A special guest

One of the great things about my writing  career is the number of interesting and delightful peope I've met as a result of going to conferences, fesrtivals, or teaching,  

As many of you know, I teach every year at Caerleon Writers' Holiday in July and this is where I met the lovely Janet Laurence who writes crime fiction.    We've also met up at also at Fishguard Writing Weekends  where once she even joined my course and became a student for the weekend.

Janet has written crime for years - and always with an interesting twist - a cook  or  a long ago artist as an investigator.  Now she has  a brand new  - and intriguing  - book  out this week. It's a historical  crime called   Deadly Inheritance  and to celebrate the publication date of this book, Janet kindly agreed to do a small interview with me to tell you more about herself and her writing.

She's also offering a give away of a signed copy of her brand new book  - all you have to do is to talk about your favourite  crime novel character in the comments section and your name will go into the prize draw.    The contest for the prize draw will stay open till Friday when Janet will pick a winner.

Welcome Janet!

Can you tell us a bit about yourself – when did you start writing and what made you choose crime as your genre?

I began writing as a child. I could think of nothing more fun than making up stories. As I grew older, I started on novels.  But I never seemed to get beyond chapter three, before I had a better idea for a story. After failing too many times, I decided to master the short story before writing a full length novel. Bad decision! I am not a natural short story writer. I think most writers have a natural length that they enjoy working with. Also, the short story is a very demanding and difficult form. Mastering it? How ridiculous is that? Meanwhile I had a job writing press releases and then I landed a cookery column in the Daily Telegraph. I’d been running  courses in a too-large house we’d bought in Somerset and writing about food seemed a natural development. When Conrad Black bought the Telegraph, there was an almost clean sweep of the feature writers and I lost my column.

This, I thought, was the time to give my fiction ambitions a kick start so I enrolled on a creative writing course. I arrived intending to be a romantic novelist, I finished it with the first page and several passages for my first crime novel, A DEEPE COFFYN. In it I tied together my love of detective fiction with my foodie knowledge and created a cook as my protagonist. 

Who are your favourite authors to read – in the crime genre and in other genres you enjoy?

My mother was a great reader of crime fiction and used to get me to choose books for her from our local library. I read and loved the Golden Age authors: Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh  and Margery Allingham, who could all ally devilishly clever plots with characters I really cared about in stories I devoured and went back to time and again. Then there was Raymond Chandler for the magic of his language and the power of his characters (his plots didn’t always make a great deal of sense). I read today’s crime writers widely, often as a judge for one of the Dagger Awards. It would be invidious to pick out individual writers but the ones I enjoy the most are those whose books have all the assets of good novels but with the added attraction of a well crafted crime plot, red herrings, clues and all. I have to confess I didn’t enjoy Agatha Christie until I’d become a crime writer myself, then I started to appreciate her incredible cunning with red herrings and ability to bury clues.  

I also, of course, read outside the crime genre.

Growing up I loved Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, particularly for their insights into human nature and their irony; Trollope for his sheer story telling; Evelyn Waugh for his biting wit; Wodehouse for his much gentler humour and way with words (I heard David Cannadine on the radio not so long ago describing how Wodehouse and Chandler - who both went to Dulwich College public school -  share the same wordsmith ability. He ended his talk with a sample paragraph and challenged the audience to guess which author had written it. Quite impossible unless you could remember which book it came from) .

I also loved romance and historical novels. Georgette Heyer has been a constant favourite, I reread most of her historicals every few years or so, though I have never been able to connect with her crime novels.  Elizabeth Gouge was another favourite and Margaret Irwin. It would be lovely to see their books resurrected – perhaps as e-books. Elizabeth Gouge knows how to inject enchantment and Margaret Irwin to bring the past alive. There are  many more authors who have brought me so much pleasure. I don’t suppose Iris Murdoch would have been pleased to have her novels classed as romance, but I enjoyed the emotional journeys of her characters. And I learned so much about emotion as a driving force in one’s writing from you, Kate. 

What I need from a novel, any novel, is a good story and characters who grab me emotionally.

My reading is always diverse and voracious. I love settling down with a book that hooks me, be it romance, crime, chic-lit, or any other genre or sub-genre. The essentials are  genuine characters I can believe in, a good plot and a satisfying ending. I just wish I knew why it is so difficult to write such books! You have that gift, Kate,  and I learned so much from your wonderful course. I still want to be a romantic novelist. I love Mills & Boon books and the first novel I ever finished was to have been the start of my M & B career. It was also the end of it! But you have inspired me to continue with the romantic novel I started for your Fishguard course. For the moment it’s had to go on the back burner while I write the second in my new historical mystery series but it’s not forgotten.

You are the author of the Darina Lisle series of books – can you tell us a bit about your cookery writer sleuth. How did you come up with the idea? And will there be any more Darina Lisle books?

I’ve already mentioned the creative writing course I attended where I came up with the idea of a cookery sleuth, thus marrying my love of crime novels with my interest in food. I saw the books as a series from the start, each one to be set in a different area of the food world. That first book in the Darina Lisle series was set in the annual conference of the Society of Historical Gastronomes (and I still don’t understand why there isn’t such an association). Other have been set in a  restaurant, a health farm, a  specialist food company, a television food programme plus others. The last book was set on a cruise going up the Norwegian coast and ended with Darina pregnant. That baby would be ten years old by now! Will there be any more? I’m working at getting the back list into e-book format. Maybe if they sell, I’ll think about another one. I am still very fond of Darina and her policeman husband.

Your other series features the Italian  artist Canaletto – what made you choose him to feature in a set of mystery stories?

I wanted to write an historical mystery. The middle of the eighteenth century attracted me, it was so vital, with London emerging into the capitalist age.  At first I thought Boswell might be a suitable protagonist. As a lawyer from Scotland, he belonged to the middle classes but had the entrée to aristocratic circles and was perfectly happy to mix with low life. But I reread his LONDON JOURNAL, and realised he had laid himself bare there, leaving me with nothing to add. Then my husband and I went to an exhibition in Birmingham on Canaletto and his influence on English painters. As we went into the lecture hall for a talk, there, on a large screen, was Canaletto’s painting of London seen through an arch of scaffolding,  Westminster Bridge was in the process of being built. Hanging down from the scaffolding was a bucket. As the lecture progressed, I realised I had found my protagonist, a perfect observer of all levels of society and someone who was almost a blank canvas. And whilst I listened, I couldn’t help wondering what was in that bucket! So I wrote CANALETTO AND THE CASE OF WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, which was followed by two more.

We first met at Caerleon Writers’ Holiday, where you have run courses on Writing Crime Fiction – and again at Fishguard Writing Weekends – what do you think is the value of events like these (apart from the opportunity to drink wine and talk!)? I suppose I’m really asking can creative writing actually be taught.

I’ve already admitted that my first published novel was conceived at a creative writing course. And at Fishguard Weekend I attended your marvellous course on romantic writing, so obviously I think they can have a great deal to offer. However, I think attendees have to have a certain talent to start with.  I think creative writing courses can hone technique, open doors into previously unexplored ways of telling stories, offer guidance on particular genres, and make writers realise they have undeveloped gifts.

Finally, can you tell us more about your new historical crime novel DEADLY INHERITANCE. I’d love to know more about your heroine Ursula Grandison – and do you plan to create a whole new series of mysteries with her at their centre?

My first agent, now retired and a very good friend, read DEADLY INHERITANCE as soon as I had finished it and said, ‘It’s Midsomer Murders comes to Downton Abbey’!  And it’s true that the background is very similar: 1903 with an American heiress married to an English Earl, a stately home and family difficulties. After that, the similarities are not many. My protagonist, Ursula Grandison is American but she is not the Countess. She arrives at Mountstanton as companion to Belle Seldon, the Countess’s young sister. Fabulously wealthy Chauncey Seldon has hired Ursula to discover what has happened to his daughter’s dowry and the exact state of her marriage.  But Ursula discovers the body of a nursemaid and finds herself investigating what lead to her death – which isn’t the last in the book!  

I loved writing the story and do hope readers will enjoy discovering the secrets that lie beneath Mountstanton’s aristocratic surface. And, yes, I do intend there shall be an Ursula Grandison series. I’m currently writing the second novel featuring both her and the London detective who eventually joins her at Mountstanton. But the action in  A FATAL FREEDOM moves to the metropolis.

I’d love to give a copy of DEADLY INHERITANCE to the blogger who gives the most interesting answer to a very simple question: Who is your favourite crime novel protagonist and why?  

I don’t have a website yet – watch this space – but www.fantasticfiction.co.uk  has details on me. Follow the link and enter Janet Laurence in the space for author’s name.

And thank you for asking me to join you in your blog today.