Sara Sheridan writes the highly-acclaimed Mirabelle Bevan Mysteries which are set in London and Brighton during the 1950s. Mirabelle has been called ‘Miss Marple with an edge’.
England Expects, the third book in the series (following Brighton Belle and London Calling) is out in hardback now with the paperback on its way this summer. Set during the heatwave of 1953 Mirabelle and her sidekick, Vesta, investigate the seemingly unrelated murders of a racing journalist and a cleaning woman. The trail leads them to Brighton Pavilion’s crumbling passageways, to the quad of a Cambridge college and finally into the shady underworld of freemasonry in Brighton.
Sara tweets about her writing life as @sarasheridan and Mirabelle has her own twitter account @mirabellebevan
It’s all about keeping secrets and that’s fascinating for me as a writer. As an historical novelist it’s your job to spill the beans. You need to recreate a lost world – be it Roman Britain or Georgian London or 1950s Brighton – and you do that with the details. The sounds and smells, the fashions, the ins and outs of how people used money or communicated. Writing historical fiction is all about dropping in the day to day realities that bring the story to life. Historical readers are gripped by that kind of thing – how much a housemaid earned or how long it took people to get from Oxford to Cheltenham by stagecoach.
Writing crime is the very opposite. You keep every secret you can, you’re stingy with your clues. Crime fiction compels readers because beneath the surface of the story there’s something going on and they can’t quite get at it. Famously, a third of all books sold in the UK fall into the crime genre. That’s a lot of people hooked on secrets.
It’s a wide genre too. I love public speaking and I spend a good portion of my year at book festivals, in libraries and bookshops, talking about what I do. The Mirabelle Bevan mysteries fall into the category of cosy crime. It’s my favourite category – I idolized Agatha Christie as a teenage reader. I remember reading the ABC Murders, which I borrowed from my local library, and thinking ‘I hope she’s written something else…’ I am hooked on secrets myself, you see.
Within the genre though, cosy crime is often considered the poor relation of more flashy thrillers and gruesome police procedurals. So when I’m at an event and I meet those kind of crime writers (standard uniform is jeans and a leather jacket) I can see their eyes glaze over when they find out that I write cosy. The truth is, though, I think cosy crime is misunderstood. Agatha Christie wasn’t cosy at all. There’s no detailed evisceration, gruesome weapons or pools of blood in her stories, but once you understand the historical context of the times, the shock of writing a range of characters who are by turns, gay, lesbian, divorced, abused or suffering from mental illness, really hits you. Those subjects were absolutely taboo in the 1930s and things hadn’t changed much by the 1950s (when Christie was still putting pen to paper and where I now spend much of my time). Readers today just don’t get shocked by the details that Christie’s contemporary fans found so horrifying.
When I started to write Mirabelle’s first adventure I wanted to create something that fitted the cosy crime monicker but I wanted to imbue it with the spirit of Christie. I wanted to give it an edge without having to resort to graphic descriptions of violence. I come from a background in historical fiction and what I’d found most shocking in my research for the series was a side of the 1950s that wasn’t shocking at the time. I remember slouching in my seat as I watched Pathe News Reels, uncomfortable at the way men were talking about women. The discomfort ratcheted up when it came to white people talking about black people. The day to day terms are horrifying to a modern reader.
In distress myself I rang my mother. She met my father in the 1950s.
‘Mum,’ I asked, ‘did Dad talk to you like that?’
‘Oh yes, dear,’ she drawled. ‘It took me to 1972 to train him out of it.’
That’s the thing with the 1950s – it negotiates an interesting faultline between memory, nostalgia and history. There are living links to the era right now – fading fast, but they’re there in our older relations.
Thinking about it, I was taken aback by what Mum had done. Let’s be frank – my parents aren’t political people, they’re not radical campaigners but what I realized was that Mum had changed the world. My Mum and probably yours too (or depending where you stand on that memory-nostalgia-history faultline perhaps it was your Granny). Many of the rights I enjoy are down to action those women took. And for that matter, the men as well – after all, Dad took in what Mum was saying and changed his ways. And he was not alone.
I had to write a female detective, I realized. And Vesta Churchill, Mirabelle’s sidekick (the Hastings to her Poirot) had to be black. That’s where the action was in the 1950s – that’s where things changed.
When I did my first interviews – just after Brighton Belle came out – I could see the journalists and bloggers were a bit like the jeans and leather jacket brigade. There was an unspoken assumption that I’d written cosy crime because I couldn’t write forensics. Or that I was soft. Or squeamish. So I renamed the genre.
‘No, no, no,’ I said. ‘It’s not cosy crime. It’s cosy crime noir.’
That monicker genuinely suits the Mirabelle Bevan Mysteries because there is violence, there is racism and sexism too and there is (coming up later) just a little bit of sex. It’s cosy crime for the contemporary reader and I’m really enjoying pushing the boundaries of the genre.
“Great fun. The world needs Mirabelle’s feistiness, intelligence, and charm.” –James Runcie, author of the Grantchester mysteries
In post-World War II England, former Secret Service operative Mirabelle Bevan becomes embroiled in a new kind of intrigue…
1951: In the popular seaside town of Brighton, it’s time for Mirabelle Bevan to move beyond her tumultuous wartime years and start anew. Accepting a job at a debt collection agency seems a step toward a more tranquil life.
But as she follows up on a routine loan to Romana Laszlo, a pregnant Hungarian refugee who’s recently come off the train from London, Mirabelle’s instincts for spotting deception are stirred when the woman is reported dead, along with her unborn child.
After encountering a social-climbing doctor with a sudden influx of wealth and Romana’s sister, who seems far from bereaved and doesn’t sound Hungarian, Mirabelle decides to dig deeper into the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death. Aided by her feisty sidekick–a fellow office worker named Vesta Churchill (“no relation to Winston,” as she explains)–Mirabelle unravels a web of evil that stretches from the Brighton beachfront to the darkest corners of Europe. Putting her own life at risk, she must navigate a lethal labyrinth of lies and danger to expose the truth.
Praise for Brighton Belle
“Beneath that prim exterior lies a fearless, fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants kind of gal. One part Nancy Drew, two parts Jessica Fletcher, Mirabelle has a dogged tenacity to rival Poirot.” —Sunday Herald
“Unfailingly stylish, undeniably smart.” —Daily Record
“I was gripped from start to finish.” —Newbooks
“Plenty of colour and action . . . will engage the reader from the first page to the last. Highly recommended.”–Bookbag
“Fresh, exciting and darkly plotted, this sharp historical mystery plunges the reader into a shadowy and forgotten past.” —Good Book Guide
“Early 1950s England is effectively portrayed in this intriguing mystery story… An excellent read for the beach or a long flight.” —Historical Novel Review
“After many twists and turns, she finally unravels the mystery in an entertaining romp pitting her wits against underworld characters and scheming impostors.” —Bookseller
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