My new book, The Proof of the Pudding, is the 17th in the series featuring Lady Georgiana, 35th in line to the throne in the nineteen thirties. When I started this series in 2006 I couldn’t have imagined that it would still be going strong and have readers around the world in 9 languages to date.
It’s always a challenge with a long running series to keep it fresh and new and not to resort to the Cabot Cove syndrome of killing off one of the characters per book. I’ve made a promise to myself that if I couldn’t be excited about starting a new lady Georgie mystery I would stop writing the series. So far I’ve come up with new and different ideas for each book, and this latest book has been one of the most fun.
I’m lucky because my heroine is not rooted to one place. It’s not like writing about a yarn shop or bed and breakfast inn where I’m tied to the premise and the premises. The stories are rarely in the same setting. I’ve taken Lady Georgie to various countries: we’ve been to the south of France, we’ve been to Paris, of course. We’ve even been to Kenya. And Georgie interacts with all levels of British society. We’ve had stories in the East End of London and in royal palaces.
One of the things that has helped to keep this series entertaining is that I am able to call upon real life experiences. If something has been weird or embarrassing for me, I make Georgie suffer with it. It started in the first book with Georgie having tea with Queen Mary, that was mirrored on my own experience having tea with Queen Elizabeth when I was a young woman. As you can imagine it was a memorable experience: just six of us in a small room with the queen and a tea table. We were instructed you only eat what the queen eats and what the queen ate was one piece of brown bread. We all had to pretend we were chewing away at this one piece of brown bread and enjoying it while the table was laden with the most delightful cakes that we never got to touch. So I made Georgie suffer the same fate, except the difference was that she was pretty much starving at the time and the food on the table looked absolutely wonderful.
I also gave Georgie a brief and disastrous modelling career which was also completely based on my own brief and disastrous modelling career which ended abruptly when I put both legs into one half of culottes and then had to walk up a runway with the other leg flapping beside me. When my editor read this the first time she said, “We really must take out this scene. it’s just too improbable,” and I replied “but it happened to me.” Poor Georgie. I do love to embarrass her.
Georgie is a British aristocrat, related to the royal family, and another of my trump cards is that I married into an aristocratic British family. My husband’s family and their connections and their houses have been brilliant inspiration for a lot of things in the books. I’ve used haunted rooms and relatives with silly nicknames. (Yes, there really is a Fig). When we were first married some of the older relatives would reminisce about jokes they played on the butler and of course I had to take notes on everything they said.
This latest book, The Proof of the Pudding, features a poison garden, something I didn’t know about until recently. At a college reunion I reconnected with an old friend who is now a docent at the Chelsea Physick Garden. It’s a fantastic place in London, founded by monks, I think in the 1400s. She took me around and showed me the various beds with plants to heal all sorts of ailments. One bed for the heart, another for the lungs. Then she showed me the bed full of plants that can kill you: the poison garden. Naturally as a mystery writer I was fascinated.
The next year my friend Louise Penny rented a flat in Chelsea and she discovered the Physick Garden and suggested we go around together. This second time we lingered at the poison garden and discussed our options to kill people (as one does when one is a mystery writer.) We tried not to discuss too loudly as that does generate strange looks. That settled it! I knew I had to write about a poison garden and decided it would be brilliant to combine it with Georgie’s new French chef who had been asked to cook a banquet. The manor house just happens to have a poison garden. What could possibly go wrong?
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The Proof of the Pudding is published on November 7.
