An Interview with Author Caro Peacock by Jerelyn (I-F-Letty)
I have been fortunate so far this year, for I have found several very interesting, new to me authors. I go through reading phases, and right now I am in a mystery phase. I love historical mysteries, of nearly every kind. In the past two years I have been drawn into all things Victorian and Edwardian. I have hit the Jack Pot with this author.
As Caro Peacock, the author has created the Liberty Lane series. Our Miss Lane is not a typical young woman at the dawn of the Victorian era. Her parents weren’t your typical parents; they were intellectuals with an interest in music and the arts and tended to have republican leanings.
With her parent both dead; Liberty must make her own way in life. While most young women would marry this does not suit her independent nature. Here is the author’s interview with her character Liberty Lane. (I love when authors do this.) Caro Peacock: “I’ve interviewed her in a question and answer session that I hope will tell the reader a little more about her.” Here is the link to the webpage: http://www.caropeacock.com/libertylane.htm
Writing as Gillian Linscott, the author has also created the character of Nell Bray; whom I believe is a front line Suffragette. These are set in the Edwardian period, and I am sad to say I have yet to read these. But they are on my list and I will be reading them soon. So I will be concentrating in this Interview on the Liberty Lane series.
Jerelyn: I would like to welcome Ms Peacock to the PBS blog and thank her for taking the time to participate in this interview. Firstly would you tell us a bit about yourself?
Caro: Thank you, Jerelyn, and it’s good to be talking to PBS readers. I suppose I’ve been a history nut since childhood. I remember sitting on the floor beside the armchair of my great uncle, who used to be a horse cab driver in Berkshire, England. He’d actually been among the crowds in Windsor at the funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901. The town where he used to drive his cab was a fashionable place on the river Thames and he told me stories about glamorous showgirls from the Edwardian stage who’d come from London for an afternoon’s boating. He’d drive them in his cab to meet the beaux on their boats. I loved it all. My adult life took me away from history for a long time and into journalism. I now live in a 350-year-old cottage deep in the country. When not writing, I work as a gardener and guide at our local stately home, which goes back six hundred years. So a lot of my life is involved with history. I am bossed around by two Burmese cats, Damson and Figaro, who have no sense of history but a keen sense of their own rights.
Jerelyn: In reading your bio it sounds as if writing has been, in your case almost a vocation, was this always what you wanted to do?
Caro: Yes, I always wanted to write but I was diffident about it. I came from a loving and stable but not particularly literary family. Becoming a published writer looked like a steep climb – which it was.
Jerelyn: You say that you have done other work besides writing; it seems most novelists now days have to work a “day job” to afford to write. But I get the feeling that your curiosity has lead you to try other professions is this true assumption?
Caro: Curiosity, yes, and the need to earn a living. I had a great time as a journalist, working for the Guardian newspaper and the BBC among others. I reported quite a lot from Northern Ireland during the troubles of the 1970s and also reported from parliament. I like working as a gardener too. Fiction involves living in your own head so much that it is a great pleasure to spend a day planting out rows of vegetables. No doubts, no wrong turnings, just lots of lettuces.
Jerelyn: What draws you to the Victorian period?
Caro: So much happened. It covered two generations, 64 years, from 1837 to 1901 and in that time almost everything changed. At the start of the period, travel was on foot or by horse, lighting by lamps and candles. By the end of it we had trains, motor cars, telephones, electricity. Aeroplanes were only a few years away. Politically, most men had gained the vote and most women were well on the way to it. The advances in medicine, science, psychology came so thick and fast that people must struggled to begin to understand all that was happening around them.
Jerelyn: You have also said that you feel the Victorian period is misunderstood. How so?
Caro: For a long time people tended to think of Victorian society as a smug and settled for the middle and upper classes, with nothing but slums and pea-souper fogs for the rest. It was never very settled. At the start of the period, there was a lot of social unrest with many people fearing an English revolution, on the lines of the French one. By the end of it, with the rise of socialism and trade unionism and women’s struggle for the vote, it was also seen by many people as an almost revolutionary time. People were becoming more and more aware of injustices in society and trying to fight them. The world was starting to open out, for women and working people as well as for the empire-builders. I think the image of the Victorian period as self-satisfied and constricted came mainly from the intellectuals writing about it a generation later. Their parents had been Victorians and, like most children, they wanted to think of themselves as more interesting than their parents.
Jerelyn: Where did Liberty Lane come from?
Caro: I’d been writing about my suffragette character, Nell Bray, following her career from 1901 to when British women got the vote in 1918. Now I wanted to go back to the other end of the Victorian period. I set the opening of the first Liberty Lane (A Foreign Affair in the USA, Death at Dawn in the UK) in the first days of Queen Victoria’s reign. I knew I wanted to write about a young woman on her own and also to set her in the British radical tradition. Then – quite apart from any theories – I suddenly had this mental image of a young woman walking on her own on the Calais sands. That’s where she started.
Jerelyn: I have never been to London, but I have poured over maps of the city for as long as I can remember. What I love is the sense of place you give London in your writing. It is almost like being on a walking tour. Was this a conscious choice on your part? I learned so much from these books.
Caro: That’s kind of you, because I’m not a Londoner by birth or upbringing, though I did live there for some time as a journalist. But I love maps too and I love walking. I got all the old maps I could and walked, looking for traces of how things had been around 170 years go. Once I was in Leicester Square, wondering where the Rotunda Panorama that I use in A Dangerous Affair (UK Death of a Dancer) had stood. A kindly refuse cart driver asked if I was lost. He didn’t seem surprised when I said I was in the wrong century. They get all sorts in Leicester Square. One odd thing happened. I’d decided that Liberty should live just off Adam’s Mews in Mayfair, which exists, though now it’s called Adam’s Row. I created, I thought, a fictional little cul de sac off the mews called Abel Yard. Later, on another map, I found there really was such a cul de sac with no name given, just where I’d put Abel Yard.
Jerelyn: Was Disraeli as much as a puppet master as you make him out to be?
Caro: Oh yes. He was ambitious, charming, ruthless, manipulative and liked to have a hand in all that was going on. He had a keen sense of drama – usually his own drama. As a young man, he’d modeled himself on Byron. I love the way he took over the Conservative party, almost against its will. There he was, deeply in debt, Jewish by origin (although his father had converted the family to Christianity), flashily dressed, too clever by half and, to his regret, not an old Etonian – all very un-Conservative. But they couldn’t do without him.
Jerelyn: He was rather a provocative character, wasn’t he?
Caro: Totally. And he could never resist a witty phrase. In the Oxford Book of Quotations he has more entries than Oscar Wilde. He was the man who said: ‘When I want to read a book, I write one.’
Jerelyn: I can’t decide who my favorite secondary character is, I love them all. But I think Amos is my favorite. Do you have a favorite?
Caro: Yes, I think Amos is my favourite too. He is partly the product of my love affair with the county where I live now, Herefordshire, on the west side of England, near the border with Wales. It is mainly a farming area and people from cities sometimes see Hereford people as slow and easy going. But there is down-to-earth cleverness here, as well as gentleness and a sometimes anarchic sense of humour. I’ve tried to put some of that in Amos.
Jerelyn: Why did you make Liberty a young single female, as opposed to a well respect matron or widow?
Caro: I wanted to write about somebody who was vulnerable as well as spirited. Also, I fancied a bit of frivolity. Liberty is serious about many things, but likes fashionable clothes, interesting men, music and dancing. Also, until well into the twentieth century, marriage did close off a lot of options for women. I’m struggling with what to do about that. Liberty is full of life and passion. She is pretty seriously in love with Robert Carmichael whom she meets in the third book. (A Family Affair in the USA, A Corpse in Shining Armour in UK) She has encouraged him to go on his travels because she thinks he doesn’t know what he really wants. In fact, I’ve sent him away because I need time to think. If she marries him, her life will change. But I can’t keep him on his travels and her single forever. Real dilemma this and I don’t know how to solve it.
Jerelyn: Did a woman of her class have more freedom than her upper class sisters?
Caro: Some upper class women managed to have quite a lot of social freedom, especially in the earlier part of the nineteenth century when the manners and morals of the Regency period still dominated. But the nineteenth century was a time when educated middle class women were beginning to claim more territory. If I had to choose to be one or the other, I think I’d go for educated middle class for a more interesting life. I’m thinking of women like the novelist George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, the mathematician and astronomer, Mary Somerville. (My old college at Oxford, founded in 1879, was named after Mary Somerville.)
Jerelyn: Liberty is well educated and can draw on any number of skills, to make a living; do you think that helps her in what is becoming her primary employment?
Caro: Yes. She’s good at languages and quick minded. But there’s a streak of wildness in her that made her choose to be an investigator. She could have done quite well by staying as a music teacher and marrying somebody suitable. She may pretend, even to herself, that events pushed her into it, but it was mostly her choice.
Jerelyn: I always wonder just how much like their characters authors are, what would you say you and Liberty have in common?
Caro: Well, let’s see: Liberty is clever, generous, brave, loyal to her friends, young, good looking, witty, a superb horsewoman, a good musician. In that list, I reckon I score, with luck, two and a half out of nine. I’m not saying what two and a half. When it comes to defects, we’re both impatient and pretty stubborn.
Jerelyn: How fully realized are your books when you begin to write? I ask this because they have a very organic feel to them.
Caro: Organic is a kind word and, I think, an accurate description of the way I write. When I start a book, I have no very clear idea where it is going and I certainly have no notion whodunnit. Sometimes I start with no more than a scene or a setting in mind. I write much like I garden – get it started and hope it grows.
Jerelyn: Your love and knowledge of horses really comes across in the books. Have you always been horse mad?
Caro: Oh yes. I think I wanted a horse even before I wanted to be a writer. It was a long time before a horse came along. The horse, Patrick, died last year. I have an empty paddock and a hope that it will be filled soon.
Jerelyn: I love to know what books writers read. What books did you read as a child, and what do you read now?
Caro: As a child, I read a lot of the ‘wrong’ things like Enid Blyton. (Don’t know how popular she was in the States, but here she was the top children-have-unlikely–adventures writer.) I know we’re supposed to look down on her now, but I can’t quite manage to do that. Robert Louis Stevenson was a revelation. I still think Kidnapped is one of the great books. Crime books came quite early. Conan Doyle, of course. Raymond Chandler was another revelation. That man moves his plots so slickly and is such a brilliant stylist that I re-read him now and again to be reminded how a master works. Nearer the present, I much admire Walter Mosley. Easy Rawlins is one of the great characters in crime literature.
Jerelyn: I am chomping at the bit for book five, Keeping Bad Company, where we finally get to meet Liberty’s younger brother. When will that be released?
Caro: It is out now in Hardcover. By the by, I’d like to apologize to readers in the U.S. for the confusion over titles. With the first three books, the American publishers gave them different titles, so that some people thought I’d written six books when there were only three. Luckily, numbers four and five, When the Devil Drives and Keeping Bad Company are the same on both sides of the Atlantic.
Jerelyn: Again, thank-you and best of luck with Keeping Bad Company.
Caro: Thank you, Jerelyn. And best wishes to you and your readers.
You can read more about Caro Peacock/Gillian Linscott at http://www.caropeacock.com/ or follow her on Twitter @CaroPeacock
As Caro Peacock:
A Foreign Affair (US) Death at Dawn (UK)
A Dangerous Affair (US) Death of a Dancer (UK)
A Family Affair (US) A Corpse in Shining Armor (UK)
When the Devil Drives (US and UK)
Keeping Bad Company (US and UK)
As Gillian Linscott she is the author of the award winning series about the suffragette detective Nell Bray.
The Nell Bray Books:
Sister Beneath the Sheet
Hanging on the Wire
Stage Fright
Widow’s Peak
Crown Witness
Dead Man’s Music
Dance on Blood
Absent Friends
The Perfect Daughter
Dead Man Riding
Blood on the Wood
Also by Gillian Linscott: The Garden
Terrific interview — thank you both Caro and Jerelyn. The thunderous crash you hear is the result of adding Ms. Peacock’s books to my already-toppling TBR stacks.
Yes, Letty, it’s another great interview all right and that means reason enough to check out these books. Liberty Lane sounds like such an interesting character especially for the time period. Caro Peacock is not an author I’ve read and it definitely sounds like her books are right in my favorite genre – historical mysteries! Thanks to both Jerelyn and Ms. Peacock for taking the time to do this interview: le sigh, more books!!!!
As always Jerelyn you ask all the questions in my head! Thank you both for an intriguing interview!