This year, in advance of the Edgar Awards, Mystery Writers of America is holding a virtual symposium.
I will be part of a panel with other nominees for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. I feel really honored to be talk about mystery novels with these amazing authors.
The event is free for anyone to attend. All you need to do is register in advance: https://bit.ly/MWAMaryHigginsClark
One of the best parts of writing The True Confessions of a London Spy was visiting London.
I wrote a somewhat sparse first draft of London Spy during the second half of 2018. And then, in October 2019, I had the opportunity of a lifetime. I got to visit London.
While this was largely a family vacation, I coopted parts of the trip for research. There were places in London that I knew were going to be in the book, and I had to visit those places, as well as museums and historic buildings that I knew would help me with my research. A few months later, as I wrote the second draft of the novel, I ended up needing a few new settings for key scenes. I ended up choosing places that had an impact on me during the London trip.
Because of all the other buildings, it is difficult to get a good picture of the Monument to the Great Fire.
Me, next to the bottom of the Monument. Picture by one of my children.
I knew that the Monument to the Great Fire would be important even before I wrote the first draft of the novel. So much of London—its architecture, its culture, its people—was influenced by the destructive 1666 fire. In 1814, when my book was set, this monument still acted as a symbol to the city—a symbol of what was lost, a symbol of tragedy, a symbol of change.
In the book, I needed Mary to be at a setting that was close the old (now no-longer existent) Customs House, and I chose the Monument because of the symbolism for London, and how this symbolism relates to her own story. I’ll avoid spoilers, but I will say:
Who we are is intrinsically connected to the difficult things that happen to us: these challenges and tragedies become interwoven into the fiber of our being. These moments transform us, and not always in a clear way. It’s not a net good or net bad change. But you can’t go to the past and swoop in and erase what happened, or you would have a completely different city, a completely different person.
Me, at the top of the Monument, contemplating whether Mary Bennet would actually choose to climb the 300+ steps to the top. I considered adding this climb to the second draft, but decided against it.
Descending the steps of the Monument to the Great Fire. Carrying 3-year-olds is a great workout, even when going down.
To see the individual captions, click the expand button on one of the photos.
Many of the stereotypical visuals that we associate with London did not exist in 1814: Big Ben, the Tower Bridge, and the Eye. Others did exist–like St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London–but didn’t end up in the book.
A lot of what was useful was being able to walk through the London streets and experience the flavor of the city. I spent a lot of time walking along the River Thames and picturing what it would have looked like in 1814, covered in ice.
One of my big priorities for the trip was visiting the Museum of London. As you go through the museum, you walk through different eras of London’s history. I may have spent an excess amount of time in the 1600-1900 section. There was clothing, fans, models of houses, and scientific devices. One of the exhibits was a reconstructed section of Victorian streets and shops. While that postdates The True Confessions of a London Spy by a few years, it wasn’t that different than it would’ve been in the Regency period.
The first draft of the novel was about half the length of the final novel. It had plenty of subplots, but no plot, and it was missing a number of key characters. As such, in the second draft I had to add a plot, a number of characters, and plenty of new chapters and scenes. Which meant that I also had the opportunity to incorporate additional London settings.
One of the things that struck me during our visit to London was how much Shakespeare was part of the fabric of the city.
A Shakespeare mural in London. Picture by my husband, Scott Cowley.
I’ve loved Shakespeare since my junior year of high school, when an amazing English teacher introduced me to Hamlet and we watched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead performed live. After my London trip, as I worked on building the character of Alys Knowles, I realized that I wanted Alys to love Shakespeare—this is her defining interest. During her life, Jane Austen read and attended Shakespeare plays, and she makes Shakespearean references in a number of her novels, so I thought it would be fitting.
Even though readers don’t meet the character of Alys Knowles in scene until the end of The True Confessions of a London Spy, Shakespeare became woven throughout the story, a lens through which to perceive relationships and interactions.
As I built up to the scene between Alys Knowles, Mary Bennet, and Fanny Cramer, I realized that I wanted the setting to have a connection to Shakespeare.
I considered placing the scene at Southwark Cathedral—this was the area where Shakespeare had lived, after all, it was near where the Globe had been located, and the cathedral predated Shakespeare by centuries.
One of my favorite parts of visiting Southwark Cathedral was seeing the stained glass window commemorating Shakespeare, but when I did some research, I realized that the stained glass had been added too late.
However, I liked the idea of using a religious edifice with a Shakespearean connection, because of the sense of immortality that gives. Which made me think of another place I had visited in London: Westminster Abbey.
Westminster Abbey is like walking among a who’s who of famous British dead people, and while Shakespeare was buried in Stratford-upon-Avon, there is a full-life marble statue of him in the Poets’ Corner. I realized that this was the public, safe spot that Alys Knowles would choose for a meeting.
While it is very possible to write a book without visiting the setting, and I have a number of research techniques that I’ve used when visiting a place is not an option, it truly was a remarkable experience to be able to visit London while writing a book set in London. London is one of my favorite cities, and I certainly plan to visit again.
Some of the most common questions I get about The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet and The True Confessions of a London Spy relate to the epigraphs at the start of each chapter:
In this post, I’m going to give readers the answers to each of these questions.
The first page of The True Confessions of a London Spy, with an epigraph from The Times
Almost all of the passages are real excerpts from real newspapers, with the exception of three headings in Secret Life and two headings in London Spy. In the upcoming third novel, The Lady’s Guide to Death and Deception, only one is from my own imagination, and one is from a letter instead of a newspaper.
I loved the short newspaper excerpts at the start of each chapter in Mary Robinette Kowal’s alternate history science fiction novel The Calculating Stars, and I thought that they would fit well in my own story.
The newspaper excerpts do a number of things:
A portion of the first article in The Times about the Custom House fire, printed on February 14, 1814
For each of the books, I waited until at least the third draft to start looking for newspaper headings. I needed the overall story to be mostly solidified, and I wanted the date each chapter occurred to be relatively fixed.
I used two newspaper subscriptions: a personal subscription to the British Newspaper Archives (which has digitized hundreds of newspapers), and a university subscription to The Times.
The tricky part is that computer programs have a hard time reading old newspapers, some of which were not well preserved. If you do a search in the British Newspaper Archives for the name Napoleon or Bonaparte in the year 1814, you’re lucky if the computer program finds 10% of the actual references. (It also doesn’t help that some of the newspapers wrote his name as Buonaparte to try to delegitimize his rule.). Most of the time instead of searching, I would download half a dozen different newspapers for a given day and read them.
Sometimes I had something very specific in mind that I was looking for—I was looking for a news story Bonaparte, crime, the stock exchange, the or the Viennese Waltz, or the weather. Yet most of the time I didn’t have a specific type of news in mind. Instead, I would read the articles with a sense of discovery, letting myself wander to columns or advertisements that drew my attention, and finding endless connections to my book. Sometimes I would find the perfect article quickly; other times I would choose three or four possibilities and then consider which really had the effect I wanted for the chapter, and fit the overall arc of the epigraphs.
I quickly got a good feel for different newspapers of the news, which ones were liberal or conservative, had the most interesting ads, included a regular fashion column, published poetry, or wrote the best opinion pieces. There was also a variety of different formats—while many of the newspapers only printed ads on the first page, others included articles from the start. Newspapers would reprint articles from other papers, and sometimes the news would be about events weeks or months in the past, depending on how long it took the information to reach England’s shores.
Sometimes I shifted the dates and timeline for a book because I really wanted to use as particular newspaper heading. And I definitely revised numerous details in the chapters because of things I learned through reading the newspapers—for example, in London Spy, Kitty’s reference to ice skating in Hyde Park came from a newspaper reference.
I have now read hundreds of newspapers from 1813, 1814, and 1815, and I feel like doing so has not only helped my books, but made me a more interesting person at parties—after all, who doesn’t want to hear 1814 trivia?
All this newspapering has influenced my readings of other Jane Austen texts.
I also did a guest post on My Favorite Bit, talking about some of my favorite newspaper excerpts.
Next week, on this blog, I’ll be posting about my trip to London and how that influenced the setting of The True Confessions of a London Spy. I’ll also be showing some of the actual dresses that were influences for Fanny’s designs. So come back to the blog, keep a watch on social media, or subscribe to my newsletter!
It has been a shocking, thrilling, exciting, and overwhelming week for me. I found out that The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet is up for three awards:
Screenshot from Mystery Writers of America’s list of nominees:
The Edgar Awards will be held on April 28th, 2022 in New York City. I haven’t been to New York since I was 14 years old—more than two decades ago—and I feel rather like the storytelling trope of “woman from small Midwestern town visits the big city.” Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen at the end of April.
The Whitney Awards Gala will be held on May 13th, 2022 in Provo, Utah. This is a setting I’m more familiar with—I attended Brigham Young University in Provo, and I have family members who live nearby. This is an award I have followed closely for years, and this year the finalists include a number of incredible authors who I have admired from afar (and an amazing friend who I met when I lived in Arizona).
I did not expect any of these nominations. I’m very proud of my novel, and I spent years of my life researching and writing and pouring my heart into it. I hoped it would find its place among readers, and I was sure that some people would connect with the story. But I had no expectations of any broader recognition.
I’ve already talked about my excitement and initial reactions on social media (learning about the Whitney Awards; learning about the Edgar Awards) so here I’ll share a few other reflections.
I had the idea for The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet in 2013. I did some initial research and planning, and then I let it stew and develop in my mind for years. In 2017, when I decided this story would be my next writing project, someone said to me, “A Jane Austen mystery novel about Mary Bennet. That sounds really niche. Do you think that will make it harder to find readers for it?”
It was a fair question, and I didn’t really know the answer, but I decided to write the story anyways.
The conclusion I’ve come to is that you should tell the story that you care about and are passionate about, even if it feels niche. If it’s something you find fascinating and compelling, you will be able to tell that story well, and there will be other people who are drawn to it.
After signing a book contract with my publisher, Tule, I worked with them to see what awards The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet might qualify for. As I was looking at the Edgar Awards on the Mystery Writers of America website, I realized that writing a Jane Austen-esque mystery novel meant my book perfectly qualified for the Mary Higgins Clark Award. They wanted stories in the tradition of Mary Higgins Clark, featuring a woman with good relationships who is drawn into a mystery and “solves her problem by her own courage and intelligence.” The story also had to have no onscreen violence and fit several other requirements. This too is a niche within crime/mystery/thriller writing, but it’s a beautiful one with a long tradition and very avid readers.
My publisher submitted my book for consideration, and while I was certain my book didn’t have a chance, clearly I was wrong.
As a teenager I memorized large portions of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, and I’m astounded that I will be attending an award ceremony named in his honor. As a teenager, I also devoured the works of Agatha Christie, Elizabeth Peters, and Mary Higgins Clark—women who wrote mysteries that captivated me and inspired me and hooked me on the mystery genre. To have my name, and the name of my book, labeled as a Mary Higgins Clark Award nominee, is astounding and humbling and honoring beyond belief.
It’s so important to find and embrace your community. This doesn’t have to be a big community. Back in 2009 or so I joined Livejournal and through that I began to find a writing community. This led to monthly meetups in Salt Lake with a group of other writers. These people became my first writing community, and are still dear friends, as are other writers I met on Livejournal.
In 2012 I moved to Arizona and joined ANWA, the American Night Writers Association. This was my first time participating in a monthly writing group, and not only did it make such a difference for my writing, but, once again, many of the writers I met are now some of my dearest friends and critique partners. ANWA is a part of a larger LDS writing community (authors who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and who write in many genres).
Participating in the LDS writing community brought awareness of the Storymakers community, which led me to following the Whitney Awards, a yearly award to recognize LDS writers. I’ve now been following the Whitney Awards for years, watching authors I admire and love be nominated and win these awards, including Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Traci Abramson, Charlie Holmberg, Julie Berry, and numerous others.
This is definitely a smaller writing community than Mystery Writers of America, but it’s one that means so much to me, and I am thrilled to be a part of it.
I found out about being a Whitney Award finalist on Tuesday, and about being a Mary Higgins Clark Award nominee on Wednesday. On Thursday morning I woke up and I was fairly certain that it was all a dream. I immediately checked the respective websites and discovered that it was not, in fact, a dream.
Not a dream. That knowledge still astounds me.
I am so thrilled to announce that The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet is now available as an audiobook.
The book was produced by Dreamscape, and it is narrated by the incredible, award-winning British actor and audiobook narrator Alison Larkin. One of Larkin’s books is on Audible’s top ten list of Best Author Narrated Audiobooks, and she’s also won an Audiofile Earphones award. Not only that, but she has narrated the complete novels of Jane Austen. She is literally the perfect person to narrate my book.
I am absolutely in love with the audiobook–it’s better than I could have ever imagined. Larkin completely captures each of the characters, whether it’s Mary speaking, Kitty, Mr. Collins, or a newspaper article.
You can listen to a sample of The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet audiobook on Soundcloud.
The book is available through Audible. If you don’t have an Audible account, you can get a copy through Libro FM, Chirp Books, Google Play, or Apple Books. Here are the full links:
If you’d like physical CDs of the audiobook, they are currently being printed. You can preorder them on Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes and Noble, etc.
If you listen to your book, I would love to hear your thoughts on it!
