Hallo, Hallo dear hearts!
I am sure it will not come as a surprise to my readers & visitors alike to realise a *new!* work of Historical Fiction caught my eye! As a book blogger, I’ve happily been sharing my readerly inclinations throughout Historical narratives for the past six years – it is hard to believe I am entering my sixth year at the end of *March!* – however, my blogoversary is on the 31st! Quite fittingly, I’ve already been spending the month happily consumed with new voices in Historical Fiction and have a ready eye on new stories I want to be reading as soon as I can get my hands on the books themselves!
I truly love everything about being a time traveller through History – to be able to hug close to a narrative which speaks authentically to its timescape and of finding authors who can take me into the historic past with convicting story-lines featuring characters you want to champion because you’ve made an emotional connection to their journeys is what keeps me anchoured into the genre overall. I love finding new segues of interest, different timescapes to enter and of course, I simply love how alive the characters feel as I am reading their stories.
By re-visiting the past – however which way we enter it, we have a chance to better understand our present and in effect, gather a glimpse of the future which is still being written into view. One of the benefits I have found of reading the historical past is having this beautiful understanding of where we’ve been and where we could go next – it is a slice of the ordinary and the extraordinary through the backdrop of our known historical timeline which makes I think the wicked sweet part of reading Historical Fiction!
This is why when Sapere Books mentioned this particular author was going on a blog tour, I couldn’t wait to spotlight her new Thriller of a series & ask her curiously pertinent questions regarding how she took about to craft the series overall! Historical Thrillers are typically the kind I read the most – there are a few Contemporaries which sneak into my reading life and charm the socks off me – but let’s be truthful, it’s the Historical Mysteries & Thrillers which really drive a heart of joy into my readerly wanderings the most often! Sapere Books is a new UK publisher I have discovered who is publishing quite a large collection of Historical Fiction – most of which I am actively seeking through my local library and am hopeful I can start reading some of their titles this Spring.
I am also quite aware of the fact they are also publishing stories within my particular genres of interest – from Women’s Fiction to CrimeFiction – I previously highlighted another #newtomeauthor of theirs, Clare Gray who recently celebrated her debut novel “Running in Circles”!
Ahead of reading these stories – today I am celebrating a new series by M.J. Rogue!
An Abiding Fire (Interview)
Subtitle: Murder and Mystery in Restoration London
by M.J. Logue
How do you solve a murder when you are one of the suspects?
1664, London
Life should be good for Major Thankful Russell and his new bride, Thomazine. Russell, middle-aged and battle-scarred, isn’t everyone’s idea of the perfect husband for an eligible young woman but the moment Thomazine set eyes on her childhood hero, she knew they were destined for one another.
But Russell, a former Roundhead, now working for the King’s intelligence service, was never going to have a simple life in Restoration London.
Unable to shake suspicions of his Parliamentarian past, someone seems hell-bent on ruining his reputation — and his life.
Whispers about his sister’s violent murder follow him and accusations of treason abound.
When more deaths occur Russell finds himself under suspicion.
He is ready to escape from the capital, but Thomazine is determined to find the truth and clear the name of the man she loves.
But who is the real killer and why are they so keen to frame Russell?
More importantly, will they succeed?
And has Thomazine’s quest put them all in mortal danger?
Places to find the book:
ISBN: 978-1912786817
Also by this author: An Abiding Fire
Published by Sapere Books
on 2nd January, 2019
Published by: Sapere Books (@SapereBooks)
Formats available: Trade Paperback and Ebook
This kicks off the Thomazine and Major Russell Thrillers series!
Converse on Twitter via: #HistFic or #HistNov
+ #AnAbidingFire & #MJLogue
About M.J. Logue
M. J. Logue (as in cataLOGUE and epiLOGUE and not, ever, loge, which is apparently a kind of private box in a theatre) wrote her first short novel on a manual typewriter aged seven. It wasn’t very good, being about talking horses, but she made her parents sit through endless readings of it anyway.
Thirty-something years later she is still writing, although horses only come into it occasionally these days. Born and brought up in Lancashire, she moved to Cornwall at the turn of the century (and has always wanted to write that) and now lives in a granite cottage with her husband, and son, five cats, and various itinerant wildlife.
After periods of employment as a tarot reader, complaints call handler, executive PA, copywriter and civil servant, she decided to start writing historical fiction about the period of British history that fascinates her – the 17th century.
Her first series, covering the less than stellar career of a disreputable troop of Parliamentarian cavalry during the civil wars, was acclaimed by reviewers as “historical fiction written with elegance, wit and black humour” – but so many readers wanted to know whether fierce young lieutenant Thankful Russell ever did get his Happy Ever After, that the upcoming series of romantic thrillers for Sapere Books began.
Brew your favourite cuppa & enjoy this Wickedly Lovely Convo:
You wrote a lovely piece on your author’s blog about women in Historical Fiction – how the History of women in the world isn’t tracking well in the historical narratives about how non-traditional and non-conventional women should be not just honoured in Historical Fiction today but their stories deserve to be told. I agreed with you whole-heartedly as there are many women who self-identify differently than other women and that doesn’t make them ‘less’ of a woman or ‘less’ worthy of having a story writ about them. I love finding the unique women who helped raise a voice of individualism which is one reason I love reading Feminist Historical Fiction and other stories about the lesser known women of the past. How did you approach writing your own stories knowing you have this passion lit inside you to rally for the women who lived life on their own terms?
Logue responds: The thing for me is that throughout the 17th Century women who lived – unconventionally, if you like – their stories kept cropping up: not just the single figures, but the everyday ones. The Leveller women who petitioned Parliament, most of whose names we don’t know. The soldiering women who offended King Charles so much that he publicly denounced them, whose names we don’t know. The women who nursed wounded soldiers during the Civil Wars – and were paid to do so, professional, competent women given the care of complete strangers – whose names we don’t know. All the many thousands of women whose husbands marched away to follow the King, or Parliament, and who kept the show on the road. Women who went on stage and who were never groped by Samuel Pepys or slept with Prince Rupert, but who went on being actresses and making a living at it all unsung.
Most of us, both men and women, go through life making history and not even knowing we’re doing it, and those are the little stories that fascinate me. Not the crusaders, not the public figures, but ordinary people, doing everyday things in an extraordinary way. It’s just that nobody ever remembers the little stories that go into making the great ones.
There’s a lovely story that I often quote about how Oliver Cromwell had a particular liking for mutton in an orange sauce, and was complaining that he hadn’t had it for many months due to the lack of oranges. And his wife – possibly apocryphally – turned round to him and said “well, you shouldn’t have made war on Spain then, should you?” I love Elizabeth Cromwell, from what little remains of her letters and the few anecdotes of her still around, and yet she was almost universally hated by the Royalists for being too ordinary. There’s a certain almost old-Hollywood glamour about the antics of some of the demands and the expenditure and the personal habits of some of the Restoration ladies, but it’s not real, any more than Jayne Mansfield and her heart-shaped pink toilet seats reflected the real lives of her fans in the 1950s.
I do agree – it is the stories which first intrigued me to seek out Historical Fiction and the stories therein – especially when the stories I am finding are rooted in the lore or living histories of persons who once lived – I love tucking into those stories as you get an especially wicked good glimpse of how life was once lived during that particular era or timescape of interest. It is like you said – the ordinary becomes the extraordinary because these were the real lives of the people who were living through what they might have considered just another ordinary day in their own lives but to those of us who are peering at their lives from afar – thus far removed even from whence they had originally lived – we see their lives a bit uniquely as we have the benefit of knowing where in History their lives actually played out. In that, their lives seem a bit more interesting on the surface and if you peer past the surface to where as you said you get to the heart of who they were – that is where the interestingly intriguing bits of their lives start to burst to the surface. It is an interesting sociological study on human behaviour and the nature of how our interactions and associations through time have either changed or remained unchangeable depending on which lens you view through History.
I hadn’t heard of this quotation previously – but it would lend a heap of sense towards why he ought not be complaining about the shortage in fruit! lol I sometimes wonder if they even connected the dots? Of what would alter their lives if they pursued a certain course of action? I have a feeling I might enjoy reading more of the Restoration ladies – they seem to have a bit of spunk to them but also a fierce sense of reality and of self. I like finding women in the past who stood out on their own merits and were not afraid to speak their minds.
I also understood why you try to lesson your time online and in social realms as I agreed about how sometimes the negative outweighs the positive. This is one reason I elected to try to hug close to the bookish and geeky side of the book blogosphere and bookish Twitter; in that capacity being online is a burst of sunshine. It gives merit to what we drink in can affect us on a larger scale – how do you temper the harder edges in your stories? Most of Historical Fiction is rooted in elevating the drama and the realism of the past with characters who anchour us into their lives. How do you choose how far to take your stories on an emotional level?
Logue responds: I think the thing with the Russells was that on the face of it, he could have so easily been the bad guy – the scarred Puritan intelligencer with the dark past – and actually the bad guy in this series is, in fact, the good guy. And because of all the things and all the spoiler-y things, he has the potential to be a very damaged, very dark individual, and what makes him not the bad guy is essentially his ordinary, and very joyous, relationship with his wife.
There is only so much darkness you can surround yourself with before dark becomes your normal – you have to have some illumination, in order to see the shapes of darkness. (Which is why I limit my online time.) We know, we have the historical evidence before us, that the period I write about was one of the most bloody and brutal and cruel of any period in history, for many people: we were not quite so Enlightened that we were yet above a bit of light torture. And yet and yet and yet. Even away from the professional brilliance of the Court, there was so much amateur outpouring of love and faith and hope in the everyday – the dreadful pedestrian poetry of Thomas Fairfax, who was a good military commander and a flippin’ rotten poet but who clearly had a high old time rhyming moon and spoon entirely for his own pleasure; the everyday love poetry of Anne Bradstreet in America, celebrating her babies and her husband and her household; the joyful domestic embroidery of commonplace items like jackets and cushions and pillowcases.
One of the things I hate about a certain genre of historical mysteries is that everything is dark. The hero has some kind of inner torment, the world is chaos, it’s all going to hell in a handcart. I find it quite difficult to engage emotionally with characters who exist in a constant cycle of existential misery. They don’t really have anything to lose, do they?
Someone said that the fact of the Russells having a series meant that there was a lessening of that dramatic tension because evidently they both continue to survive and I thought well, actually, if you consider not being dead to be the height of dramatic tension you’ve never been married, have you? And I think to an extent they’re what you could describe as Cosy – they centre about the lives and enduring affection of a married couple who do ordinary things and are trying to raise a family, in a pretty turbulent period of history. The tension is in their trying to keep it that way when ne’er-do-wells keep leaving dead bodies lying about the place.
I love this response – as I too, oft-times find certain periods of History threading through Historical Fiction to be overtly dark and the undertone of those narratives is so explicitly vacated of Light it is a wonderment to me even how those people championed their own right to live a life which was not as miserably dreary as it is being portrayed now all these centuries forward inside a historical novel! It is also like you’ve lamented – to think of life without any hope of lightness or without the hope of having adverse situations turn back round to the positive, there is literally no hope for anyone of any age to see the beauty of what life can afford even if it is in the simplicity of how living life forward, striving for a better day is what ought to be focused upon instead.
I love how you said your series is more Cosy in nature and hugs closer to the characters themselves – to give a voice to how they took their life and the lot they felt they must live in order to make a small indention of change in the goings on of their world but they anchoured their lives to each other; if only to find the light and to keep their hearts tethered to something other than the chaos of what was happening outside their own lives to where History began to chart time by the events which would one day become well known.
What drew your writerly eye to Restoration England and the 17th Century in particular? How did you want to take your joy of this century and give readers an inside edge towards what life was really like during this period of history?
Logue responds: My re-enactor’s eye got there first! It’s a period I find endlessly fascinating, because it’s the first period in which “the poorest he that is in England” had a voice, and didn’t they just use it, producing pamphlets and broadsides and poems: the world was turned upside down for a while, everything was open to question, anything could be debated.
There were a million and one increasingly fragmented political allegiances – the Levellers, the Diggers – and a million and one equally fragmented (and often downright weird) religious sects, all shouting all at once. And yet in spite of all that life carried on, people went out to work, they had families, they fell in love, they got sick, they went to school, and on the one hand you’re thinking but wait what! how can you concentrate with all that ?? And then on the other hand you’ve got this glorious noisy colourful riot of things all going on at once, and it’s just a wonderful, exciting time to write about. To be alive, I imagine.
All of which is very exciting, of course, but I also wanted to get across the idea that you’ve got lots of different threads going on. You’ve got the whole Forever Amber, party lifestyle that’s the popular image of the Restoration, oranges and ringlets and spaniels. You’ve got the whole social upheaval of the end of the Protectorate, when lots of people who were in favour suddenly realised that possibly they weren’t, and there was a deal of back-stabbing and climbing of greasy poles – which is bubbling along below the party surface and is a lot darker and a lot nastier. And then the thing that really interested me is what happened to the principles for which men had fought in the Civil Wars – in Thankful Russell’s case as a Leveller agitator – if you’d actually believed in the cause for which you had fought, if your conscience genuinely dictate that the poorest he that was in England had as great a right to life as the greatest – how on earth would you square that, with living under a monarchy that you’d just spent the last eleven years morally opposed to?
When you put it that way, I am uncertain how any of our ancestors found solace in the everyday knowing what they had lived and fought for whilst they weren’t exactly living in a state of a tomorrow they had hoped to arrive inside. Still, as you said, it boiled down to how they approached each new day – how they fought to keep their hope and their hopefulness alive in the attitude and outlook they cast towards the future. The hardships they had endured and the overwhelming emotional response they must’ve felt had to be countered against their realities and of course, tempered a bit as you said their outcome hadn’t been the favourable one they had hoped for all those years. Still. I think you also pointed out it was a time of reformation in the sense that all of life was open to being ‘edited’. You could find your voice and you could carve out your own niche if it pleased you – it was a time where all the voices had a chance and equal measure of success if someone dared to believe in themselves with the whole of their hearts and souls.
The hardest part to Historical Thrillers & Suspense is the pacing – from the background bits on the lead and supporting cast to the churning suspense leading into the revelations at the end. What did you find the most challenging when writing “An Abiding Fire”?
Logue responds: Not turning it into the “Perils of Pauline”.
I’m definitely the sort of writer who chucks things up in the air and sees where they go, and at one point in the initial drafts of the book I consciously decided that there needed to be more murders. (Not unlike the possibly-apocryphal story of Henry Ireton, Cromwell’s son-in-law, in Ireland on his deathbed, crying “More blood!”) I shoved in another couple of grisly murders, suspicious shadowy figures, another couple of attempts on our heroes’ lives, and then I re-read the whole thing and thought, this is getting ridiculous. It really was like one of those penny dreadful serials, and so I stripped it right back.
I shouldn’t have laughed as loud as I had but this response was brilliantly classic! Of how sometimes being a writer is a bit disparaging as our own instincts can sometimes cast us astray and get us into a muddle of a pickle! I love how you decided to revert back to your original sketch and idea for the story as I have a feeling if it had staid the course you were describing here I might not have found it as dearly intriguing to fetch to read!
Which supporting character do you hope readers will latch onto the most and what gave you the most to smile about whilst writing their character’s life? Or the scenes in which they were focused the most?
Logue responds: Supporting characters – I amenormously fond of the Widow Bartholomew, and the Bartholomew-baby. (Which is a very stupid joke, by the way, and it’s most unkind of Thomazine to refer to that unfortunate infant as the Bartholomew-baby: it’s a term of abuse from the period meant to indicate someone who’s behaving foolishly. Bartholomew-babies were children’s toys, wooden dolls usually sold at the Bartholomew fairs in London, at which people were known to have one drink too many and get silly…and it kind of stuck.)
What I like about the Widow is that she presents as very meek and very sweet and very nice and under that she has a backbone of absolute stainless steel –my house, my rules. And I love the way she interacts with Thomazine, who is twenty-two and as full of ideas as to how an orderly household should be run as a hedgehog is of fleas, and the two of them do not always see eye to eye.
What you have, at bottom, is two women who have an intimate attachment to the same man, although not in the way Thomazine thinks they do, which is also a fun dynamic. I suspect Jane Bartholomew had been trying to pair her blameless lodger up with a nice respectable girl for years; I don’t think she likes seeing people wandering about all loose and unattached, it troubles her sense of order. She is a very orderly and housewifely person: as Thomazine works out for herself at one point, she has to be, because of her circumstances – a widow clinging on to respectability who has to put straight lines on things because it’s the only way she can keep some kind of control over her life.
The thing that makes me smile, writing about her, is that I don’t think the Widow ever does know that Thomazine suspects her of having had some kind of passionate illicit liaison with her husband in the past. I think she would be very, very offended if she did. That said, Thomazine thinks her husband is irresistible to the opposite sex and has a past full of passionate illicit liaisons, bless her. She thinks he’s romantic and glamorous and gorgeous, and she actually cannot comprehend that not everybody sees him the same way. Even when he’s sixty – and yes, he will still be doing stupid adventurous things at sixty – she’ll still see him as a dangerous heartbreaker….
This response made me smirk – mostly because it was such an honest revelation about your characters and how as a writer, you were smitten with how your characters are either a) reacting or b) interacting with each other – it was a humbled glimpse into how the order of their dynamics was set to stage and in that, I felt I would enjoy seeing how it all started to unfold. I admit, the humour at the start of this reply was lost on me – as I hadn’t heard of this expression or point of reference previously – however what truly grabbed my attention is how fiercely interesting you’ve written your characters. How uniquely independent-minded they sound and how happy I’ll be to ‘meet them’ as soon as I have a chance to read the story!
What inspired your dual lead characters and how did you insert them into 1664 London? What was the main motivation to place a partnership of sleuths in this particular year?
Logue responds: Well, I knew at the end of the Uncivil Wars series set in the 1640s that it wasn’t going to be the end for Thankful Russell, even though it’s the end of that particular period of his life as a soldier and a political activist. Without giving too much away about the end of that series – which I’m still writing, although it’s a matter of words on a page catching up with brain: I know what happens and to whom, and how it happens – he was never going to go away and enjoy a peaceful retirement, he’s just not made like that. He was always going to find some windmill to tilt at. And at the end of those books, he’s all of twenty-five, and Thomazine is almost six, and they have a funny little friendship going on already.
As a child she considers him her especial property – you know like you do when you’re six, she thinks she can wave a magic wand and he will be all fixed and she can look after him and all the things – and then as she grows up she decides he’s all manner of wonderful things in a rather more grown-up capacity. She says in one of the later books-.”.. I was not wholly convinced that you were not an angel, at the time. One of the sterner ones. I used to think that if I came on you suddenly, when you weren’t quite expecting me, I might catch a glimpse of your wings under your shirt.”
So there was always going to be that – unlikely, and slightly cockeyed – romance: I don’t think she ever really gets out of the habit of thinking of him as her rebel angel, and he’s never going to lose the habit of only ever dropping all his defences for her – he’s always going to be just very slightly reserved with just about every other person in the world, but Thomazine he trusts absolutely.
Which is very nice. But which makes them vulnerable, in a fashionable society which prizes flirtation and glitter above workaday fidelity – it makes them conspicuous, and it also sets their marriage up as a challenge – wouldn’t it be fun to come between them? I mean, nobody can be that perfect, right?
The main motivation for placing them where they are was pragmatism – the characters they are. Given what he does for a living, that he is attached to the Admiralty Board as an intelligencer, he has to be based in London at least some of the time: he can’t not be. And that means he has to be in certain places, and to know certain people historically. (But then, who doesn’t know Sam Pepys?)
And Thomazine is the age she is, she features in the earlier books and she’s born in early 1644, that’s a matter of record in the Uncivil Wars books and I can’t go back and change that. So they always needed to be based in London and she needed to be of a reasonable age to be married. Everything else just kind of happened. Things have a habit of “just happening” to those two….
The more I learn about these characters the more I see a bit of the marriage between Nick & Nora (Charles) coming into view – as they had their own unique rhythm together in their own marriage and I feel that your two characters have struck their own unique rhythm with one another as well. Perhaps even to where others in their peerage haven’t quite caught on to what makes their marriage work or how their past history together fits in with their current lives. It is rather curious how they knew of each other at such younger ages but then again, that isn’t the first time something like that has happened. Overall, the more I gleam about these characters the more I am increasingly looking forward to reading about them! Though now I wonder – should I begin with this chapter of their life or read the previous series? Hmm… something tells me the curiosity is too great ‘not to begin’ with “An Abiding Fire”! And, then as the earlier series concludes to go back and read those installments!
What did you think was harder about writing the story? Keeping the timeline of known history or taking liberties against the known timeline and representing the vision you had for your story? How did you draw a balance between the two?
Logue responds: I’d had a lot of practice with timelines in the Uncivil Wars series and I’m sort of used to the idea that first you find out what happens, and then you work out where your people would have been given who they were and where they were.
I do actually have a timeline of birthdays and significant life events on my laptop, and it’s – well, I wouldn’t call it easy to cross-reference, but when you’re writing about the ongoing life of a fictional family and interweaving it with real historical events, you have to remember how old people are and when they get married and when things happen, if nothing else so that you can be consistent.
Sometimes the history shapes the timelines: like I said earlier, Thomazine is almost six and Thankful is twenty-five when the civil wars end, and that means throughout her young childhood she grew up with political upheaval and – blood and fire, basically – she’s been brought up with her father mostly away fighting, and her mother mostly in charge at home. So whenever she has to step up and take charge as an adult in the Restoration series, it’s sort of second nature to her, it’s something she’s seen modelled in her own childhood. So it’s not only about keeping the timeline of history as it was, that things happened on the right dates, but that the characters respond in the way that they should respond at that point in their development.
I love this – how much you’ve built into the series – not just for continuity from the original series but also in keeping in step with your character’s lives and how they would naturally evolve into their futures. It is truly a remarkable feat and one I am most anxious to be reading. I love how you thought about their instinctive natures, how they would naturally step into roles which befitted their generational responses and how you honoured their lives by how their composites might have lived themselves. Well done!
Which aspects of criminal investigation and forensic science practices did you enjoy peppering into your novel?
Logue responds: Oh, the Royal Society, definitely!
In the very early stages of writing Abiding Fire I had to spend quite a lot of time at hospital appointments with a damaged cornea (because lupus… blah) and I started out reading a biography of Nicholas Culpeper, because I like gardening and I like the period. When you read Culpeper’s original text there’s a phenomenal amount of pseudo-science, that sort of stereotypical picking mandrake roots at the dark of the moon kind of thing, but there’s also a lot of research-based basic evidential findings.
I started getting interested in the early beginnings of botanical science just as a matter of personal curiosity, and let’s be honest because I’m a period cook and gardener and I do like me a bit of 17th Century gardening, so I’m curious to know what would have been used for what. Then I came across a book called “Soul Made Flesh” by Carl Zimmer, which is about the discovery of the brain -At the beginning of that chaotic century, no one knew how the brain worked or even what it looked like intact. But by the century’s close, even the most common conceptions and dominant philosophies had been completely overturned, supplanted by a radical new vision of man, God, and the universe. (From the cover blurb of “Soul Made Flesh”) – which sums up the stunning importance of the Royal Society much better than I can.
The 1660s was an amazing period for the sciences. mostly due to the founding of the “Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge” and the fact that influential, wealthy patrons could indulge their passion for a bit of light scientific dabbling with the assistance of any enlightened country doctor with a like interest. It was the first – and as far as I know, the only, with the possible exception of the Victorian passion for the weirder natural sciences that grew into spiritualism – time in which Science was a hobby in its own right.
As well as a fashionable one! I liked the idea of the old – the somewhat battle-scarred Civil War veteran with the fascinating head injury – meeting the new, the natural philosopher and practising physician Dr Willis. I mean, imagine this pioneering anatomist and groundbreaking neuro-scientist being faced by a subject he could really get his saw into, especially if the subject in question is fully functioning and deeply averse to being used as a research specimen. Writing the scenes with Dr Willis made me hoot. The Russells want to pick his brains for forensic evidence, and Dr Willis wants to pick Thankful’s brains for anatomy practice. Chortle.
I truly think I am one of the few who would find this witty and hilariously wicked – mostly, as I oft-times lament, I grew up in an industry adjacent to the morgue and most of what your speaking about isn’t new to me nor would it shock me. You are quite right – for any progress to be had it had to begin somewhere and it was within those original periods of progressive thought towards the dead and towards what could be examined at point of death is where a lot of science shifted forward. It is also of course how forensic science grew into what it is today and how what is left behind is able to be evidenced out through the science which understands the evidence. This is one reason I love the series by Anna Lee Huber (ie. The Lady Darby series) and why of course, I have the tendency of appreciating a lot of medical examiner series on tv (ie. Quincy, ME; Crossing Jordan and NCIS (original & NOLA).
Something tells me I am going to enjoy seeing these exchanges within your story and of course, I love how your gardening and cooking from a different era of interest altogether! I would be honestly happy if I could find the right soil to just grow ‘something’ other than weeds and where the climate was more particularly healthy to grow a healthier diet to eat through the seasons; at the moment I feel like I’m blighted against a clime that is intolerable to yielding anything but sand and dry dirt! Aye.
As this is the beginning of a new series – what can you share with us about their next adventures together? Do you know already how many installments there will be or are you writing the series organically – seeing where each new story takes you?
Logue responds: The fun thing is that it’s also the beginning of their marriage, so their adventures are also somewhat shaped by their relationship, and as that grows and changes so the way they engage with external forces start to change. I can tell you that the theme of the series, really, is that the past never goes away. No matter where they go, and how far they put themselves from the hub of things, they’re never going to be able to escape the choices they’ve made in the past – his choice to be a rebel , and her choice to marry him.
That sounds very dark and actually it’s not.
“Most of the time her man was straight and sober and absolutely, darling-ly conservative: he did the thing that was right, always, and he knew where his duty lay and he would do it no matter how hard it was. And that was oddly endearing all by itself, because it wasn’t fashionable to be quite so conventional in a world where society lauded poets and adventurers to the skies. But he was, though: it was one of the things she loved most about him, that he was decent right through. He could be relied on, absolutely, to do what was right. It wasn’t always comfortable to live with – for him or for anybody else – but that didn’t matter, and it made people roll their eyes at him a little when his back was turned – oh, too good to be true, dreadful old relic of the old Commonwealth – but that didn’t bother him either.”
The second book – which is called A Deceitful Subtlety, and I’ve seen the cover and it’s lovely – follows them as they settle into marriage and family life, and it’s all very placid and domesticated until Aphra Behn plops into their life again asking for their assistance to find a runaway husband.
Which, of course, is not what it seems. There are at least another three installments in my head: the third one is mostly written and involves wool-smuggling in Essex, an escaped Scottish prisoner of war from the battle of Dunbar, and the unexpectedly shocking love-life of the Widow Bartholomew. (Honestly, did you think Jane Bartholomew wasn’t going to be a keeper? You think Thomazine would let her go?)
There’s another one involving the interception of an incriminating portrait of Thomazine’s father’s first wife in the altogether, painted by Rembrandt and left to Colonel Babbitt in the painter’s will, and which he’d rather his current wife – to wit, Thomazine’s mother – didn’t know about. And then there’s a much later one set around the evacuation of Tangier and finding a truanting young officer who happens to be Prince Rupert’s unaccounted third child, and given that at the time when that one’s set Thankful is just over sixty and I shall let you imagine how Thomazine feels about him gallivanting off to North Africa without her. (I’ll give you a clue. Not. Happening.)
And any number of short stories and novellas to fill in the gaps, because obviously they don’t always have adventures – sometimes they just have chaos at home, and small children, and an elastic number of cats, dogs, horses and hangers-on. Sometimes that’s just fun to write about. I make a point of writing a short story for Christmas every year for my readers.
As said, there are echoes of Nick and Nora Charles throughout this whole series – mostly, as they were wholly enthused with themselves, they loved their life and they loved living it. They set themselves to their own unique beat of normalcy and you can in-tune the same is true of your characters – they are merely living their lives, enjoying their hours and dealing with whatever arises to be adversely opposite of their goals – yet, we are following in their footsteps, trying to see a portion of their lives and own to the fact they created their own happiness along the route of their lives. It is a lovely testament to their unique connection and their respect for each other. I am so very thankful you’ve given such a hearty glimpse into who they are and for what as a serial appreciator can expect from reading their series of stories!
When your not researching and writing stories what uplifts your spirit the most?
Logue responds: Textiles. I am one of these weird peoples who can’t just look at a beautiful thing but has to know how it’s made for myself. I’m currently amusing myself by learning nalbinding, Viking single-needle knitting.
Also my cats – all five of them, two half-Persian brothers who are very senior furry gentleman, one very lovely but needy part-Bengal silver tabby, and two enormous chunks of furry love who chase bees and thunder up and down the stairs like a cavalry charge – and my garden, lamentably not improved by the cats. And my boys, my big one and my little one, without whom the books wouldn’t get written at all.
Did I mention chocolate?
I hadn’t had the chance to address what you disclosed earlier about lupus – I, myself, have chronic migraines and my father recovered from a bilateral moderate stroke two years ago; I have been his caregiver as Mum needed to work extra hours as a result of how our lives changed the day my Dad entered the hospital. Throughout your candid conversation I recognised someone else who champions their hours and finds the joys in life – you don’t let things get you done (if not for long, as we all have our bad days, let’s face it!) and you love your stories as much as I love crafting my own. I’ve been trying to get back into my writings this year and this conversation I think has sparked a renewal of hope I might actually start to get something down on paper! I really needed a nudge of inspiration and listening to you talk about your characters and the ways in which you set the foundation of this world – anchoured between two distinctive series is just wicked impressive and inspiring!
I’m very textile curious myself – in fact I love knitting for the tactile blissitude it gives me to find how you can take something raw like yarn and knit it into something you can hold and use. Reminds me – it has been far too long since I’ve knitted anything of length and I can’t remember the last time I finished one of my UFOs! lol Need to remedy that!
I used to have four companions in fur myself – a cheeky quartet of felines – two siblings of tabbys, one quirkly smart Tuxedo and an unrelated tabby who rounded out the quartet. I lost two of these lovelies within the first two years of Jorie Loves A Story; the timing was horrid and the loss was great as their lives ended on difficult health adverse events. The two which are left are in their glory days of senior living – the elder tabby of the sibling pair is not a hair past his younger self as he seems to age backwards rather than sequentially and the Tux? She’s such a hoot – she’s one half old soul and one hat old sage; she smirks at the other one due to his antics and they both are a light of love, truly as yours are for you. Interestingly, in their golden years they’ve taken to travelling – who would have thought that possible?
There must *always!* be chocolate… seriously! And, perhaps a dosh of wine, a pint of ale or a love short mixed drink! Mostly though – anything which is either savoury or ambrosial and gives you a boost of random joy in the height of eating it is a wicked good treat to me!
I am especially thankful to Ms Logue for answering my questions & for giving me a lovely glimpse inside this new series – as I truly feel like I’ve lived inside it a bit, taken stock of the characters and have a ready sense of what I’ll find once I lay heart and mind inside it. I love hosting novelists who are conversationalists – to tuck into their writerly world, see how they crafted their stories together and perhaps, takeaway a few pieces of behind-the-book trivia as the conversation progresses! If your a ready reader of Historical Crime Fiction, I hope this conversation might have sparked your attention & perhaps you’ve found a #nextread!
This blog tour is courtesy of: Sapere Books
Be sure to follow the publisher’s tweets to find the latest updates for this lovely blog tour! Most of us are socially engaged & you can happily find our tweets to share!
One of my fellow book bloggers on this blog tour is hosting a bookaway for ‘An Abiding Fire’ – be sure to visit Let Them Read Books to find out the details if you’ve loved reading this conversation about how the series was written!
Similar to blog tours where I feature book reviews, as I choose to highlight an author via a Guest Post, Q&A, Interview, etc., I do not receive compensation for featuring supplemental content on my blog. I provide the questions for interviews and topics for the guest posts; wherein I receive the responses back from publicists and authors directly. I am naturally curious about the ‘behind-the-scenes’ of stories and the writers who pen them; I have a heap of joy bringing this content to my readers. This also extends to Book Spotlights & Book Blitzes which I choose to highlight which might have content inclusive to the post materials which I did not directly add a contribution but had the choice whether or not to feature those materials on my blog.
{SOURCES: Book cover for “An Abiding Fire”, author photograph of M.J. Logue, author biography and the blog tour banner were provided by Sapere Books and are being used with permission. Post dividers by Fun Stuff for Your Blog via Pure Imagination. Tweets were embedded due to codes provided by Twitter. Blog graphics created by Jorie via Canva: Conversations with the Bookish banner and the Comment Box Banner.}
Copyright © Jorie Loves A Story, 2019.
I’m a social reader | I share my bookish life on Twitter
Celebrating the lovely #blogtour for a NEW #HistoricalThriller "An Abiding Fire" wherein I am chatting w/ the author M.J. Logue (@Hollie_Babbitt) about how she developed this new #HistFic #Thriller from @SapereBooks!
🗣️📖https://t.co/LuxJYdtiXW | #worldbookday | #HistoricalFix pic.twitter.com/gwnvl6pbuO
— Jorie Story 📖🎧 (@joriestory) March 7, 2019
Comments via Twitter:
What a great interview with Sapere author M.J. Logue! Find out how she wrote the amazing historical thriller An Abiding Fire! Thanks so much @joriestory https://t.co/ufB6F2HTTx
— Sapere Books 🦉 (@SapereBooks) March 7, 2019
I equally shared your enthused replies; responding back to what you gave to this lovely convo was wickedly exciting for me!😁I loved feeling tucked inside your world and the ways in which you gave such illuminating back-history into the new series & your characters was brill💞
— Jorie Story 📖🎧 (@joriestory) March 8, 2019
I, definitely shall!😊By the by, our convo is my top read post of the week as well as w/in the top 3 of the month! Whilst my 📌tweet s/o I gave has seriously travelled through #bookishTwitter!🙌I love when healthy bookish discussions of #HistFic gain momentum & become well read🤗
— Jorie Story 📖🎧 (@joriestory) March 8, 2019
Considering how this lovely post & the s/o tweet I originally posted on its behalf *reached!* viral status for this humble book blogger – as it went up to 30x RT and 21 favourites – I decided to give a few s/o’s of appreciation to those kind tweeters!
Appreciate your kindness in supporting #HistoricalFiction #bookbloggers🦋@bardessdmdenton @JudithArnopp @cherrymischivus @foxesfairytale @IvyLuther2 @chicksandrogues @missfelicia123 @abruno77 @CKullmannAuthor @GarenGlazier @mcgonagalI @claireEsnail pic.twitter.com/2cFmvQjmzw
— Jorie Story 📖🎧 (@joriestory) March 9, 2019
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