Transcript

Welcome to Mystery Books Podcast, a podcast covering mysteries in all of their forms from classic golden age novels to contemporary cozies. I’m mystery author Sara Rosett and this S1 E4, and it’s all about The Moonspinners by Mary Stewart.

Book Blurb

All right. So this is one of my all time favorite books. It was published in 1962. And let me read the blurb first:

Transport yourself to the idyllic hills of mid-century Crete in this tale of peril and intrigue, from the original queen of romantic suspense. Nicola Ferris is looking forward to a holiday in Crete, but before she reaches the island, she stumbles across a murderous crime. For the first time in her life, Nicola meets a man and a situation she can’t handle.

All right. So I had to search around for a blurb that did not give away too much. And I even had to edit this one a little bit because it’s really hard to talk about this book without giving away too much. I will try and do my best here to not spoil anything.

First line, let’s read that: “It was the egret, flying out of the lemon grove, that started it.” I love that. I think part of the reason I love this book so much is the writing is just so beautiful. Mary Stewart is excellent at  invoking, setting in. Her description is beautiful, but it’s not boring. I think that’s one reason that when I write, I always try to include information about the setting and give you a feel of the place, because I read these books when I was younger and they made such an impression on me.

All right. So I would classify this book. I would call it mystery adjacent. It would have properly been categorized as romantic suspense in 1962. It’s romance with a very heavy dose of mystery. I feel that it would interest mystery readers today. And that term “mystery adjacent,” that is something that I have picked up from the Plot Trysts podcast. They review and talk about romance books, but they have “mystery adjacent” books in their romance podcast. So this is what I would call a mystery adjacent romantic suspense.

Today, this type of book, I would call it “classic romantic suspense” because romantic suspense as a category is now mostly like man-chest covers, and it’s certainly much steamier than The Moonspinners. So if you read romantic suspense today, this is not like the romantic suspense of today. It’s more of a classic version. But the story itself is also very classic and timeless, I think.

Story Behind the Story

OK, so fun facts and interesting story behind the story, things about The Moonspinners. Mary Stewart was one of the leading authors of romantic suspense, and she’s known for blending strong mystery with romance. She’s also known, as I said, for her beautiful writing and for the sort of exotic settings of her books. This one is in Crete. She’s done others in Corfu, France. Vacation destination books is what I would call them. They these books made me want to travel. When I read them, I read them in a very impressionable age, obviously.

So Mary Stewart’s New York Times obituary states that she was known for elevating the romance genre, and it quotes the columnist Melanie Reid’s article in a Glasgow newspaper called The Herald from 2004. And she said, “Mary Stewart sprinkled intelligence around like stardust. Every chapter was headed with a quote,” and this is very true. There’s so many classic allusions and references in these books that you can obviously tell that Mary Stewart loved classic literature. She loved myths, she loved Greek myths especially. And all of that is woven into her books. I enjoy her books for this sort of like added intellectual aspect, but I enjoyed them even more because I love her heroines.

They’re smart and they’re savvy women who they get swept up in something bigger than themselves, but they always find a way out of the dangerous tangle and they usually find love in the process, which is always a bonus. The Guardian’s obituary describes Mary Stewart’s motivation for writing this “new” type of romance heroine: “It was her ‘anti-namby-pamby’ reaction, as she called it.”

In other words, it was her response to the too stupid to live heroine. Which I mean, we’ve all had that experience when we’re reading a book and we just don’t know why the heroine goes into that dark, deserted house or goes wandering around the moor in their nightgown. Just doesn’t make sense. And this was her reaction. This type of fiction was her reaction to these heroines in some of the romance books that I guess she’d obviously read that were doing things that just were unbelievable.

And that’s one thing I do admire about Mary Stewart, is her heroines are always smart, they seem to be real people. They have fears, they have desires, but they never do things that are just absurd.

Themes and Tropes

Now we come to theme. I think the major theme of this book is Resurrection, Death and Rebirth. I can’t say much more than that without spoiling the book. So I will keep this short. But even the setting of the book takes place at Easter. Nicola is traveled to Crete for her Easter holiday. That emphasizes the theme and then the storyline itself. There’s a lot of references.  I’ve read this book several times. I don’t usually reread books. Usually I read them and I’m done, but this is one that I reread. And I don’t know, probably the second or third time I reread it, I was like, oh, there’s so much in here. And once you start looking for it, you see it more and more. Theme of resurrection is very strong in this book.

All right, let’s switch over to tropes. This book has one of my all time favorite tropes, and it’s the Vacation Adventure. Nicola is working in Athens. She has a job at the British embassy, and she’s been in Greece for a little over a year. She’s traveled around and seen lots of different things in Athens. And this is her Easter break, and so she’s getting out of hot, stuffy Athens and crowded Athens. Because all the tourists will be there, and she’s going to Crete. This part of Crete is very deserted and not commercialized. Someone from this village went to England, started a restaurant, made a lot of money and has returned. And so that person has bought an old I guess we call it a coffee house. That had some rooms above it for rent. And they are renovating this building and turning it into a hotel. They’re not officially open for business yet, but Nicola heard about it through fellow traveler and decides that that’s the perfect place to get away from the crowds of Athens. And so she’s going there. Her aunt is going to meet her there. And her aunt still lives in England. But her aunt is very interested in wildflowers, and this island in this part of Crete is known for its beautiful flowers. So she convinces her aunt to meet her there. They’re going to this place that should be like a quiet, you know, nothing to do but swim in the bay, maybe take a boat out, tour the beautiful scenery. There’s really nothing to do in this little village. So it should be a very tame vacation. But of course, it’s not. Even before she gets to the village, Nicola finds adventure.

Another trope in this book is the Exotic Location. I’ve already talked about Crete a little bit, and the setting that’s so isolated, it’s kind of its own little world. Mary Stewart drops quite a few clues in the beginning that it’s a very primitive area, and that it can be a little dangerous.

There’s a trope of Hidden Valuables, shall we say, that we find out later on. I won’t say more than that.

There’s the trope of the Wounded Man. Nicola becomes involved in helping Mark, who has run into some trouble. So there’s some romance there. He needs her help and he doesn’t really want her help, but he needs her help. And so it allows her to become involved in this mystery.

Another trope is the Who Can You Trust trope. So because of the situation that Mark the Wounded Man is in, Nicola becomes involved in that. And she hears his story, and she realizes that, “Oh, my goodness, this village could be involved in what’s going on.” She does not know who could have been involved in this dangerous situation. So she has to be very careful and she doesn’t really trust anyone. This has a lot of elements of like psychological suspense. Because she is, everybody she meets, she’s trying to figure out if they were involved in this problem with Mark, that he’s involved in. There is so much suspense in this book, especially once she goes down into the village and stays there. She helps Mark in the White Mountains and helps him get recovered from this wound that he’s had. Once she does that, they both realise it’s safer for her to go down to the village. But once she’s there, everyone she meets, she’s second guessing. Like, is this person involved? Is this person involved? And of course, because of who she is, she cannot just go on with her vacation.

Nicola is described as someone with a very soft heart. In a way, she’s a little bit of a trope. She’s the type of person who is always taking in wounded or stray animals, always caring for things and getting involved.

Adaptations

All right. Let’s talk about the adaptation. In 1964, there was a film version made by Walt Disney Productions. And it starred Hayley Mills. Now for me, as somebody who had read this book first and then saw the movie, the movie was a huge disappointment. And I think partly it was because the types of books I read, there are so few movies made of those books, that when I saw that there was a movie, I was like, “Oh, my goodness, it’s going to be so great!” And it was so different from the book that I just found it hugely disappointing.

Now I know other people who saw the movie first and then read the book, and they really enjoyed the movie. Leaving aside the changes that they made in the plot, I think my main issue with the movie was the character of Nicola is so different from the Nikky character in the movie. The Wikipedia entry about the movie says that the movie was aimed at a more mainstream audience. Then later on, when Disney began to focus more on appealing to just children, this movie was apparently aimed at an adult mainstream audience. But even then, I just found it too juvenile. The character of Nikky, played by Hayley Mills, she was just too young. The movie did not capture the spirit of the book. And so for me that was really disappointing, but beautiful scenery. So if you just want to escape to Crete for a couple of hours and see some beautiful locations, then this might be a  good movie for you.

Quotes

All right. So next up, are quotes. I chose a longer passage from this book because it really captures the relationship between Nicola and her aunt and gives you a little summary of what’s going on and how Nicola approaches things. So it begins with her aunt’s reaction to Nicola’s story of what she’s found in the hills above this little village. And the aunt says:

“My dear,” she said gently, “you’ve got yourself so involved with Marks’ side of this that you’ve forgotten how it started.”
“How it started?”
“There was a murdered man,” she said.
Silence, broken by the crisping of the shingle at the sea’s edge. I stopped, picked a flat pebble, and skimmed it at the surface of the water. It sank immediately. I straightened, dusting my hands.
“I’ve been awfully stupid,” I said humbly.
“You’ve been right in the thick of it, honey, and you’ve been frightened. It’s easy for me, walking calmly in at half-time. I can see things more clearly. Besides, you’re emotionally involved.”
“Who said I was?”
“Aren’t you?”

Nicola becomes swept up in this and doesn’t quite realize how emotionally involved she is in it.

I’ve mentioned several times during this podcast how much of an influence The Moonspinners and Mary Stewart’s writing had on me as an impressionable young person. It was such a big influence, her writing was, and particularly this book that I wanted to try my own hand at the genre, at what I would call classic romantic suspense, this blend of adventure and intrigue with a dash of romance. I’d always written cozies which are very whodunit-esque. You have a dead body and you have some searching for clues. These types of books have a completely different structure, there’s more suspense. After writing several cozies, I wanted to try something new, so I wrote Elusive. And that’s the first book in the On the Run series. Now I’ll add the audiobook sample here to give you a taste of it. Zoe gets mixed up in international intrigue that takes her to Italy, where she searches the cobblestone streets in scenic squares for her missing ex.

Here’s a short sample of Elusive read by Laura Princiotta.

(Excerpt of Elusive)

That was Elusive, the first book in the On the Run series. It was read by Laura Princiotta. You can find it on Audible and on all other audio book retailers like Kobo Audio or through your local library, through Hoopla or Overdrive.

What are your thoughts on classic romantic suspense? Any favorite authors you enjoy? I hope this podcast lets you revisit a favorite book or perhaps helps you discover a new author to try. If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, I hope tell a fellow mystery readers. Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.