SJ Bennett talks about her latest book The Windsor Knot and what it's like to write about the Queen solving crimes!
SJ Bennett wrote several award-winning books for teenagers before turning to adult mysteries. She lives in London and has been a royal watcher for years, but is keen to stress that The Windsor Knot is a work of fiction: the Queen, to the best of her knowledge, does not secretly solve crimes.
The Windsor Knot is published by Zaffre and is also available through Suffolk Libraries.
When I was seven, my father was posted to Hong Kong with the army and I had to say goodbye to my little primary school and my close band of friends for two years. To start with, I was devastated. My mother took me to the local library, which was a converted van that visited our village on the mountain of Tai Mo Shan in the New Territories. That’s where I discovered Ballet Shoes and A Little Princess, The Secret Garden and the other classics of children’s literature.
But my biggest love was Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings series, about a boy getting into scrapes at his boarding school. I remember waiting with huge excitement for each new book to come out, but it never really occurred to me that Anthony Buckeridge was a real person, and that I could have written to him if I’d wanted to. He made my life much easier while I was adjusting to my huge new school, by giving me access to Jennings’s world to get lost in, and I quickly realised that one day that’s what I wanted to do too. Later on, I fell in love with Jilly Cooper, PG Wodehouse, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Len Deighton, all picked from my parents’ bookshelves. Dorothy L Sayers was a big hero, so maybe it’s not completely surprising that I ended up writing about an aristocratic detective.
My journey to publication was pretty typical, I think i.e, it was very long! Having wanted to be a writer since childhood, when I left university I didn’t dare actually write a novel, in case it didn’t work. So for over a decade I did a series of other jobs. Then Harry Potter came out and I loved it so much that I was inspired to give up my job to write full time. I wrote a book in five weeks and sent it out to agents in a flurry of excitement, but needless to say (did I edit it at all? I’m not sure) it didn’t get published. Nor did the one after that, or the one after that, or the screenplay after that. I would take a freelance job for a while, save up and then have another go at writing.
This lasted for ten years until I wrote Threads, my first children’s book, which won the Times/Chicken House competition. With each book I learned a bit more about the process and took editing a bit more seriously. By the time I submitted Threads, I was on draft 17, and I redrafted it another 17 times. I tried to approach it each time like a reader, looking for bits that were boring, confusing, unnecessary, and gradually whittling them out. By then, I was ready to turn it into a series and I was ten thousand words into book two when the competition winner was announced. This was wonderful, as it meant I didn’t have ‘difficult second book’ syndrome. In fact, book two was easy. Book three turned out to be the hard one!
It’s the first in a mystery series with a very special detective. In between her normal royal duties, the Queen solves crimes. In this book, set in 2016 during the time of her 90th birthday celebrations, there is a murder at Windsor Castle. The Queen’s new assistant private secretary, Rozie Oshodi, finds herself being sent on increasingly odd secret missions by ‘the Boss’, and gradually discovers that the Queen has been solving mysteries for decades.
She’s quite brilliant at it, behind the scenes of her normal royal life, combining a great memory, a fine eye for detail, expertise in many fields gathered over the years, and a shrewd appreciation of character. She always lets someone else take the credit – which is why the general public don’t know. In this case, a story of Russian spies isn’t all it first appears to be.
I did wonder about that at first. I thought hard about who should be real and who should be fictional. In the end, only members of the Royal Family and celebrities like David Attenborough were themselves. I didn’t make them do or say anything we couldn’t imagine them doing from what we already know (apart from the Queen actually solving murders, obviously). This path has been often trodden before, by Steve Antony, Alan Bennett and Sue Townsend, as well as Peter Morgan in The Queen and The Crown, so I was just following a long tradition.
All the servants and suspects in my books are fictional characters - apart from the Queen’s dresser, Angela, who is mentioned by name but doesn’t really appear. Angela Kelly is such an amazing character and has recently brought out her own book about her life with the Queen - The Other Side of the Coin - and I couldn’t completely leave her out or fictionalise her. If the Queen did solve murders, I imagine Angela would probably be the person to help her. Who knows - perhaps she does?
I've already finished book two in the series, A Three Dog Problem, set at Buckingham Palace during the last US election (available to preorder now and out in November next year!), and am currently working on book three, set at Sandringham at Christmas.
I’m also putting together season two of my podcast, Prepublished, in which I talk to emerging and bestselling writers, agents and editors about what it takes to get published. I’ve taught writing for children for several years, and I know my students appreciate it most when they can hear writers talk to each other. We never quite agree on how it’s done, and it’s good for aspiring writers to know that they can forge their own path and do whatever works for them.
I don’t get nearly as much time as I’d like, and there are always rafts of wonderful books I wish I was reading. Like many people, I recently re-read Rebecca in time for the Netflix film. I’ve long been a big fan of Daphne du Maurier. I was disappointed with the new film, but enjoyed going back to Hitchcock’s version with Lawrence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Among current books, my recent favourites have included Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, Educated by Tara Westover and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club.
I’ve been looking forward to Richard’s book for ages, knowing what a great sense of humour he has. Any book featuring a secret elderly detective called Elizabeth and her friends is fine by me! I’ve also just discovered the Louise Penny Three Pines murder mystery series, set in a small, fictional village in Canada. I love her writing and the warmth and decency of her main characters so much.
Like many fellow writers, I found it increasingly hard to concentrate as my mental energy has been taken up with feeding the family, checking everyone is OK, worrying about the state of the world in all sorts of different ways and despairing of the way the vulnerable are treated in this country.
However, I was extremely lucky in that I had a new contract and a deadline to finish the second book in the Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series by mid-summer. That forced me to keep going, though I got increasingly slow. The whole experience has definitely taught me to be as tolerant as possible of other people, whatever they choose to do. We’re all just trying to get through this as best we can.
It used to be that I once interviewed for a job working for the Queen, but I think a lot of people would not find that surprising now! After I wrote You Don’t Know Me, about a girl band, I decided to learn bass guitar. I’m not very good but I do love to play along to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Flea is awesome.
