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Transcript

Welcome to Mystery Books podcast, where we talk about mysteries in all of their forms from classic golden age novels to contemporary cozies. I’m mystery author Sara Rosett. And this is season one, episode six, and it’s all about Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen.

If you love Downton Abbey and Miss Fisher, this episode is for you. Her Royal Spyness was published in 2007, and it’s a long series. Number fourteen just came out, and I believe number fifteen is on preorder. So if you like this type of book, you have a good long series to dig into. Now, you might notice that I’m talking mostly about first in a series books. We’ve done a couple of episodes now, and I’m trying to go back to the first book in each series. And the reason for that is because most mystery readers like to start at the beginning, even if you don’t have to read a series in order. Most mystery readers prefer to do that if possible. And with ebooks now, it’s easy to find the first book in each series. That’s why we’re doing the first book most of the time. And we have the #nospoilers motto on the Mystery Books podcast. So hopefully as we talk about the first book, we will not spoil anything that will happen later on in the series.

Here’s a little bit about Her Royal Spyness.

Book Blurb

“It is an Agatha Award winner, and it’s the debut of a 1930s London mystery series featuring Lady Georgie, daughter of a Duke. She’s thirty-fourth in line for the English throne. But when her brother cuts off her allowance, she leaves Scotland for London. But then an arrogant Frenchman winds up dead in her bathtub. Now, her most important job is to clear her very long family name.”

So that’s an abbreviated version of the blurb. I had to chop out some stuff because I didn’t want to give anything away. It’s amazing how many blurbs give away key plot points.

Here’s the first line. “There are two disadvantages to being a minor royal.” Which I think is a great opening. It gives you the fact that Georgie is dealing with the downsides of being a royal and that she’s a minor royal. So already we’re intrigued.

The book opens in Scotland at this drafty family castle. Lady Georgie is 21, and she’s been to finishing school and completed her season. But she hasn’t received any suitable marriage proposals, which in that day and time was not a good thing. She finds out that the Queen has requested her brother and sister-in-law to hold a house party with the intent of matching her to a European prince. And this prince is definitely a frog, not one that you’d want to end up with. And Georgie calls him “a cold fish with staring eyes, a limp handshake and a look that indicated a perpetual bad smell under his nose.” So definitely a frog.

She does what any self respecting young woman would do. She flees to London to make her own way in the world. After attempting several jobs and failing at those, she finds a dead body in her bath and she turns to sleuthing. And then the mystery series is off and running.

Now we’ve got a lot of fun supporting characters in this series. We have her half brother and his nickname is Binky. All the characters in this book, the aristocratic characters have nicknames. And that’s something that I discovered as I was researching my 1920s series is that nicknames were very common, and often they had nothing at all to do with the person’s given name. You know, like Elizabeth becomes Liz, oftentimes. That’s not the case at all here with these.

So Binky’s real name is Hamish. He grew up at a boarding school and Georgie describes the place as one that has cold showers and runs at dawn and, “is designed to mold the future leaders of the Empire.” He’s very fond of Georgie, but is often overruled by his penny-pinching and very critical wife, Hilda, who her nickname is Fig. Which I think is really funny. She’s extremely fond of economizing and setting an example for the lower classes. Not so much interested in economizing for themselves in major ways. A lot of her economizing involves limiting Georgie’s funds.

Another character we have is Georgie’s best friend Belinda. She’s kind of racy and lives on the edge and does things that Georgie would never do.

Then we also have her down to earth commoner grandfather on her mother’s side, and he was a policeman.

And then we have her actress mother who bolted. And that was a term that was used in the 20s and 30s for aristocratic women who just left the country. They dropped everything, abandoned their families and went to… A lot of times they went to Africa, to India, to foreign places and lived away from their families. Her mother took off to travel the world and she’s married and divorced many wealthier men.

And then we have last but not least, the dashing but poor Darcy O’Mara, he is also aristocratic, but he is like Georgie. He has very little money.

The setting of this book is 1930s London. Most of the book has a really light tone, but there are some darker hints. You get a look at the hardships of the time. You see descriptions of the war veterans who are out of work and the soup kitchens. And then you also have the fact that Georgie’s own father shot himself after gambling away most of the family money before the crash in 1929. Georgie is in severe financial straits. She has no allowance, and no job, and no skills she can turn into a job, and really no practical skills at surviving. She doesn’t know how to light a fire. She doesn’t know how to do a lot of the things that she would need to if she’s going to survive on her own.

Story Behind the Story

All right. The story behind the story section. This is a fun one for this book. In this series, there is so much royal trivia in this series. If you enjoy royal trivia and especially historic royal trivia, there’s the etiquette around the queen and the king and the royal intrigue. The queen summons Georgie to her and gives her some task and wants her to do some discreet spying. Talk about that in the tropes later. So you have this peek into this exclusive world. That’s pretty interesting. And I’ve heard Rhys Bowen speak about this at a couple of conferences and events. The background of the books is drawn from history and from some of her relative’s stories.

At one of the events, Rhys mentioned some of the research sources she uses. She talked about newspapers from the time period. She uses historical maps, and reads a lot of biographies and autobiographies. And I found the same thing for me. When I’m writing the historical 1920 series, I really have dug into biographies, autobiographies. I like to read the newspaper of that time and look at magazines to really give me a feel for the time period. Rhys Bowen’s website states that she married into an upper class family, “rather like Georgie’s with cousins with silly nicknames, family ghosts, and stately homes.”

Themes and Tropes

All right. So let’s talk about themes, I think for this book and for the first probably 10 books of the series. The main theme is Belonging. Georgie’s trying to figure out where she fits. She’s caught between these two worlds, this world of royalty and the aristocracy and this world of the commoners. So she’s got these aristocratic relatives, including the queen, and there’s certain expectations and things that she has to do because she’s part of that world. But her mom was an actress, and she was a bolter; she has a scandalous reputation. And her grandfather is very down to earth. He’s a commoner, very practical person. Georgie is trying to sort through this and figure out either how she can live in both worlds or how she can blend them together.

All right. This book especially has a lot of fun tropes. This whole series has great tropes that I personally enjoy to read and to write about.

And one of the most common in this sort of historical in the wars period is the Stately Home/Manor House trope. So it’s one of my favorites. I’ve written quite a few manor house mysteries and I think the lure and the draw of it is that it’s got this dual quality, it’s got the microcosm of society. So you have in this, you know, country home manor house setting, you’ve got the wealthy owners of the home as well as the servants who live there. So you have the upper echelon and the lower echelons. And it’s all enclosed within this little, you know, area. It can be quite extensive, but it’s all enclosed in its own little world. So you’ve got a microcosm of that. But then you also have the fact that these country home mysteries are a look at the culture of the time. So most of them focus on the upper class point of view, of course, because that is interesting and appealing to us. It’s a way of life that pretty much no longer exists, except for like a tiny portion of people in the world today. And it’s fascinating to go back and look at it through these, through fiction. So we get a look at the class structure, at the customs of the day. We get that peek into the exclusive world. So I think that’s why they’re so appealing. And the interesting thing about country homes is that they really were their own little self-sufficient world most of the time. They had gardens, greenhouses, farms, sometimes breweries, sometimes lumberyards. So they were very self-sufficient. In a way, it was like their own little world. And I think that’s one reason it’s so interesting to us. And it’s a great place for a mystery, because you have all of your suspects there in the country house.

Another trope in Her Royal Spyness is Bluebloods Are Different. They have different goals, different requirements. And Georgie struggles against some of these. But at this point in the series, she’s rather tentative in her rebellion. In fact, I wouldn’t say it’s really a rebellion. It is a tiny rebellion. She’s pushing against the norms, but she’s not breaking them yet. So she doesn’t stay in Scotland; she goes to London; she strikes out on her own. But she’s not making this huge break with the royal family. She’s not turning her back on everything that she knows on that side of her family, but she is exploring how far she can go. So it’s an interesting set up.

Another trope in this book is the Poor Little Rich Girl trope. But it has a twist to it because even though she is rich, she’s only rich in her heritage. She really doesn’t have any money at all. So it might actually be more appropriately called “rich, but poor little girl”. Because she doesn’t have the money, and she’s required to keep up appearances, but she can’t work. She doesn’t even have enough money to pay for a maid, which is like scandalous in this time. Aristocratic young woman should always have a maid accompany her everywhere when she travels, when she goes to London, when she visits country homes. And, you know, it’s shocking to her peers to think that she can’t afford that.

The trope that’s most linked to the mystery is the trope of the Discreet Sleuth. So that’s what Lady Georgie becomes in this book and throughout the series. And the discreet sleuth is a trope that is someone who is not officially a detective, but they take commissions from important people or people who don’t want to go to the police. I’ve also used this trope in my High Society series because it’s a lot of fun to have a semi-professional sleuth. It solves a lot of the problems with doing an amateur sleuth mystery. You don’t have to work quite as hard to get them involved in the mystery. In this series, it’s especially interesting because the person who commissions her to do the sleuthing is the queen. And that’s really hard to say no to in the first place; Lady Georgie pretty much has to do this. And that also ties in with the theme of belonging, as George is trying to sort out, you know, how she can be independent and yet be part of this aristocratic world. She’s trying to figure that out. And this is just an example of the way that they impose on her life and her freedoms. And it’s also great for launching into the mystery as well.

There’s a couple of other smaller tropes involved in this. One is this Comic Employment Attempts. Reminded me very much of Bridget Jones, if you’ve ever seen the movie and she’s trying to do all these different things and she’s not really good at them. Same thing happens with Georgie. And I won’t spoil any of those because they’re funny and entertaining.

The last trope I want to talk about today is the Clear the Family Name trope. Georgie is motivated to solve this mystery because it involves her family. So it’s a personal link to her. And that’s always a great motivation for a sleuth.

Movie Adaptation

All right. No film adaptations or television adaptations of the series. I think it would be wonderful, wonderful if there were. But so far, not yet.

Quotes

For our quote, I’m going to give you the rest of that opening paragraph about being a minor royal. “There are two disadvantages to being a minor royal. First, one is expected to behave as befits a member of the ruling family, without being given the means to do so. One is expected to kiss babies, open fetes, put in appearances at Balmoral (suitable kilted) and carry trains at weddings. Ordinary means of employment are frowned upon.” I will let you read the rest of the book to find out what the second disadvantage is.

For this book. I’ve added a section called Influence because this series, along with Ashly Weavers’ Amory Ames series and my love of Agatha Christie Mysteries, inspired me to write a historical mystery series. Like Georgie, my female sleuth finds herself one of the “new poor” and must find work. My sleuth Olive is not nearly as highly placed in the aristocracy, but she does have a place in high society. While the Royal Spyness series is set in the 30s, I went back to 1923, partly so I could delve into flapper fashion. The ropes of pearls that the flappers loved play an important role in the story. And also because that time period was such, there was so much radical change going on for society and for women in particular. And I just thought it would be an interesting time period to explore.

Here’s a sample of Murder At Archly Manor. It’s narrated by Elizabeth Klett, and it gives you a glimpse of how Olive gets involved in her first murder mystery.

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That was a sample of the first book in my High Society Lady Detective series, Murder At Archly Manor, narrated by Elizabeth Klett. You can find it everywhere audio books are sold, as well as in your local library through Overdrive and Hoopla. I hope this podcast has let you revisit a favorite book, or perhaps helped you discover a new author to try. Happy reading, and I’ll talk to you next time.

Links:

Rhys Bowen’s website