Are you ready to uncover a Gilded Age mystery that blurred the lines between fiction and reality? This week on Books & Looks, join Blaine DeSantis as he talks with acclaimed historical fiction author Marie Benedict about her new book, “The Queens of Crime.” Step back to 1931 London, where legendary mystery writers Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Orczy form a secret group to assert their place in a male-dominated world. But when a real-life murder occurs, these literary icons become unlikely detectives, using their mystery-writing prowess to solve a crime the police couldn’t. Learn about Benedict’s extensive research into the lives of these fascinating women and the historical attitudes they defied. A tale of suspense, murder, and the power of female ingenuity. Don’t miss this exclusive interview!
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Transcript
Blaine DeSantis: [0:00] Hi, friends, this is Blaine DeSantis, and I welcome you to another edition of Books and Looks. This is our weekly voyage of discovery into the wonderful world of books, the best of history, mystery, fiction, and nonfiction that I’ve been reading, along with, yes, along with exclusive interviews with those authors of the books. You don’t get that many places, but you’re going to get right here on Books and Looks. And I’m going to tell you what, I want to point you again to our friends over at booktrib.com. Wow, I’ve been looking at that, and I guess every week they come up with new books, new things for book clubs, new things for if you’re into science or into other historical fiction or the bestsellers. I mean, it’s all there. So if you’re interested in books and new books and reading about books, that’s the place to go.
Blaine DeSantis: [0:44] Now, friends, we have got a treat today because we have one of the leading, I mean, this leading historical fiction writers in the world right now. Her name is Marie Benedict, and we’ve got her here for Books and Looks, and she’s going to tell us all about a book called “The Queens of Crime.” It’s 1931 in London, and five legendary mystery writers, Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Orczy, they formed this little group called The Queens of Crime to prove themselves in a male-dominated world. But you see, a young nurse is eventually found murdered over in France, and the line between fiction and reality is going to blur as these women launch into a real-life investigation. Now, this is really combining the best of history and the best of fiction here because they, Queens of Crime, are out to unmask a killer before that killer kills someone else. It’s a tale of suspense and murder, intrigue. It is wonderful. I’ve got to love these women who are doing this back in 1931, and you’re going to love what we did with Marie Benedict. She’s a wonderful person. So I’m Blaine DeSantis. This is Books and Looks, and today we’re interviewing Marie Benedict about her new book, “The Queens of Crime.” Marie Benedict, welcome to Books and Looks.
Marie Benedict: [2:13] Thank you so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.
Blaine DeSantis: [2:16] Well, we’ve been anxious to have you on since the moment I saw this book was coming out, so I was very honored you would take time for us.
Marie Benedict: [2:23] Thank you so much. Well, it’s a pleasure being here.
Blaine DeSantis: [2:25] You know, before we get into the actual book, we have a little bit of background I want to get into about things in the book and about the book. And it starts out with this thing called the Detection Club. What was it? Why was it formed? Tell us about the Detection Club.
Marie Benedict: [2:40] So the Detection Club is a real-life organization that, in fact, still exists into today. It was started by a group of the best and brightest mystery writers in and around 1930, although I think the idea had kind of been germinating in one form or another before that.
Marie Benedict: [2:58] Dorothy Sayers, who’s one of the main characters of my book, sorry about that, is really at the forefront of putting this group of people together. And the goal kind of of the group—they have a couple goals. First, to kind of unify these mystery writers. This is a time period when these genres are really just really being formed. I mean, obviously there have been mystery books before that, but this is kind of the kind of classic murder mystery that we think of today is really being created in this time period. So they’re there to kind of support one another, network with one another, read each other’s works in progress. They do some collaborations together, but in Dorothy’s mind, one of the things she’s most interested in doing with this group is actually kind of unifying and elevating the craft. You know, it’s a new genre, there’s lots of variation in quality out there, and one of her sort of desires is to create the best quality she can for the genre because she wants them to be reviewed by top reviewers in magazines and newspapers. She wants them to be considered really on par with a lot of the other great literature of the day. So that’s kind of the origin behind the club.
Blaine DeSantis: [4:20] Okay. Were there a lot of women in that initial membership?
Marie Benedict: [4:23] No, there weren’t. I will say there’s a little deviation between fact and fiction in this, which is, and I always love to point that out as we get into that. There were women in the Detection Club. They were not in the same number as the men. You know, that’s a function, of course, of the time period. It was much more difficult for women to break into this very male-dominated field, writing in general, and kind of this seemingly sordid, craft, this sort of genre. But in order, as my book opens, I bring together five of the women who are within the organization. And I do highlight the fact that the men are more dominant than the women in the group. And in order to kind of create an atmosphere of the women coming together and proving themselves, I do have, I sort of, I would say, emphasize or overemphasize the divide between the men and the women. I don’t think it was probably quite to the extent that I depicted there.
Blaine DeSantis: [5:30] Okay. Very good. Now, you selected Dorothy Sayers as your narrator. Is it because she started or helped form the Detection Club?
Marie Benedict: [5:39] I mean, I think that was definitely part of it. I had read Dorothy Sayers growing up. I mean, growing up, I loved this sort of time period, these books, this classic locked room murder mysteries. And of course, Agatha Christie’s the best known today, but I was also reading some of these other books. So I knew Dorothy Sayers growing up. I knew her books. I actually got to know her more as a person, as an author, better when I was writing another book that I wrote called “The Mystery of Mrs. Christie,” which is about Agatha Christie’s disappearance. And I learned, even though I knew her books, I didn’t know the author, and I learned more about Dorothy. And I kind of dipped back into her books and really felt like they were so modern in feel. Dorothy’s dealing with a lot of issues in her stories that are very modern. I felt like she was an author that was had kind of been forgotten but was a little bit ripe for rediscovery, and when I learned that she had actually herself been involved in investigating a real-life murder, I was very gravitated towards getting into the story from her perspective.
Blaine DeSantis: [6:49] Yeah, wow, well that’s great, that’s great. Now, had you read all five of these women’s books? Because I know I had not read some of them. I had not read. I read The Hungarian Lady. What was her name?
Marie Benedict: [7:02] Babe.
Blaine DeSantis: [7:02] Orczy. I had not read the other lady. I have her books, but I have not read it. Margaret.
Marie Benedict: [7:07] Margery Allingham.
Blaine DeSantis: [7:08] Margery Allingham.
Marie Benedict: [7:09] And Ngaio Marsh. Those are the other two. Actually, I had. I had read maybe one or two each of the other women growing up. Like I said, I love the time period. I had this incredible aunt who was a professor and she gave me millions of books and these were that was one of her loves as well, so I kind of grew up with those. But I didn’t, I think I kind of knew certain of the women, I knew better, I knew their work, but I didn’t know the women themselves, and that was that was really the difference for me in writing this. Yes, I went back and rewrote, re-read a lot of their books. Certainly Dorothy Sayers, I re-read a lot of Christie, and I dipped into a lot of the other women’s stories. Because so often, whether we do it unconsciously or consciously, authors include little bits and pieces of themselves in their stories. But I also did a lot of research about the women generally, so that I could get to know them and their world and how they rose up to really become these incredible women.
Blaine DeSantis: [8:12] Very true. Great. Well, now, we talked all around it, but now we’ve got to figure out what is going on in this book. Tell us a bit about “The Queens of Crime.”
Marie Benedict: [8:20] So really, as you mentioned, the book opens with the founding of this Detection Club. The kind of setting, you know, we talk a lot of these very fanciful initiation rites, which are kind of part of the story. But really, the story kicks off when the women come together and are trying to find ways to really prove themselves, both to the Detection Club itself and to really the readers and the literary establishment. And around this time, Dorothy’s husband, who was a journalist, had been asked to cover a murder investigation in France. There had been several months prior, a young English nurse had gone on a day trip to this coastal town of Boulogne with a friend, a fellow nurse, and she disappeared in circumstances that really seemed torn from one of these women’s mystery novels. The girls had spent this day kind of touring this really cute town. And just before they’re about to take the ferry back to England.
Marie Benedict: [9:27] May Daniels, who’s the victim in the story, she stepped into a restroom that was on the dock. It was a restroom with one entrance and exit. It had no windows inside, no other, not even any vents. Her friend waited outside the restroom. And May Daniels never came out again. She seemingly vanished into thin air. And, you know, this was obviously very dramatic, very unusual crime. And it led to a huge amount of media coverage. And several months later, her body is found. She hadn’t been seen in the intervening months. And Dorothy Sayers’ husband is asked to cover the investigation into her murder. And Dorothy sees this as an opportunity for all five of the women to come on board and really prove themselves by solving a real-life murder. This indeed did happen. Dorothy Sayers and her husband actually set out for News of the World to cover this, and they did get involved in the investigation to May Daniels’ murder. The fiction is that the other friends…
Blaine DeSantis: [10:39] Mm-hmm. Doesn’t matter. It was a good read. I loved them bringing them all together. That’s great. You know, you talk about a very, okay, pivotal time for women because I was distressed. I have been distressed for a long time because they used the word surplus women, which was so damn derogatory. I’m sorry for swearing, but that’s what it was. They didn’t say damn cannon fodder about the men who were killed, but the women. Tell us about the whole concept of surplus women and who created this concept.
Marie Benedict: [11:19] Right. So, you know, I’ve researched this time period extensively. I’ve set several of my books in this interwar period. So we’re looking at the post-World War I, pre-World War II era. And to my surprise, as I was researching the time period, the murder of May Daniels, I spent a lot of time in the newspaper archives, because as I mentioned, this disappearance and the subsequent murder were heavily covered in the newspaper. And so, I mean, there’s hundreds, if not thousands of articles about it. And what I kept finding was this reference, or not the actual word, this attitude about May Daniels, that she was a surplus woman. And so I spent some time kind of investigating that, because it was a term I’d never heard before, and it was a concept I was unfamiliar with. A surplus woman is a young, doesn’t have to be young, it’s an unmarried working woman. And we’re talking about the era, the post-World War I era.
Marie Benedict: [12:23] There was an attitude during this time period that a woman should be married in the home, taking care of her husband and her children. However, in the years after, so many young men were killed during World War I and the population diminished, leading to a more of a dearth of young, eligible young men, that there very often weren’t men for young women to marry. And as a result, there was an unusually large population of single working women. Now, it didn’t seem to matter that these women didn’t often have men to marry, right?
Marie Benedict: [13:01] There was this negative attitude about these young working and older working women, regardless of whether it was a choice, regardless of whether they had elected that life or whether it was really by default. And May Daniels fell into that category. She was a single nurse. She was a young woman. She was in her 20s, and there seemed to be this lingering attitude about her and her disappearance that because she fell into this category that she, which was like very untraditional, right? Again, nevermind if she chose it or not, but that a young woman at this time should be married and taking care of her husband and children. So there were less resources, less attention dedicated to the investigation into her disappearance and then murder. And I just found the attitude so first shocking and then really just so reprehensible.
Marie Benedict: [13:55] And it really became central to the outcome of the story.
Blaine DeSantis: [13:59] Yeah, what’s interesting is that May Daniels was a nurse who was helping people after World War I, was doing good. They needed her during the war. They needed her time. Now it’s like, well, we don’t, you know, you’re surplus. You know, I was shocked at that. That peeved me, peeved me.
Marie Benedict: [14:19] It’s so upsetting because, like you said, during World War I, women were really being encouraged to work, right? They needed women. And then as soon as all the men that remained came back, it was like, let’s go back to what was before, take you out of the workplaces, not use the skills that you developed, time period, and now we want you back in the homes. And if you choose or even if you have no choice but to support yourself by working, you don’t have a family, you don’t have a husband, there was a really negative backlash from that. And, you know, May Daniels was very much a victim of that of that larger societal attitude.
Blaine DeSantis: [14:57] And even a lot of the women writers were considered surplus. They had nothing to do. So, well, they’re writing books. They’re writing mystery books. Right. Soft it off, you know?
Marie Benedict: [15:07] Yeah. What’s interesting too, is that the, yes, some of the women in the, some of the, the five women who are central to my story, the five women writers aren’t married, right? Ngaio Marsh is the primary one in that category. And, but you know, what’s a little bit different about surplus women and the five detectives at the heart of my story is that they were in a slightly higher, some much higher, but all definitely somewhat higher social class. The surplus women tended to fall sort of in the lower to middle class. The women, whether or not they had ample funds, if we’re wealthy or not, they were all very well educated. Baroness Orczy was royalty, right? You have women who are kind of operating in the higher echelons of society at that time. And yes, they were supposed to be married and have families of their own, but there was less of a stigma for them to work and to remain unmarried. So it was just a little bit, a little different. They were somehow able to avoid that label, more than somebody like May Daniels.
Blaine DeSantis: [16:12] Yeah. Yeah. That, that was a, that was fascinating. You know, and what you’ve done here, and I know you do this in all your books, is you blend the historical figures with the fictional figures. Is that difficult for you to do, especially in something like this, where we have women coming together that never, I don’t think, came together at one time to do this. Tell us a little bit about that.
Marie Benedict: [16:34] Well, first of all, these women did know each other and they were friends. And they were like the Queens of Crime, which is kind of the name that they take. That’s what they were called in the press. So we know that these women did meet separately. I do kind of play with the time and and, of course, imagine the conversations that they had because we don’t know what they talked about.
Marie Benedict: [17:00] We don’t know that we know that they collaborated, we know that they were in the Detection Club together. I’ve seen letters between some of them, but some of that that’s kind of where the fictional piece comes in. I do try to remain as true as I can. I mean, I’m in the way just to back up a second, the way I kind of approach it is this right: I do an immense amount of research. That’s my old lawyer training, you know, leave no stone unturned, right? So I do an immense amount of research, both original source material, and if I have to, secondary source material, to create, to understand the women, understand their characters.
Marie Benedict: [17:36] Understand what motivates them, how they really rose up to become these incredible women, and the world that they inhabit. I’m looking at things, social, political, cultural, all the things that are happening in their world. All of that really becomes the architecture of my story. It’s the foundation and the pillars and the roof upon on which the story hangs. The fictional pieces, whether it’s conversations, fictional characters, playing with dates and times, things like that, that all comes into the gray areas where we really don’t know what happens. Where we really, like, we know that these women were friends, but we don’t know what they were chattering about at these get-togethers they had. That’s the fiction. Sometimes an invented character to bring the story along. So I’m always trying to stay true to the women, their characters, the themes that I’m trying to go for. So the fiction is really, I hope, like really a logical extrapolation from the research that I’ve done.
Blaine DeSantis: [18:32] Well, you showed, I think, the five women, I think you show their evolution as friends and in their conversation through this entire book. Do we know if that happened in real life? Did they become closer the longer they were together?
Marie Benedict: [18:52] Definitely Agatha and Dorothy, for sure. They were very close. You know, Dorothy, as I mentioned before, I first really came across her as a person when I was writing “The Mystery of Mrs. Christie,” which is about Agatha Christie’s very real-life 11-day disappearance. And they were friends at that time, but they definitely became closer in the years that followed. They actually became quite good friends over the years. She was a reluctant, you know, after her disappearance, and that was a huge paparazzi event, she really became, she really retreated and became really reclusive. But Dorothy was a big personality and she could kind of always bring Agatha out of her shell. And so she really brought her into society more. And so they did have a very, very tight friendship. The other women, we know that they were all friends. We know that they operated in the same circles. How close the evolution of that friendship, I don’t, you know, I don’t know how quickly or slowly that transpired. That part of it is the fiction. You know, I compressed that into the time period, the investigation into the murder.
Blaine DeSantis: [20:03] Wow. Well, they certainly had distinct personalities, distinct writing styles, and their books are so different. You have Agatha, who writes about, you know, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and then you have Lord Peter, who is Dorothy’s creation. Who are some of the other, tell us a little bit more background about these other three. Who were they? Where were they from? And what were their name? What were they known for that way?
Marie Benedict: [20:32] Yeah. Well, I’ll start with Ngaio Marsh. She was, you know, all these women, what I love, just to back up a second about these five women. And they really were friends with each other. They come from different places, different continents in some cases. They come from different sorts of backgrounds, different educations, different social strata. Again, they’re not, they’re still an elevated social strata, but there’s variation there. And to bring, and they were different ages. I mean, they spanned ages from 20s to 70s. That type of friendship, I mean, it’s, I would say, uncommon to some extent now, but it was very uncommon during that time period when people really did kind of stay within their spheres, you know, this, especially the social strata. So I loved, I intentionally, you know, brought these women together in this way at this time because I wanted to explore that, that intergenerational friendship, that really is so important to us today and always, I really feel. So Ngaio, you know about Dorothy and Agatha. Ngaio Marsh, she was actually from New Zealand. She was also very big in the theater world, and she’s actually credited with really elevating the theater scene in New Zealand, really bringing it up. Even today, she’s remembered for that. She had all these women, not all of them, but they had like these gentlemen detectives.
Marie Benedict: [21:58] Yeah. And so hers was Roderick Allen, I think it was her campion. I get them mixed up.
Marie Benedict: [22:04] But she was also known for her personality. You know, she had sort of a bold personality. She loved to wear pantsuits. And the fact that that made her scandalous tells you a lot about the time period.
Blaine DeSantis: [22:16] And you bring that up very well. Very well is brought up.
Marie Benedict: [22:18] I mean, it was a real thing. Like, imagine having to think twice about wearing pants. But anyway. So, and then Margery Allingham, she was an English woman. She was the youngest of the group. She was raised in a family of writers, so it really came to her quite naturally. Her parents were editors and magazine writers. And she, again, had a gentleman detective, all a little bit different, different backgrounds. But Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh’s characters, Roderick Allen and Albert Campion, those two actually have been adapted into series on PBS. Over the years, as have Dorothy Sayers’ characters and, of course, Agatha Christie’s. So some people would know the names of their characters in the series that they write, but they might not know the women. And that was something that was interesting to me as well, that you could create a fictional character that would live on, well past your own name being known. And that was very much the case with these women. The fifth is really the most, is another well-known woman, Baroness Emma Orczy. She was a Hungarian aristocrat in exile, living in England and in France as well.
Marie Benedict: [23:35] She was a very kind of big, romantic, flamboyant personality. She wrote a mystery series about, it’s really considered the first armchair detective. It’s about this older man who kind of like sat in a literally in a chair, that’s where the phrase armchair detective came up, and solved mysteries. But she’s actually much better known for her Scarlet Pimpernel series. You know, for people who don’t know that, a lot of people have heard the name Scarlet Pimpernel even if they’re not super familiar with those books. They were in some ways one of the first dual identity action heroes. The Scarlet Pimpernel was an English aristocrat who by night would put on a cape and a mask and would rescue, as the Scarlet Pimpernel, he would rescue French aristocrats from the guillotine. That was kind of his story. So and those had been adapted into plays and movies and really so have lived that character has lived on, but also all these dual identity action heroes, Marvel and you name it, a lot of them really started with the Scarlet Pimpernel. So she was a mystery writer as well. The Scarlet Pimpernel is more like historical adventure, and she’s probably better known for those. I mean, she was the oldest. She was in her 70s.
Blaine DeSantis: [24:53] She was, yeah. And if I’m not mistaken, Scarlet Pimpernel. Leslie Howard was the Scarlet Pimpernel in the movies, way back when classic.
Marie Benedict: [25:02] You know classic film. So she has, she was probably during this time period, Agatha was becoming well known, but of this group in this time, Baroness Orczy was the most famous and most successful.
Blaine DeSantis: [25:18] That was, you know, this murder investigation, we see corruption, we see power all displayed with the men and why did you want to explore this because you really got into of that, that whole process of the corruption of this like this entire who did it and we now know why. What tell us about that please, yeah.
Marie Benedict: [25:38] I’m going to talk about it without giving spoilers.
Blaine DeSantis: [25:40] No, no spoilers, don’t, no, yeah, so.
Marie Benedict: [25:44] So here’s, I mean, so what I was interested in was exploring, first of all, the issue of a marginalized young woman. You know, we already talked about her being, May Daniels being a surplus woman.
Marie Benedict: [25:58] The way in which she was depicted in the media, which really became apparent to me during my investigation, my research, you know, a lot. I read, I can’t even tell you how many newspaper articles, hundreds and hundreds, was really telling about the time period. And I thought it was very fitting for these. I mean, this is really the murder investigation that Dorothy Sayers did. So I was I was very much wedded to working on the actual murder investigation that she was involved in. But it was such an interesting investigation because it really revealed so much about attitudes about women during this time period, restrictions on women during this time period, the way in which those attitudes played out in the way their lives or deaths would be experienced. And so in exploring it and then in exploring the conclusion, the way in which the story evolves, some of which I definitely had to fictionalize without giving away too much, I had to fictionalize some of that because some of the questions were left unanswered in the real investigation. But the things that I explored, the avenues and the resolutions are ones that, all ones that had been tossed around by the press. These were theories that had been floated.
Marie Benedict: [27:21] By the press based on certain clues. And I basically followed them out to their final conclusions because they were things that people in the society at that time were imagining were happening and were possibilities. So without giving away any spoilers, I hope that answered your question.
Blaine DeSantis: [27:39] No, and I don’t think people realize how the press covered these things. I mean, they were 20, 30 newspapers sending people over and they’re all vying for their own angle. And now we’re coming up with these bizarre ideas. And, but we end up with, I like to call it the rush to judgment. Everything that happened.
Marie Benedict: [28:01] Yeah.
Blaine DeSantis: [28:02] If they saw one clue, well, that’s what that’s all about. They saw another clue. Well, that’s what that’s all about. We can put it to bed. You know, that’s what made these women different. They analyzed the clues.
Marie Benedict: [28:12] That’s right. They were really, I mean, they were utilizing their skills as mystery writers in a very real-life application, and they were approaching it from the perspective of a woman as well. You know, so when they did their investigation, they weren’t starting at it with all these preconceptions that the authorities or the male journalists were. They were starting it from their perspective, the perspective of a woman exploring characters from her unique lens. And so when they did that, they conducted an investigation that was different from everybody else’s. You know, they retraced the girl’s path instead of just kind of plunging in. They spoke to the women that all the girls, that the two girls would have encountered, many of which had kind of been ignored by the authorities and the journalists. So in doing that and approaching it in that way, which was kind of unique for the time and for the situation, they actually came across a lot of answers that everybody else was up.
Blaine DeSantis: [29:21] Missing. Well, again, if we go in the layers of investigation, you had the women doing a lot, a lot, I mean, a lot of investigating, then you had the media, and finally you had the police who did not much of anything. They were stumped from day one and didn’t do much.
Marie Benedict: [29:41] Well, I think too, with the with the media and with the authorities as well, so much of their attitudes came into play with how much they were willing to do and what sort of clues they were seizing on and, like you said, rushing to judgment. That lens through which they viewed May, that she was a surplus woman, really meant that she was only deserving of a certain amount of investigation. And they were going to make assumptions about the kind of person that she was and the kind of behavior she was engaged in, not necessarily because of evidence that they found, but because of perceptions that they had about women at that time. I’ll just give you one example. When I first started to read all these newspaper articles about the murder, I started to see pictures of May. It was usually the same picture and a description of her as having bobbed or shingled hair. You know, so when you think of the 1920s, you think of those bobbed haircuts, right? And I didn’t think anything of it at first. I was just like, oh, they’re just talking about what she looked like. You know, this is a stylish haircut of the time. It was only once I got deeper into the research that I realized that referencing that haircut and showing her with that haircut was telegraphing a judgment.
Marie Benedict: [31:00] A girl, a traditional girl at this time would have long hair. It would be styled a certain way. A modern girl would have the bobbed haircut. A modern girl was not embracing traditional values.
Marie Benedict: [31:17] A modern girl is one that might be a working girl. It might be a girl who’s not married. It might be a girl who’s loose, you know? So embedded in this article. Now, the readers from the time period would have known that, right? They would have seen that and said, oh, she’s a girl with a shingled haircut. We know what that means.
Blaine DeSantis: [31:37] She’s a floozy.
Marie Benedict: [31:38] Exactly, right? So there’s so much judgment out there. And that lens through which they’re looking at May is something that I was very interested in exploring. And it was something that I was interested in having my detectives debunk.
Blaine DeSantis: [31:54] Yeah. What year did this happen?
Marie Benedict: [31:58] In the early 1930s.
Blaine DeSantis: [32:00] In the early 1930s. So when you talked about the bob, that, that by that time it’s almost over because the roaring 20s has ended that.
Marie Benedict: [32:10] That haircut was still, it was still very much, that was, we think of this all happening the roaring 20s, but it’s, it’s, it’s going into the 1930s as well.
Blaine DeSantis: [32:19] It did, okay. I was unaware of that. I, I just, yeah, I seem to concentrate on the 20s and don’t get into the, when I think of 30s, I’m thinking of the dust bowl. So that’s, but.
Marie Benedict: [32:28] This is England, so they’re in a slightly different.
Blaine DeSantis: [32:31] No doubt. I know that. Wow. Now, you talked about the Detection Club had rules. And I think, friends, you got to know this. We’re going to get into this just a little bit here. First of all, what were some of the rules of the Detection Club if you wanted to be a part of it? And did you use those rules when you wrote this book?
Marie Benedict: [32:50] I tried.
Blaine DeSantis: [32:51] I thought so.
Marie Benedict: [32:52] They were important to Dorothy. You know, as I mentioned earlier, when we were talking about the formation of the Detection Club, Dorothy was very interested in elevating the craft. I mean, they all were, but this is kind of the bee in Dorothy’s bonnet specific. She was interested in the rules of fair play. And fair play, so fair play meant that you were proceeding with a certain level of logic and thoughtfulness in creating your story. So when she, you know, the Detection Club was kind of a rarefied organization. You had to be invited. It was only the best and the brightest. And it was the people who were already kind of towing the line, obeying the rules of fair play. So as part of the initiation ceremony into the Detection Club, it was a very elaborate ceremony. She had everybody wear long robes, carry lit candelabra as they approached a stage, which was kind of like an altar. Standing up there would be the leaders of the club, one of which would be Dorothy, and she would be holding a theatrical skull, right? And the initiate had to put their hand on the skull and swear that they would—it’s very long, but this is the short version of it—that they would solve their crimes, their mysteries, without coincidence, acts of God, skullduggery.
Blaine DeSantis: [34:19] Right.
Marie Benedict: [34:20] Something called Jiggery Pokery. And the list kind of went on and on. And the bottom line of which was no fanciful endings. Use logic. So, you know, like I said earlier, there was a pretty big variation in quality in these early days of these mysteries. And sometimes there would be a mystery that was well thought out, you know, well constructed. And then at the very end, there’d be a character or a piece of evidence that had never been mentioned before. The reader could not have possibly resolved the mystery on their own because the clues simply weren’t there. She wanted to avoid that and kind of move the genre away from that towards something that was more… elevate it. And so the Detection Club, from the very beginning, she wanted her members to really abide by that particular role.
Blaine DeSantis: [35:14] That’s fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. She was the only one who was actually investigating the May Daniels murder. None of the other ones ever got involved at all.
Marie Benedict: [35:24] In real life? Yeah. In real life, she and her husband. So her husband was asked to cover the murder. It was a paparazzi event, you know, in Boulogne when that happened.
Marie Benedict: [35:34] And she actually had the idea that it would be fascinating for the two of them to write companion pieces for the News of the World, which is where her husband worked. He would cover it from a journalistic perspective, and she would do her own investigation and cover the murder from the perspective of a crime fiction writer. So that, and so she really did do that, and she really did investigate it. And I really do believe that that experience, I don’t want to give it away in these spoilers, but and her sort of assessment of what transpired stayed with her for the rest of her life because the research that I did came from her own books. So, you know, I had read Dorothy Sayers before and I reread a lot of the books. First of all, the ones that involved Harriet Vane, who’s the sidekick of Lord Peter Wimsey and her stories. Because I think Harriet Vane is actually like an autobiographical stand-in for Dorothy Sayers. And also, I reread a lot of the books that came out around this time period because in the books, she is leaving clues that are her musings on the murder of May Daniels. For example, in a book that came out about a year or so after the investigation, she creates a scene that’s almost exactly like the disappearance of May Daniels. And then she resolves it.
Marie Benedict: [37:00] In her own way. And I very much drew on that for inspiration in my book. And that’s not the only time that happened.
Blaine DeSantis: [37:10] This is no spoiler, but at one point in time, they’re over there investigating and all of a sudden her husband, Dorothy’s husband, gets shipped back to England. Did that really happen?
Marie Benedict: [37:21] Yeah, it really did. I actually had a section in the book which I scrapped because it was too much of a side issue. It took away, but he was pulled into this whole, they were there investigating it. And then there had been this, I think it was an English aristocrat of some kind. He had embezzled a ton of money. And he had been in hiding across Europe during this time period. And he resurfaced right near where they were. And he got pulled off this case and put on that case. So that really did happen during that time period. So I really do, even in the small details, because that’s not, and in another version of the book, I really get into that. But I really do try to adhere to the historical record wherever I can, even if it’s a detail that doesn’t seem that crucial to the story. It’s just fun for me to really bring those real historical facts to life.
Blaine DeSantis: [38:17] And don’t you notice, that’s what I pick out. That’s a little fine.
Marie Benedict: [38:21] I know, it’s a lawyer in you.
Blaine DeSantis: [38:22] I tell you, that’s right. Well, you know, you’ve been delightful, but I got to ask you this before we finish this up. And I know you can’t tell me this, but I’m going to ask anyway. What’s next for Marie Benedict? Oh, I can tell you what’s next. Oh, you can’t. Okay. What’s coming up? What’s coming up?
Marie Benedict: [38:39] So I have a new book coming out in March. It’s called “Daughter of Egypt.”
Marie Benedict: [38:45] And it’s the story of Lady Evelyn Herbert, who was the daughter of Lord Carnarvon, who owned Highclere Castle, which is the setting of Downton Abbey. He was also a very well-known patron of archaeology. And he, for years, had done, prior to World War I, he had done tons of digs in Egypt. And his daughter, during the summers when they couldn’t dig because it was too hot, Howard Carter, who was his actual archaeologist, really tutored Evelyn Herbert in archaeology. And when they were finally able to go back to Egypt to resume digging after World War I, she joined them on their excavations. And Evelyn Herbert was determined to find the tomb of the pharaoh Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut was one of the only female pharaohs. She was the most successful. And in the years after her death, someone went around and literally chiseled her name out of history, from monuments, tombs, papyrus. She was scratched out. And so people really didn’t know about her for a long time. And she wanted to find her tomb and solve the mystery of what had happened to Hatshepsut. During those attempts at finding that tomb.
Marie Benedict: [40:09] They actually uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, King Tut, which is the largest archaeological find of all time. So the book explores Lady Evelyn, her contributions to that, and it also, I go deep into the past and try to unearth what happened to Hatshepsut as well.
Blaine DeSantis: [40:27] And it’s next March, and it’s called “Daughter of Egypt”?
Marie Benedict: [40:31] “Daughter of Egypt,” yeah.
Blaine DeSantis: [40:33] And that’s done already?
Marie Benedict: [40:34] Oh yeah, that’s done.
Blaine DeSantis: [40:36] Are you writing another one already?
Marie Benedict: [40:39] Yeah, I already have one that’s coming out in next summer. That’s a co-written book with Victoria Christopher Murray.
Blaine DeSantis: [40:46] My word, you keep busy.
Marie Benedict: [40:48] I love it. I feel lucky I get to do this for my job.
Blaine DeSantis: [40:52] You’ve got a myriad of fans. You’re one of the most popular historical fiction writers. I love that you delve into the mystery part of it at times also. I think it’s great. And personally, I’m thrilled that you were here with us today. And I thank you so much for being today with us on Books and Looks.
Marie Benedict: [41:08] Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a pleasure.
Blaine DeSantis: [41:11] Thank you, Marie, for being on and being with us today. Wow. I’m telling you what, this was a fun, fantastic book to read. So much. I learned history and fiction. We combined them beautifully. You’re great. And I’m going to tell you, I hope you all go out, buy this book, give a listen to the show, because I’m going to tell you why. She has done a wonderful job with the Queens of Crime and these five legendary mystery writers, real life people, each and every one of them. So I want to tell you what, it’s a great book. And again, she’s a fun writer. I’m so glad we could have her on. So anyway, on behalf of Books and Looks, this is Blaine DeSantis saying, may all of your leaves be pages in a book.
