Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the Maisie Dobbs series, featuring the eponymous heroine as she grows into a role as London’s preeminent psychologist and investigator, as well as other works. In her latest, The American Agent, Maisie investigates the murder of an American radio journalist against the backdrop of the London Blitz. Winspear is a fine crafter of character, and knows how to write a richly detailed historical novel. I caught up with her ahead of the publication of her new book to talk radio, research, and respect.
Molly Odintz: Your latest novel explores the issue of American isolationism prior to WWII through the character of an isolationist senator, a chapter in American history that is frequently smoothed over in the official narratives. What do you want audiences to take away about the subject?
Jacqueline Winspear: I never set out to write a book so audiences take away anything more than being entertained and feeling satisfied with the novel they have just read. The stories are generally seeded years before I begin to write, so there is no manipulation to reflect current events. However, history has a habit of doing that for me—readers are often writing to me, emailing to comment that a given book has made them think more about current events, because they see the present in the past they have just read about in my novel. I think history is a bit like fashion—major events come along that are reminiscent of the past, but they just look a bit different. Having said that, here’s what I would like audiences to take away about the subject—that the radio as a form of communication, and manipulation, was as powerful then as the internet is today, and possibly more so, as it ushered in a world of communication that had hitherto not been available to ordinary people—at once you could learn more about what other people were doing on the other side of the world. It made news more immediate. Radio broadcasts from London during WW2 brought the war into American homes, chipping away at the notion of “isolation” from events on the other side of the Atlantic.
In addition, I would like readers to take a way a very vivid sense of how bombing impacts a country—how it upends everything and how life has to go on, even if you’ve been left with no home, no food, no personal belongings. If you’re lucky, you are left with just the clothes you stand up in (as a teen, my mother had every stitch of clothing she was wearing blown off when a bomb hit the street outside the house). People see terrible things in a bombing, and it marks them forever.
The news on the radio is almost a character in your latest, can you talk a bit about what you wanted to explore about the role of media in keeping up morale during the war?
Radio changed not only with the war, but with the work of the American “warcasters” such as Edward Murrow, who reported from London, taking news of the war to the American people. Yes, the radio was an enormous source of morale boosting, reminding people who they were and what pluck everyone had. But Murrow took broadcasting into the streets, on one occasion holding a microphone close to the ground to record footsteps as people ran for the shelters during a bombing—bringing it right into American homes.
I think history is a bit like fashion—major events come along that are reminiscent of the past, but they just look a bit different.Prior to the war, British broadcasters would wear evening jackets and bow ties to read the news, even though it was not a visual medium—the studio was a very “proper” place. The war brought greater immediacy to radio communication. And more than anything, it was a means of “soft” propaganda—for example, Murrow’s broadcasts began to change American opinion, with people wanting to help Britain rather than let her fight the Nazi threat alone. Americans became more aware that Britain alone was holding the line against the Nazi threat. The media was definitely a propaganda tool even before the war—in Elegy for Eddie, one of the characters, a writer, has been brought into the Ministry of Information to join a group writing for newspapers and magazines on topic about England—and this really happened. No one mentioned the coming war, or the rise of Nazi Germany—but instead they promoted a sense of the “green and pleasant land” that everyone loved and could be proud of. Articles were strategically placed on nature, industry, the people—every subject of national pride was covered, but it was still propaganda—so that when the war came, people really had a sense that they would do anything to protect their heritage.
And of course on the other side there was Lord Haw Haw—William Joyce, an Irish American (who had lied to gain British citizenship) working for the Nazi regime. With his clipped English “hoity-toity” tones, he repeatedly informed the British people that their days of freedom were numbered—the goal was to undermine morale. Most people thought he was a bit of a laugh, and listened to make fun of him. He was later tried and found guilty of treason, and hung in 1946.
Maisie has lived through a lot by now, but the Blitz appears to bring out the best in her (as well as the rest of the British people). Can you tell us a bit about your research into the Blitz?
I think I have been researching that part of history my whole life—my mother and 6 of her siblings were in London and Kent through the Blitz. They saw it all. From an early age my mother told me her stories—possibly in an attempt to exorcise the memories—so I had a very keen image of what it was like to live through that time. I grew up in the country—my parents left London as a young married couple, determined to get away from bombsites. My memories of childhood visits back to London to see relatives are marked by visions of passing those bombsites on the train as we entered London, and playing in the shells of broken buildings with my cousins, scampering across rubble while playing hide and seek—and this was many years after the war. The final bombsites were not wiped from London’s landscapes until construction began in East London in preparation for the 2012 Olympics. Of course I’ve also read a lot about the era, and watched documentaries where those who lived through that time were interviewed. I was brought to tears on many occasions while preparing to write this novel.
Maisie Dobbs is an invaluable resource to Scotland Yard and the American Cousins for a number of reasons—tell us a bit about how Maisie’s character has developed over the years, and how she came to be so effective at solving crimes.
Over the years, not only have I continued to create the character of Maisie Dobbs, but she continues to reveals herself to me. In the earlier books, her innate sense of intuition and deep intellectual curiosity came to the notice of the man who would become her mentor, Dr. Maurice Blanche. As a doctor of legal medicine (forensic science), a psychologist and something of a philosopher, he nurtured the qualities that would stand her in good stead for the future—he had already envisaged a time when she might become his assistant. She studied the Moral Sciences at Girton College, a curriculum which included modern psychology. But it was her war experience, and seeing death of a most terrible kind at an impressionable age that marked her. Readers have seen Maisie come to terms with her own shell shock, and while working on each case she learns something of herself and grows over time, maturing into a woman who has experienced all the pain and joy that marks the development of a person. Her effectiveness in terms of solving crimes is rooted in the very deliberate way she goes about an investigation, questioning motives, searching into the background of a person. In gathering the “facts” and searching in the gray areas of a person’s life, she is able to look into the soul, to what it is that brings a person to a decision that will change the trajectory of their lives—or an act of passion that impacts the futures of everyone around them. Maisie is not a character seeking to discover “whodunit.” She has training and insight into the human condition, along with a desire to understand the landscape as well as each blade of grass.
You’ve been with Maisie for a long time now. Do you have a favorite Maisie Dobbs moment in the series?
That’s a tough one. Over the years there have been moments that have made me laugh, and moments that have left me shattered. In Pardonable Lies, there is a scene set during Maisie’s return to France, to the location where she had worked as a nurse in a casualty clearing station. She is now in her early 30’s and in the very place where she saw death of a most terrible kind at a young age, and where she was also wounded when the station came under attack. On one of my visits to the WW1 battlefields of the Somme and Ypres, I stood at the edge of a small casualty clearing station cemetery, looking at the graves of soldiers, doctors and some nurses—I had not known of its existence when I wrote the first novel—and I asked myself, “How would I feel if it were me? How would I feel if I had endured those same experiences, and had finally made my pilgrimage back to face my demons?” And I knew then that I would break down, that I would fall to my knees because I could not stand the weight of remembrance. I used that experience later, when I wrote about Maisie’s return to the battlefields—writing it was a visceral experience. I could feel the weight of memory in my heart. I wept as I finished the scene.
I believe we cannot keep piling up the corpses without addressing the notion of grief, of shock, of deep despair that attends the passing of another.The interwar period, and in particular, the aftermath of WWI, is a historical setting that never ceases to appeal to mystery writers and readers. What draws you to the era?
The time from just before the Great War to the end of WW2 rationing in Britain really does fascinate me (broadly 1913-1954). It was a time of great upheaval, great social change, technological advancement in almost every realm, and it was a pivotal moment in the lives and futures of women. They really came into their own in the UK—far earlier than in the USA, for example. As the setting for fiction, it offers so much—and I think it offers the reader something too. There is a sense that people lived through trauma on an international scale, and with that came so much personal heartache and loss, but along with opportunities to work together, to change their lives—it could be seen as “the best of times and the worst of times.” Everyone who lived through that era was marked by it. Yet they came through it. I think there’s something comforting about that, especially as we seem to be in tumultuous times again—fiction teaches us that we can endure, that we are resilient. Fiction set in times where people have been burnished by the fiery furnace of war’s collective and personal experience has been a comfort and guide since the earliest myths and legends—that’s probably why it offers writers such a powerful landscape today.
You’ve written a series and also published a standalone—how do the experiences compare?
Writing a series is a very organic experience in terms of creating character/s. You get to build a relationship with them over time. As you develop characters, so more is revealed about them. There’s something very natural about the process. After all, you didn’t get to know your best friend overnight —it happened over a passage of time, which is perfectly natural. You learn as you reveal yourselves to each other. That’s how it feels creating a series, however, when you add mystery, there are great leaps of knowledge, empathy and understanding as you are tested together. Writing The Care and Management of Lies was a different experience—it had a different rhythm and pace, and sometimes I felt as if I was asking too many questions of Kezia, in particular. It was as if I was trying to get to know her deeply at a time when we’d only just met. Though the truth is she had been with me since I was 25—it just took about 30 years to write the novel. I’d like to write a sequel though—if only to reacquaint myself with her, and see how she’s fared over time.
Respect for the dead is a theme throughout the books, something I’ve appreciated as a reader who comes across too many corpses with no names in the works of others. What’s your advice to writers when it comes to making sure the dead are humanized, not exploited?
I think respect for the dead—whether villain or victim—is paramount. When I see movies or read books where the corpses start to stack up, I wonder who they were as babies just born, when their mother held her child for the first time. I wonder what happened to them as children, and what came to pass in life to bring them to a point leading to untimely death? I believe we cannot keep piling up the corpses without addressing the notion of grief, of shock, of deep despair that attends the passing of another. This asks the writer to consider the notion of sorrow, of the emotions that assail us when faced with death, and of course to explore what it means to have empathy for villain and victim. Of course writers who deal with death in comedy will see this from another angle. This is only my opinion and my approach—what works for one writer doesn’t necessarily work for another. When I write I do so from the heart—even if I am writing a light, comedic scene. I also think one of the most important questions a writer can ask, when placing a character in a scene, is “How would I feel if …?” Then of course you have to be prepared for a journey that simple question demands of you.
