Please tell us everything we need to
know about the new book!
The Vanished Bride imagines that
before they were famous authors the Bronte sisters were amateur sleuths. In the
first of the series they hear of the disappearance of a young wife and mother,
who has vanished from her home, Chester Grange, leaving behind a room covered
in blood. Naturally curious, intelligent and formidable, the sisters decide to
become ‘detectors’ and discover what happened to Elizabeth Chester.
Is there going to be a lovely series
of Bronte adventures, that will continue forever..?
I really hope so! I’d love that,
because they are a joy to research and write. Book 2 is coming in 2020 and at
present I have two more planned. Each book is interwoven with the real
biographical facts, and takes place over a few days – so it is possible to fit
in a lot of detecting into their all too short lives.
How do you go about slotting these
mysteries into what we know about the sisters’ real
lives?
It not too difficult, we have a great
archive of material, particularly Charlotte’s letters to her friend Ellen
Nussey, the diary papers that Emily and Anne wrote, and a great number of other
artefacts that give us a really good idea of who the sisters were, their voices
and personalities, while still leaving open a lot to interpretation. There have
also been some amazing finds, particularly the torn-up love letter that
Charlotte sent to her unrequited love, Monsieur Héger, which his wife took out
of the waste bin and stitched back together and kept! Even so we still only
know about five percent of what they did on a day to day basis, so there is
still plenty of room for detecting!
Where did such a fantastic idea come
from..? Did you have a single moment of inspiration?
I did, as it happens. I was spending a
lot of time in Haworth and at Ponden Hall, where my contemporary ghost story
The Girl at the Window is set. I was briefly considering a thread in that novel
where the Bronte sisters investigated the same mystery my contemporary heroine
does. But as soon as I thought of the Bronte Sisters investigating anything, I
knew it was an idea that deserved its own novel!
Why do you enjoy the mystery genre,
and which books / authors / series would you recommend?
This is my first foray into
mystery writing as an author, but I have loved it for a long time as a reader.
Like many I love Christie, Du Maurier, Conan Doyle, all the classics! I love
gothic fiction too, and most importantly I am devoted to the novels and poems
of the Bronte Sisters, which all contain an element of mystery. For contemporary
authors I have been reading Robin Stevens with my son, the Murder Most
Unladylike series, and they are brilliant!
Tell us about the landscape and
setting of your series. Where in the world are we, and why should everyone want
to go there..?
We are in beautiful West Yorkshire,
and the village of Haworth, though it was a good deal less picturesque in the
Bronte’s time that it is now! Then the average life expectancy was 24, and the
drinking water came right off the moor, got filtered through the putrid contents
of the graveyard, flowed down the sewage strewn streets and into the town well.
Typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera were rife, and infant mortality meant that on
some headstones lost babies were numbered instead of names. It was a very hard
life for most of the occupants of Haworth. The Parsonage at the top of the
village was something of a beacon for the residents, and Patrick Bronte served
his community well, eventually successfully lobbying for a series of fresh
water reservoirs to be built. Today Haworth is a beautiful little village,
surrounded by stunning countryside and it feels like my second home. If you
want a wonderfully wild walk, at any time of year there is nothing to beat a
good march up to Top Withens, the geographical location of Wuthering Heights,
or my favourite (and Emily’s) spot Ponden Kirk, better known as Peniston Crag,
where the view is astounding.
How did you get into writing in the
first place, and how did you first get published..?
I’d always written, but I never really
tried to do anything with it. Then when I was 29 ½ and reading a magazine on my
lunch break that had a young writers short story of the year competition. I
realised the cut-off point was 30! Horrified I thought I better enter, and I
wrote a story set in an alternative reality where all women aspired to be fat
and single. Anyway, it won! That opened a lot of doors for me, and within in
two years my first novel was published.
Why do you have different pen names,
and do you see them as distinct personalities and types of writers?
Yes, basically. I write a wide range
of contemporary fiction under my own name Rowan Coleman, sometimes emotional
family stories, sometimes time-travel adventures, sometimes historical ghost
stories. But when I write something that is more of a pure genre I write under
a pen name to define that. Bella Ellis is also a little tribute to the Bronte
Sister’s pens names they were first published under of Currer, Ellis and Acton
Bell.
What is your readership like..? Do you
meet them, or get letters from them?
They are lovely, diverse, ever
changing. There are a core of readers I have had now for nearly twenty years
and they honestly feel like friends, even though I haven’t met them in real
life! The great joy is every time I try something that is more genre fluid like
The Summer of Impossible Things or The Girl at the Window, I meet new readers,
and that’s always brilliant fun. I meet quite a few at book events, but I
suppose mostly I talk to my readers online, we all love books and that’s great
thing to have in common.
What are you going to write next..?
I’m just finishing Bronte
Mysteries 2 and then I have a new idea for a Rowan book that I could tell you
about, but then I’d have to kill you.
Finally… tell us something surprising
about yourself that your readers might not already know..!
I am a chronic over sharer so there
isn’t much mystery to me! I am dyslexic, I harbour a long held desire to write
a vampire novel and I’m married to Rick Astley’s guitarist, who is also my
childhood sweetheart, Adam.
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