murder,” he says to her. “But before then, you are going to disappear.” We know she disappeared in real life, but the question my novel poses is this: Christie wrote about murder, but would she—could she—ever commit one herself?

 

Andrew Wilson is a British journalist and the author of four biographies (including the award-winning Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith), several other nonfiction books and a novel, The Lying Tongue. A Talent for Murder, Wilson’s fictional take on the real-life 1926 disappearance of Agatha Christie, will be released in the U.S. on July 11.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Andrew Wilson, a devoted and lifelong fan of Agatha Christie, takes us through the process of writing his mystery about the famed author's real-life disappearance.
Behind the Book by

“Downton Abbey” expert Jessica Fellowes (she’s the author of five official companion books) turns an eye to a different headline-making family in her historical debut, The Mitford Murders. Based on the true story of the murder of Florence Nightingale Shore (the goddaughter of the famous war nurse), The Mitford Murders follows Louisa Cannon, the newest young employee at the Mitford’s manor, as she navigates their high-profile world. But when Louisa and 16-year-old Nancy Mitford find themselves at the crime scene of Florence’s murder, their lives begin to spiral out of control.

In a Behind the Book feature, Fellowes dishes on exactly what drew her to the drama-plagued Mitford sisters, the influence “Downton Abbey” had on her story and more.


As a young girl, seeing my uncle Julian was always a treat. He was my father’s younger brother and, until I was 16, unmarried and without a child of his own. We used to go on holidays to Majorca and the South of France together to stay with friends of his who had children, but mostly we enjoyed each other’s company. Julian was never less than a fount of amusing stories, but the ones I enjoyed the most were the anecdotes about our family that he had collected, mostly from his own elderly aunts. My grandfather was born in 1912 and though he was an only child, his father had several sisters and it was these women who told Julian of a dying Edwardian age, with all its extraordinary snobberies and customs, as well as of the challenges and tragedies of a life lived during and after World War I.

It was these stories that we later saw in “Downton Abbey,” which Julian created and wrote for six seasons. I was lucky enough to become a part of the “Downton” world when I wrote the official companion books, which told not only the story of how the series was made but also sought to explain something of the historical context that inspired so many of the characters and plots. I had grown up working for newspapers as well as the iconic Country Life magazine, which taught me a lot about life inside the great houses of Britain. And all the while, Julian and I had continued to talk and share stories, leading me to the writers of the between-the-wars period: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, W. Somerset Maugham and Nancy Mitford.

When I had finished the five “Downton Abbey” books, I knew I wanted to write a novel next and I knew I wanted it to be set in the 1920s—a time that I am both familiar with and endlessly fascinated by. By an extraordinary piece of luck, I was approached by editor Ed Wood at Little, Brown, who asked me if I would consider writing a series of Golden Age-style mysteries featuring the Mitford sisters.

Of course, I knew their legend well—six sisters who grew up in Oxfordshire, England, who each came of age during the 1920s and 1930s. Between them, they represent everything that was compelling, glamorous, political and even appalling about that time: Nancy the satirical novelist; Pamela the countrywoman; Diana the fascist; Unity, who fell in love with Hitler; Decca the communist; and Debo, who became the Duchess of Devonshire and ran one of Britain’s grandest houses. We had the idea for a series, with each book focusing on one of the sisters at a key moment in their lives. I knew I wanted a pair of fictional protagonists who could appear in every book, taking us in and out of every room both upstairs and downstairs, so I created Louisa Cannon, a nursery maid for the Mitfords, and her (sort-of) love interest, policeman Guy Sullivan.

A few weeks after I had started planning the first novel, Ed sent me a newspaper article online about a murder in January 1920 that had never been solved. Could this, he wondered, be our first crime? This was the tragic murder of Florence Nightingale Shore. She was brave, having worked in both the Boer War and World War I, yet only two months after she was demobilized, she was attacked on a train and left for dead.

When I realized that there was a possible connection between Florence and the Mitfords, I knew this was the perfect crime. The inquest records had been destroyed but there were numerous newspaper reports of what had been, at the time, a famous and shocking murder. I was also able to trace details of her will, find photographs of her lodgings and look up the details of her family ancestry as well as those of her close relatives and friends. All of which led me closer to what, I believe, is a likely solution to her terrible death. Alongside Guy’s investigations is always the bright and irascible Nancy, whose predilection for story-telling and close observations are of invaluable help to him. Louisa, too, becomes drawn into the crime and discovers her own talent for problem-solving. For the next book, Bright Young Dead, I’m writing about Pamela Mitford and another real-life criminal. But it’s the smaller details of the world then that continue to fascinate me, and I hope that I can get that across to the readers in a way that feels real and relevant. That, for me, is the privilege of my work.

“Downton Abbey” expert Jessica Fellowes (the author of five official companion books) turns an eye to a different headline-making family in her historical debut, The Mitford Murders. In a Behind the Book feature, Fellowes dishes on exactly what drew her to the drama-plagued Mitford sisters, the influence “Downton Abbey” had on her story and more.

Behind the Book by

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! This month, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.


They say that writers write about the things that preoccupy them. Our personal interests, our politics, our take on the individuals in our lives. It all has a way of sliding into the story we are writing whether or not that is what we intend. And isn’t that a good and necessary thing? How boring novels would be if there wasn’t some mystery to the making of them. Some alchemy that takes place inside the author’s head that even the author isn’t fully privy to.

So what is the recipe? What proportion of the whole is intellectual effort, and what proportion organic? How much of the leavening energy comes with that first seed? I don’t know. I doubt if even the most analytical writer has that degree of insight – so much of writing comes from instinct, from the love of the story as it is spun through your fingers. But it is always possible to point to certain specific elements, to a scene or a character that we have drawn from life.

Much of The Ruin is inspired by real life, and I’d like to tell you about one experience in particular. About something odd that happened when I was very young.

I was born in Ireland in 1976. It was pre-Celtic Tiger era, there wasn’t a lot of money, and if there had ever been an Irish upper class it had largely retreated, leaving behind little more than remnants of ruined country houses, traces of formal gardens gone to seed. My brothers and sisters and I (there were seven of us) had a happy, ragamuffin childhood. Our parents were loving and hard-working and much too busy to worry about how we entertained ourselves. Every day after school we would dump our schoolbags in the hall and make for the front door, the only limit placed on us that we should return by the time it got dark.

Our parents’ lack of vigilance was largely rewarded. Our games were innocent—hours spent playing rounders in the small park at the top of the street. We played using a steel baseball bat someone’s brother had brought back from America, and tennis balls when we could find them. We played tip-the-can and 40-40-all-free. Our home was one of many in a housing estate located at the edges of suburbia. We were surrounded on three sides by agricultural land, and the fields were a popular playground for the more adventurous among us. The land was a patchwork quilt of small fields, hedgerows, copses and ruined houses. Heaven for a child with an overly active imagination. A narrow river ran through the farmland about four fields down from the edge of our estate. We swam in it once or twice—more for the dare of it than anything else. The river could be crossed easily by walking over the rocks at the top of a small waterfall, but we stayed on our side of the river. Until the day the odd thing happened.

It was sunny the day we crossed the river, though it was a pallid sort of sun that left a chill in the air. We were aimless explorers, making for whatever landmark caught our eye. We found an abandoned farmyard. It had a cobblestone courtyard, some outbuildings with intact walls and roofs. There was something a little bit creepy about the quietness of the place, but we were explorers, so we pressed on. We fell silent as we made our way out into a driveway long gone to seed. Tree branches met and twined overhead, blocking the meagre sun. Halfway down the drive there was a left turn and we took it. It brought us to a house, and the house was in ruins. Part of the roof had collapsed. There were no windows, not even broken glass, as someone had removed the window frames. The doorway gaped dark and open.

We stood stock-still. No one took a step further, there was no teasing, no daring. There was something about that house. Something dangerous, as if it had the power to reach out and grab us, pull us into its depths. We were frozen in place, immobilised by a creeping sense of dread, a sense that we had stumbled into something adult, something dark and perhaps, just perhaps, the door was about to close behind us. The silence was broken by a sudden, loud bang, like a single beat on a base drum, though the reverberations were less perfect, less sonorous. The noise worked like a starter’s pistol on our feet. Every one of us turned and ran back the way we came.

The odd thing was waiting for us in the courtyard. The gateway to the fields beyond, which had been empty when we passed through minutes before, now held a single, rusting barrel. The barrel was upside down, dropped there probably, the sound of it falling into place almost certainly that loud drumming bang we had heard. Running down the left-hand side of the barrel was a fist-sized drop of flesh-coloured, gloopy fluid, as if someone had put five kilos of steak into a smoothie-maker, then upended it on the barrel before the smoothie was quite ready. A fleshy, glistening globule. There was no one there that we could see. We were caught, the four of us, in the middle of the cobbled courtyard. Beyond the barrel lay green fields, the river and home. Behind us lay the dark driveway and the ruined house. The bravest of us made her decision. She ran for the barrel and we ran with her. With every step I took I could feel a phantom hand reach for my shoulder. Surely whoever put the barrel there had plans for four trespassing children.

We ran until our chests burned and our legs stumbled. We splashed our way across the river, and into the safe, familiar fields beyond, but we kept running until we made it up and over the final fence and onto the tarmacadam roads of the estate.

That evening, at our usual noisy family dinner, I told everyone what had happened. My sisters were fighting over a borrowed and broken set of colouring pencils. My brother didn’t look up from his book. I tried again, tried to put weight on my words. I saw my parents glance at each other across the kitchen, a crease of amusement about my father’s eyes, and I knew then that the same thing was happening at three other dinner tables that evening. No one would believe us. Maybe that was understandable. It was an odd sort of story, after all. The kind of thing a child might make up. A story without an ending. The kind of story that sounds exaggerated, built it up with a bit of colour, a bit of extra bite. A fleshy globule.

I’ve thought about what parts of that experience fed the writing of The Ruin. It might be the scary old house. That dark and lonely driveway. Certainly, all of those elements are found in the book. And one more thing, perhaps. The part where the children tried to tell, and no one listened.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Ruin.

Photo credit Julia Dunin

Much of The Ruin is inspired by real life, and I’d like to tell you about one experience in particular. About something odd that happened when I was very young.

Behind the Book by

When I was five months pregnant with my second son, I spent most of my days interviewing special operations officers. It was fall 2011, a Navy SEAL team had killed Osama bin Laden that May, and in August a helicopter crash had resulted in the greatest loss of life in special operations forces history.

I was writing a novel about a mother whose son goes missing in Afghanistan, and while a lot of people far more knowledgeable than I were also trying to understand what had happened in May and in August—whether May was linked to August, would this “forever war” ever end—I was interested in something different. I wanted to know what it felt like inside the mind of a special operator.

When I met members of the community, I didn’t ask about the bin Laden raid, or any raid. I asked about how their bonds with mothers and children and spouses survived under the radical pressures of multiple deployments. I tried to understand the concept of risking your life to save someone. And then I remember thinking that if you ask any mother whether there is someone she’s willing to die for, of course she’ll say yes.

Two months after that book, Eleven Days, was published, I was at the beach with a former CIA case officer, a family friend who had read the novel and asked me to lunch to talk about it. I remember he used the phrase “shiny things” that day. He said something like, “Everyone in Washington is chasing shiny things.” He explained how in the context of the Agency, a “shiny thing” is a plum recruit. He explained this with a level of cynicism, implying (I thought) that in a way a shiny thing is a chimera. I had the sense that while his own experiences had been broad and exceptional, there was something else, something existential, in his view of life in that line of work. Maybe he was getting at the idea that hunting shiny things could wear a person down. It was our talk that convinced me to try and write about the CIA. Of course the intelligence world, like the world of special operations, is defined by an ethos of discretion. If you meet someone from these worlds who wants to tell you all their stories, chances are, they’re not going to have the best stories. Chances are, the people with the finest stories are the people you will never meet. But I tried.

As I did with Eleven Days, I started by placing a woman at the center of my narrative. In Red, White, Blue, my main character is not a mother who has lost her son but a daughter who has lost her father. As I talked to more and more people currently or formerly in the intelligence world, it struck me that the fundamental skill required isn’t firing fancy weapons or jumping out of airplanes or mastering the art of surveillance. It’s far more human and complex. It’s empathy. You can teach someone how to load an M4 far easier than you can teach them to be empathetic. Empathy is the ability to look at another person and understand why they do what they do. Sometimes the other person is an asset you want to recruit. Sometimes it’s a foreign officer who wants to recruit you. And sometimes it’s someone about to commit an unimaginable crime. The radical end of empathy, I came to believe, is understanding why someone would do that. And then perhaps convincing them not to.

Chances are, the people with the finest stories are the people you will never meet. But I tried.

The training, the Farm, the art of recruitment, dead drops, brush passes, spotting and assessing and developing an asset—I learned all these things. Anyone can. Only then I concluded that, while not exactly dull, these things are not exactly new either. I concluded that telling a reader how to recruit as asset was far less compelling than trying to make a metaphor of things spies do and then, as John le Carré put it, “mirror the big world in the little world of spies.” As I did with special operators, I set out to understand the emotional make-up of someone willing to assume not one but several new identities, in doing so risking the loss of whomever they were underneath it all. Someone I interviewed told me about lining up mobile phones on a table, each one linked to a distinct, separate identity he inhabited at the time. I thought, a tableful of phones is not a life. I wrote that line into the novel.

What is and is not a life is, I think, what my family friend was really trying to describe that day at the beach. I think he was, if gently, even without meaning to, cautioning me away from glamorizing “tradecraft,” away from the typical tropes of the genre. He was trying to encourage me to look at the people, as he felt I had done with the prior novel. Maybe he thought I could illuminate another community that had endured unimaginable loss over more than almost two decades of perpetual combat. After he read a galley of Red, White, Blue, he wrote me a note. Its simplicity made me smile, as I now know spies rarely write anything down. “You did it,” he said.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Red, White, Blue.

Screenwriter and author Lea Carpenter was a founding editor of Zoetrope magazine and is currently a contributing editor for Esquire. Her first novel, Eleven Days (2013), is an affecting portrayal of maternal love during a time of war and was inspired by her father’s career in Army intelligence during World War II. Her latest novel, Red, White, Blue, is a haunting modern-day spy story that plumbs the depths of American espionage through the story of a daughter grappling with the truth of her late father’s secret life. Carpenter lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Author photo by Michael Lionstar.

When I was five months pregnant with my second son, I spent most of my days interviewing special operations officers. It was fall 2011, a Navy SEAL team had killed Osama bin Laden that May, and in August a helicopter crash had resulted in the greatest loss of life in special operations forces history.

Behind the Book by

On November 11, 1918, world leaders signed the armistice ending World War I and its four years of gruesome conflict. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the armistice, Anna Lee Huber shares a look behind the latest installment of her delightful Verity Kent historical mystery series, Treacherous Is the Night.


My fascination with World War I began because it seemed to be the war that always got skimmed over in History class. Not on purpose, I’m sure, but when the school year was winding down, and our class had only just begun to crack our books open to the 20th century, the First World War tended to get reduced to a blip in time in order to get to the Second. It was like fast-forwarding to the end of a movie, ignoring the plot twists that had gotten the characters to that point in the first place.

But I wanted to know about the people. I wanted to understand how the war had affected the hundreds of thousands of people who had fought and died and struggled through the first modern worldwide conflict. It seemed to me they deserved more than to have their lives reduced to such sparse facts as the assassination of an archduke and a short description of trench warfare in a Western Civilization class.

The truth is, it’s all too easy to reduce an era in history to just a set of numbers and dates and a few names and places. To ignore the humanity of millions of individuals. But when I look at history, I see people. I see their hopes and dreams. I see their struggles and losses. Sometimes they triumph, sometimes they fail, but always there is the wishing, the wanting, the striving.

But World War I crushed so much of that. It extinguished the hope, or reduced it to a bare flicker. It left its survivors wandering and lost, searching and sometimes failing to find something to give their lives meaning. Or at least to distract them from the pain for just a little while. It’s no wonder they’re called the Lost Generation, and not just because of the unimaginable number of casualties stolen from their ranks.

I began writing my Verity Kent series to try to better understand this generation, to explore who they were and what it would have been like to live through such a horrendous conflict. To have survived, and yet not know how to move on and rebuild their lives, or even dare to hope again. But rather than a soldier, I wanted to do so from the perspective a woman, one who had witnessed both sides. A woman who had become a young war bride just days before her beloved husband left to fight on the Western Front, leaving her to sit anxiously at home waiting for him. But also a woman who had decided to do her bit, unwittingly finding a position in military intelligence—one of the few agencies that would hire a married woman—and discovering she was good at it. A woman who could move about London as one of the thousands of wives carrying on while their husbands fought, but also found herself undertaking increasingly dangerous missions at home, near the front and even within the German-occupied territories.

I wanted to grapple with what it was like for the thousands of women employed in various capacities by the British intelligence agencies to serve their country in secret, and then when the war was over to be demobilized and told to never speak of it again. To be so tremendously useful and then suddenly not. Not to mention the impact this had on their relationships with their families, friends and spouses. What was it like to be reunited with a man you had been largely separated from for four long years, a man who had been through the hellish experience of trench warfare? How did such a marriage survive when they’d both been forbidden to speak of their years of service, to share what had become such an essential part of who they were?

On the centennial of the armistice for World War I, which will take place on November 11th at 11 a.m.—the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month—I’ll be thinking of all those men and women. I’ll be thinking of those who died, of those who served, of those whose contributions and sacrifices were barely acknowledged. But most of all I’ll be thinking of those who survived, but whose lives were irreparably impacted—the returning soldiers, the wives and fiancés, the children. I hope you’ll join me in observing two minutes of silence to honor all those lives, as well as our veterans.

My fascination with World War I began because it seemed to be the war that always got skimmed over in History class. Not on purpose, I’m sure, but when the school year was winding down, and our class had only just begun to crack our books open to the 20th century, the First World War tended to get reduced to a blip in time in order to get to the Second. It was like fast-forwarding to the end of a movie, ignoring the plot twists that had gotten the characters to that point in the first place.

Behind the Book by

At the beginning of Fran Dorricott’s debut mystery, a little girl goes missing during a solar eclipse. Sixteen years later, her older sister, Cassie, has returned home, another eclipse is on the way, and another local girl has gone missing. After the Eclipse follows Cassie as she tries to uncover the truth and come to terms with her grief and guilt over the fate of her sister. One wouldn’t automatically assume that inspiration for a devastating crime novel could be found in that safest of places: a bookstore. But Dorricott’s experience as a bookseller provided the key to finishing her first draft, inspiration for her favorite clue and more.


I’ve been a writer for longer than I’ve been a bookseller—but I’ve wanted to be both for as long as I can remember. My local bookshop, which is the one where I now work, was my first memory of seeing a bookshop that looked exactly how I thought a bookshop should look: It’s got three floors, a spiral staircase and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It’s stunning. And the benefits of working in such a beautiful place aren’t just the aesthetics.

I’d actually been working at Waterstones for less than a month when I wrote the bulk of After the Eclipse. I’d had the idea earlier that year, drafted a little and gotten myself stuck. Then, I had a chance conversation with a customer. She mentioned that she loved reading books that had strong echoes of the past, like those by Elly Griffiths and Kate Ellis—and I agreed. It was then that I realized: I’d been going about my drafting the wrong way, and I knew exactly how to fix it. I finished the rest of my first draft in less than a month.

The amazing benefits of working in a bookshop boil down to three main points: the books, the staff and the customers. Of course, the books must always come first. Honestly, just being around so many books every day makes me a better writer. Reading good books makes me hungry for more—and it drives me to work harder, take bigger risks, be the writer I want to see on those shelves. It’s amazing how being surrounded by thousands of books every day makes me love writing more. People always assume it would feel daunting, but actually it’s inspiring! All those people succeeded in writing a book that somebody loved, even if that somebody wasn’t me. I would find the space on the crime bookshelves in the store where my own name would sit: right between Eva Dolan and Louise Doughty. It was such a boost to realize I could one day do that, too! Plus, one of the biggest perks of being a bookseller is getting sent early review copies of upcoming releases. Checking the post is literally one of the highlights of my working days.

One of the best things about working with books is working with book lovers. It’s a prerequisite for the job! We eat, sleep and breathe books. Probably about half of my conversations on any given day are about books—and not just surface conversations either. Aside from other writers, booksellers are perhaps the best equipped to have a really fun chat with about the complexities of books we’ve loved: plot, character, pacing, etc. It’s really useful to see those things through a professional reader’s eyes, especially a reader who is selling those books on the ground, who knows what’s selling well and what isn’t, and what their regular customers love or hate. One of my colleagues accidentally helped me to come up with one of my favourite pieces of evidence in After the Eclipse—the mermaid mood ring—when we were discussing our favourite clues.

Which brings me to the customers. I love the customers! It goes without saying that booksellers talk about books a lot among themselves. But what about customers? I’ve had some of the best recommendations for books to try from my customers. A lot of my regulars are more than happy to give me wonderful new authors to try, and they often encourage me to read books I never would normally think to choose. One of my favorite recommendations last year was This Is Going To Hurt by Adam Kay. Not crime at all—not even close! But one of my regulars, who works for the NHS, said they had enjoyed it and was so enthusiastic that I couldn’t not read it. And I loved it.

Plus, customers are often an accidentally brilliant source of inspiration. From the lovely to the wacky to the downright rude, getting to talk to so many different kinds of people every day gives me insight into the world at large. I won’t say I’ve ever murdered one of my customers in one of my books, but I have drawn characteristics from more than just a few. Cassie’s mentor Henry was inspired in part by one of my favorite customers from my first months in the shop—a man in his 70s who walked a few miles into town every week to visit the bookshop and talk about what he was reading.

So beware next time you buy a book. You never know what your bookseller is thinking about. But don’t be afraid to recommend them your latest read—you might make a reading buddy for life.

One wouldn’t automatically assume that inspiration for a devastating crime novel could be found in that safest of places: a bookstore. But Fran Dorricott’s experience as a bookseller provided the key to finishing her first draft, inspiration for her favorite clue and more.

Behind the Book by

Elizabeth Fremantle’s historical thriller The Poison Bed fictionalizes the story of King James’s favorite, Robert Carr, and the poisoning scandal in which he became embroiled. The term favorite could mean anything from a close friendship to an intimate sexual relationship, and as The Poison Bed dances back and forth between Robert’s rise to power and his imprisonment in the Tower of London along with his wife, the beguiling Frances Howard, the author explores the complicated, murky ways in which homoerotic desires and relationships were expressed in early modern England. Here, Fremantle discusses the difficulty of defining a historical figure’s sexuality, and what that meant for her characterization of James and Robert.


Rubens’ glorious ceiling in the Whitehall Banqueting House, one of the great artistic legacies of the Stuart era, depicts the heaven-bound figure of King James I surrounded by the flickering wings and dimpled flesh of a host of cherubs. Not long ago, I sat beneath it in the company of several towering drag queens trussed into a corsets, heels, bum-rolls and a good deal of flesh-toned hosiery, while one announced in a booming voice, “Yes, darlings—our new king is a bit of a queen!” The evening was a gender-bending performance, part of the Historic Royal Palaces LGBT events program, telling the story of James I and his male favorites.

The gay community has long claimed James I as their royal poster boy, and why not? He was, after all, well known for having had a series of beautiful male favorites, including one whose heart he kept in a box after his death. Given there was no term for homosexuality at the time (only the illegal practice of sodomy), we cannot judge James’s behavior by the standards of today. And it is important to remember that when it comes to the private behaviors of kings, much evidence is based on little more than slander and supposition.

We do know, however, that James was not thought to have had any liaisons with women prior to his marriage. Indeed, it was rumoured that his close relationship at an early age with an older male cousin, Esmé Stuart, was a physical one, and Stuart was forced to leave Scotland because his influence over the young king was becoming problematic. To add to this, once there was an heir, a spare and a daughter all in good health, James chose to live separately from his wife from 1607 onwards. While this in itself was unremarkable, it was unusual in that he didn’t subsequently take a mistress, as was expected behaviour for a king at the time. James certainly preferred the company of men and there is a good deal of anecdotal evidence suggesting he actively disliked women, although many deem his marriage to have been a happy one.

In my mind, some of the most compelling evidence to suggest James had deep and passionate feelings for the men in his life is the abundance of surviving letters between him and his favorites. These texts are strikingly intimate. Take this, for example, to George Villiers:

I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you than live a sorrowful widow’s life without you. And so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that ye may ever be a comfort to your dear dad and husband.

                                  James R.

Two men, close friends, who call each other husband and wife, offers little ambiguity from our modern perspective. We would assume them gay on that evidence alone. But, as many historians have pointed out, the language of friendship between men in early modern England tended to be uninhibited and overblown with terms like “love” thrown about liberally. Masculinity was differently defined at the time—one only has to consider the clothes men wore at the Stuart court: festoons of pearls and lace and pom-poms on their shoes the size of cabbages, none of which would seem out of place on the main stage of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” So, the letters, though compelling, are not sufficient evidence to prove James’s sexual preference.

The recent discovery of a secret tunnel at Apethorpe House, one of James’s favorite residences, between his and George Villiers’s bedchambers caused a flurry of supposition. But this too has a plausible and mundane explanation. Corridors between bedchambers were commonplace in palaces of the period. Privacy, as we recognise it, didn’t exist in such buildings, which were designed to house a court of hundreds. The bedchamber was as much a place for political activities as for sexual. Corridors such as this would have allowed access to the king’s close circle, including the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, of which Villiers was one. All early modern kings had Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, young courtiers who had close access to the monarch and were required to sleep in his room on a rota, as a security measure.

The role of the historian is to seek evidence, making for a sticky problem when it comes to the intimate sexual practices of a monarch, when the only proof of sex was a bloody sheet or a pregnancy. The fact that James fathered children is irrefutable evidence that he had sexual relations with his wife. Beyond that we have only hearsay to go on. There was much contemporary gossip about James, whose pacifist policies with the old enemy Spain were deemed “feminine” as compared with those of his predecessor Elizabeth. Sir Walter Raleigh is said to have joked that, “King Elizabeth had been succeeded by ‘Queen James.’” This pointed more to James’s style of foreign policy, though we cannot discount the possibility that its subtext was aimed at the new King’s rumored sexual proclivities. After all, his preference for the company of beautiful men was no secret.

Three men held particularly significant roles in James’s life, both public and personal: the aforementioned Esmé Stuart, Duke of Lennox; George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; and Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset. All were privileged in much the same way as a royal mistress, the latter two rising from obscurity to greatness by way of the king’s favor. It is a matter of historical record that courtiers schemed to place beautiful young men in the King’s path in the hope of creating some advantage out of it, in much the same way pretty daughters were dangled under Henry VIII’s nose. It was a weakness to exploit. Huge political capital could be gained to those in league with a royal favorite. James bestowed honours and promoted these men to the highest offices, giving them excessive political responsibilities and power, though they were not always suited for such roles.

In the case of Robert Carr, James’ goodwill was stretched almost to breaking point. Carr became mixed up in a poisoning plot, for which he and his wife were convicted, which forms the central plot of my novel The Poison Bed. There is reason to believe that James’ actions around the trial indicated his fear that Carr, were he to be condemned, might have revealed personal details about his private habits in his scaffold speech. One could suppose that James had something to hide.

I have read more than one indignant tirade directed against those who choose to accept James as homosexual, stating that to do so casts negative aspersions, or “outs” a man who is no longer able to speak for himself. This pre-supposes that to call someone homosexual is an insult and that to be homosexual, and in this I include bisexual, is degrading. This, I refuse to accept. I do however understand historians’ reluctance to take a firm stance on James’ sexuality. Stuart historian Dr. Samantha Smith is clear as to why:

“There is no denying that James I was fond of his favorites, who happened to be young men, but we cannot say for certain if this attraction resulted in sexual relations. There is no actual evidence to support such claims and the act of sodomy was in fact illegal and deemed a sin in 17th century England and James was a man who feared sin.”

The assumption that male homosexuality can be defined by penetration precludes other sexual practices between men that don’t involve sodomy. It was sodomy, specifically, that was the legal and religious infringement at the time. The law had nothing to say about most other intimate acts. It is possible to imagine, then, even considering his fear of sin, that James may have indulged in practices we might nowadays consider homosexual but not in the act of sodomy itself.

Seventeenth century historian Rebecca Rideal comes at the question from a subtly different angle, focusing on the romantic aspect of love. We know, she says, “he had romantic relationships with men which is evidenced by his correspondence. Whether this was sexual, we will never know, but it was romantic nonetheless.” It is clear she accepts the letters as proper proof of an intimacy that escaped the bounds of ordinary friendship, and I tend to agree with her.

For the purposes of telling the story of Robert Carr’s relationship to James in The Poison Bed, I have made the assumption of both men’s bisexuality. This may be audacious and certainly might put some noses out of joint. But fiction is the mode by which we can explore the liminal space between the lines of the historical record. It allows us to imagine what happened behind closed doors and weave a plausible version of the past from what we know and what we can never know.

Elizabeth Fremantle discusses the difficulty of defining a historical figure’s sexuality, and what that meant for her characterization of James I and his favorite, Robert Carr, in her historical thriller The Poison Bed.

Behind the Book by

In Leslie Karst’s fourth Sally Solari mystery, Murder from Scratch, the restaurateur stumbles onto her latest case after taking in her blind cousin, Evelyn, who is convinced that her mother was murdered. Sally and Evelyn’s investigation takes them into the fast-paced, high-stakes world of pop-up restaurants and celebrity chefs, giving Karst the opportunity to feature even more delicious recipes. Here, she shares six cookbooks she finds herself returning to over and over again.


Okay, that title may sound a tad dramatic, especially since—being more of a seat-of-the-pants style cook—I don’t even use recipes all that much. I do, however, love to read cookbooks and to study the techniques described by the experts who’ve come up with or compiled the recipes therein. Moreover, several cookbooks have had a huge impact on me from a young age, opening my eyes to a world of food and cooking far beyond the TV dinners and Jello salads so prevalent during my 1960s childhood.

So here are some of the cookbooks that have most influenced me over the years, listed in the order in which they came into my life.


The New York Times Cookbook by Craig Claiborne
I remember first noticing this big blue tome on our kitchen bookshelf when I was about eight or nine years old. The book was all the rage in the early ’60s, with its recipes for hip, “new” dishes such as rumaki and curried chicken and Eggs à la Russe. It harkens back to the days when the New York Times was the king of newspapers and people enjoyed their food with no qualms about butter or salt or excess calories.

But what was different about the book for me was that both my parents cooked from it. This was a big deal because my dad rarely ventured into the kitchen save to spread butter on saltines, slice a few stalks of celery and mix up a glass of chocolate milk for a light lunch watching the Saturday afternoon Dodgers game on TV. Dad only made two recipes from the book, however: Steak Diane and potato pancakes, which he would make on the same night, to be accompanied by a salad prepared by my mom. I thought it was heaven.


Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck
This selection is somewhat disingenuous, as I actually first came to the book by way of Julia Child’s television show, “The French Chef,” during which this big, charismatic gal with a funny voice would demonstrate how to make many of the recipes from her newly published cookbook.

My mother adored the show, and she and I would sit on my parents’ bed in the afternoon and watch it together, Mom with a pen and notepad in hand to take down any recipes that struck her fancy. Later, she would try them out for the grand dinner parties my folks used to throw back in the day when that was a thing. (I miss those fabulous “days of the dinner party” but do my best to keep the tradition alive in my own home.)

Years later, I finally bought my own copy of the cookbook and have tried many of its wonderful recipes, including the to-die-for coq au vin and the labor-intensive-but-well-worth-the-effort cassoulet (which Ms. Child poetically translates into English as “baked beans”).


The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer
My mother presented me with a copy of this book when I went away to college. For some years it was the only cookbook I owned, as it contains pretty much everything you need to know to be a quite passable cook—from how to stuff, truss and carve a chicken, to coring artichokes, to whisking up the perfect white sauce.

I once cited The Joy of Cooking as a “learned culinary treatise” in a brief I penned during my years as a research and appellate attorney. I needed to show how much was in the “three glasses of wine” our defendant client had testified that he consumed, and Mrs. Rombauer’s declaration that “an average serving of wine” was the genteel amount of three and a half ounces was highly beneficial to our case.


Sauces: Classical and Contemporary Sauce Making by James Peterson
This was one of my textbooks during culinary arts school, and through it, I discovered the wonders of the five “mother sauces” (béchamel, hollandaise, velouté, espagnole, tomato), from which all the secondary, or “small,” sauces are derived in classical French cooking. In addition, the book instructs about stocks, liasons, butter sauces, vinaigrettes, Asian sauces and even dessert sauces.

If you’re as much of a sauce junkie as I am, then you need to get this book now.


The Classic Pasta Cookbook by Giuliano Hazan
After I’d completed the first book in my Sally Solari culinary mystery series, Dying for a Taste, I realized I should really learn how to make my own fresh pasta if I was going to write books about a restaurant-owning Italian-American family.

This was the cookbook that taught me how. Giuliano is the son of the renowned Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan, so he should know his pasta—and boy does he ever.

What’s especially wonderful about this book is all its terrific photographs, which not only give step-by-step tutorials on how to mix, roll and cut your pasta but also provide mouth-watering illustrations of what you have to look forward to once you add the luscious sauces and toppings (recipes for which are also included) to your handmade noodles.


Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking by Madhur Jaffrey
Several years ago, I resolved to teach myself to cook Indian food, since it’s one of my favorite cuisines. The first book I bought in my journey toward unwrapping the secrets of curries, dal, raita and chutney was this one, by the food writer I consider to be the queen of Indian cookery. This book was an offshoot of a TV show Madhur Jaffrey did for the BBC and makes for a perfect primer for learning about the cuisine.

A couple of years later, I was brainstorming ideas for Murder from Scratch and hit upon the idea of featuring a pop-up restaurant serving the kind of Southeast Asian dishes you’d buy on the street from a food vendor—which of course gave me reason to further my culinary education regarding Indian food. Many of the dishes featured in Murder from Scratch were inspired by Jaffrey’s book, including the butter chicken, lamb curry, dal, samosas and naan.

Murder from Scratch author Leslie Karst shares six cookbooks she finds herself returning to over and over again.

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