LibraryThing is pleased to sit down this month with British mystery novelist S.J. Bennett, whose Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series, casting Queen Elizabeth II as a secret detective, has sold more than half a million copies worldwide, across more than twenty countries. Educated at London University and Cambridge University, where she earned a PhD in Italian Literature, she has worked as a lobbyist and management consultant, as well as a creative writing instructor. As Sophia Bennet she made her authorial debut with the young adult novel Threads, which won the Times Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition in 2009, going on to publish a number of other young adult and romance novels under that name. In 2017 her Love Song was named Romantic Novel of the Year by the RNA (Romantic Novelists’ Association). She made her debut as S.J. Bennett in 2020 with The Windsor Knot, the first of five books in the Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series. The fifth and final title thus far, The Queen Who Came In From the Cold is due out next month from Crooked Lane Books. Bennett sat down with Abigail this month to discuss the book.
The Queen Who Came In From the Cold is the latest entry in your series depicting Queen Elizabeth II’s secret life as a detective. How did the idea for the series first come to you? What is it about the Queen that made you think of her as a likely sleuth?
The Queen was alive and well when I first had the idea to incorporate her into fiction. She was someone who fascinated people around the world, and she was getting a lot of attention because of The Crown.
I was looking for inspiration for a new series, and I suddenly thought that she would fit well into the mold of a classic Golden Age detective, because she lived in a very specific, self-contained world and she had a strong sense of public service, which I wanted to explore. Her family didn’t always live up to it, but she tried! What’s great for a novelist is that everyone thinks they know her, but she didn’t give interviews, so it leaves a lot of room to imagine what she was really thinking and doing behind the scenes.
I often get asked if I was worried about including her as a real figure, and I was a bit, to start with. But then I realized that she has inspired a long line of novelists and playwrights – from Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader, and A Question of Attribution, to Peter Morgan’s The Queen, The Crown and The Audience, Sue Townsend’s The Queen and I. I think they were also attracted by that combination of familiarity and mystery, along with the extraordinary life she led, in which she encountered most of the great figures of the twentieth century.
My own books are about how a very human public figure, with heavy expectations on her, juggles her job, her beliefs, her interests and her natural quest for justice. The twist is, she can’t be seen to do it, so she has to get someone else to take the credit for her Miss Marple-like genius.
Unlike many other detectives, yours is based on a real-life person. Does this influence how you tell your stories? Do you feel a responsibility to get things right, given the importance of your real-world inspiration, and what does that mean, in this context?
I do feel that responsibility. I chose Elizabeth partly because I admired her steady, reliable leadership, in a world where our political leaders often take us by surprise, and not always in a good way. So, I wanted to do justice to that.
The Queen’s circumstances are so interesting, combining the constraints of a constitutional monarch who can’t ever step out of line with the glamour of living in a series of castles and palaces. Weaving those contrasts into the book keeps me pretty busy, in a fun way. Plus, of course, there’s a murder, and only her experience and intelligence can solve it.
I made the decision at the start that I wouldn’t make any of the royals say or do anything we couldn’t imagine them saying or doing in real life. Anyone who has to behave oddly or outrageously to fit my plots is an invented character. But it helps that the royal family contained some big characters who leap off the page anyway. Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother have lots of scenes that make me giggle, but that I hope are still true to how they really were. I would honestly find it much harder to write about the current generations, because their lives are more normal in many ways, and also, because we already know about their inner lives, because they tell us. The Queen and Prince Philip were the last of the ‘mythical’ royals, I think.
With a murder seen from a train, and the title The Queen Who Came In From the Cold, your book suggests both Agatha Christie and John le Carré. Are there other authors and works of mystery and espionage fiction that influenced your story?
I love referencing other writers, and someone on the train in this novel is reading Thunderball, by Ian Fleming, which came out in 1961 and deals with one of the themes that’s present in my book too, namely the threat of nuclear war. At that point, The Queen Who Came In From the Cold is very much still in the Agatha Christie mold, where a murder is supposedly seen from the train, but Fleming’s book hints at the more modern spy story that the book will become in the second half.
As well as Fleming and John le Carré, whose debut novel came out that year, I read a lot of Len Deighton when I was growing up, so I hope some of his sense of adventure is in there too. But another big influence was film. I love the comedy and graphic design of The Pink Panther, and the London-centered louche photography of Blow-Up. I asked if the jacket designer (a brilliant Spanish illustrator called Iker Ayesteran) could bring some of that Sixties magic to the cover, and I like to think he has done … even if the lady in the tiara isn’t an exact replica of the Queen.
Unlike the earlier books in your series, which were contemporaneous, your latest is set during the Cold War. Did you have to do a great deal of additional research to write the story? What are some of the most interesting things you learned?
I hadn’t realized there were quite so many Russian spy rings on the go in and around London at the time! One of my characters is based on a real-life Russian agent called Kolon Molody, who embedded himself in British culture as an entrepreneur (set up by the KGB) selling jukeboxes and vending machines. According to his own account, he became a millionaire out of it before he was caught. His world was a classic one of microdots and dead-letter drops.
As a teenager, I lived in Berlin in the 1980s, when the Berlin Wall literally ran around the edge of our back garden. We were at the heart of the Cold War, but by then it was obvious the West was winning, so I didn’t personally feel under threat – although people were still dying trying to escape from East Germany to the West. I hadn’t fully realized
how much more unsafe people must have felt a generation earlier. I don’t think the western world has felt so unstable since those days … until now, perhaps.
It fascinates me that Peter Sellers, who was so entertaining as Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films, was also the star in Dr Stangelove, which was based on an early thriller about the threat of nuclear annihilation called Red Alert, by Peter George. That dichotomy between fear and fun seemed to characterize the early 19§0s, and is exactly what I’m trying to capture in the book.
On a different note, it was a surprise to see how well Russia was doing in the Space Race. At that time, the Soviet Union was always a step ahead. Yuri Gagarin was the first person to go into orbit, and the Queen and Prince Philip were as awestruck as anyone else. When Gagarin visited the UK in the summer of 1961, they invited him to lunch at the palace and afterwards, it was Elizabeth who asked for a picture with him, not the other way around.
The Soviet success was largely down to the brilliance of the man they called the Chief Designer. His real name was Sergei Korolev, but the West didn’t find this out for years, because the Soviets kept his identity a closely-guarded secret. He was an extraordinary figure – imprisoned in the gulags by Stalin, and then brought out to run their most important space program. I’d call that pretty forgiving! Their space program never recovered after he died. I’m a big fan of his ingenuity, and he has a place in the book.
Tell us a little bit about your writing process. Do you have a particular writing spot and routine? Do you know the solution to your mysteries from the beginning? Do you outline your story, or does it come to you as you go along?
I went to an event recently, where Richard Osman and Mick Herron – both British writers whose work I enjoy – talked about how they are ‘pantsers’, who are driven purely by the relationships between the characters they create. I tried that early in my writing life and found I usually ran out of steam after about five thousand words, so now I plot in a reasonable amount of detail before I start.
I always know who did it and how, and I’ve given myself the challenge of fitting the murder mystery alongside everything the Queen was really doing at the time, so I need a spreadsheet to keep track of it all. Nevertheless, red herrings will occur to me during the writing process, and I adapt the plot to fit. I find if I know too much detail, then the act of writing each chapter loses its fun. I need to leave room for discoveries along the way.
If in doubt, I get Prince Philip on the scene to be furious or reassuring about something. He’s always a joy to write. So is the Queen Mother, as I mentioned. It’s the naughty characters who always give the books their bounce.
Her Majesty the Queen Investigates was published as part of a five-book deal. Will there be more books? Do you have any other projects in the offing?
I was very lucky to get that first deal from Bonnier in the UK. My editor had never done a five-book deal before, and I’m not sure he’s done one since! I always knew I wanted the series to be longer, though. I’ve just persuaded him to let me write two more, so book six, set in the Caribbean in 1966, will be out next year, and another one, set in Balmoral back in 2017, will hopefully be out the year after. I miss Captain Rozie Oshodi, the Queen’s sidekick in the first three books, and so do lots of readers, so it’ll be great to be in her company again for one last outing.
Tell us about your library. What’s on your own shelves?
My bookshelves are scattered around the house and my writing shed, wherever they’ll fit. I studied French and Italian at university, so there are a lot of twentieth century books from both countries. I love the fact that French spines read bottom up, whereas English ones read top down. I bought really cool blue and white editions of my favourite authors from Editions de Minuit in the 1990s and it’s lovely to have them on my shelves.
I’ve always loved classical literature, so there are plenty of Everyman editions of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James, but equally, the books that got me through stressful times like exams were Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins, so they have their place. These are the books that inspired the kind of literature I wanted to write: escapist, absorbing and fun. They’re near the travel guides, for all the real-life escaping I love to do.
I have two bookcases dedicated to crime fiction, packed with Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James, Rex Stout (Nero Wolfe was a big inspiration for the way I write the Queen and her sidekicks), Donna Leon and Chris Brookmyre. I inherited my love of the mystery genre from my mother, who has a library full of books I’ve also loved, by other authors such as Robert B. Parker and Sue Grafton, as well as her own shelf of Le Carrés. She decided to start clearing them out recently, but I begged her not to: I still love seeing them there.
Finally, my bedroom is awash with overfull shelves and teetering piles of contemporary novels and non-fiction that I really must sort out one day. Highlights include Golden Hill by Francis Spufford, which someone at my book club recommended, A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and Where’d You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple. They’re all books whose inventiveness inspires me.
What have you been reading lately, and what would you recommend to other readers?
Thanks to my book club, I’ve been re-reading Jane Austen, and am reminded of what a fabulous stylist she was. But in terms of new writers, I’ve recently enjoyed The Art of a Lie by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, set in Georgian London, and A Case of Mice and Murder by Sally Smith, set in the heart of legal London at the turn of the twentieth century. Both Laura and Sally write vivid characters with aplomb, and create satisfying, twisty plots that are a joy to follow. I definitely recommend them both.
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