Q&A With S.J. Bennett 

Today I am doing a Q&A with S.J. Bennett who is the author of Her Majesty The Queen Investigates.  I recently finished the current book in the series A Death In Diamonds. 

Q: Would you like to give a brief description of each of the books in your series & talk about what made you want to create a fictional book series about the late Queen Elizabeth II investigating mysteries? 

A: Hi! There are currently four books in the series, with a fifth on the way later this year. The first trilogy imagines Queen Elizabeth II at ninety – a wise and experienced head of state, who is still underestimated by her staff because she never got a university education. However, she is an expert on many things, not least her palaces, and when murder happens in one of them, she’s best placed to work out what’s wrong, who did it and why. 

The first book is The Windsor Knot, which takes place at Windsor Castle as the Queen turns 90. Rozie Oshodi is an ex- army captain, with two tours of Afghanistan under her belt, who joins the royal household as a senior assistant. She finds herself helping the Boss secretly unravel the mystery behind a murdered Russian pianist. The Queen can’t be seen to interfere with MI5 and the police, but as Rozie discovers, sometimes she’s better at searching behind the scenes than they are. 

Books two and three follow the Queen and Rozie’s adventures at Buckingham Palace, where a housekeeper is found dead beside the palace pool, and at the Queen’s seaside residence at Sandringham in Norfolk, where a human hand washed up on the beach turns out to belong to an old friend of the royal family. 

And now, with A Death in Diamonds, I’ve gone back in time, to the first of the Queen’s adventures, set in 1957. The Queen is not an established, elderly woman, but a vulnerable new monarch and mother of young children, trying to work out the best way of balancing her work and family life. It features a different sidekick, Joan McGraw, who’s an ex-Bletchley Park codebreaker and it’s a good place to start if you haven’t read the other books. 

As for why I wanted to write about the Queen in the first place – I’ve always been fascinated by the contrast between the surface glamour of Elizabeth’s life, and the hard work that went on behind the scenes. We think we know her so well, and yet she still managed to keep a large part of herself private. There’s so much for a novelist to explore! 

I often get asked if I’d write about the other royals as detectives, and the answer is no. It’s not her ‘queen’-ness that interests me, it’s her surprising level-headedness as an individual, despite her gilded life. She was by no means perfect, but I think she could have made a great detective, if she’d wanted to. Once I had the idea, I couldn’t just not write it. 

Q: How long does it take you to research and write books? Are these the types of books you must read in numerical order, or can you read them as standalone novels as I’ve seen some authors do?

A: I generally work on each book for a year, and it takes several months beforehand, while I’m editing the last one, to get the ideas for the plot and setting in place. My research covers the minutiae of palace life, the habits of the royal family (and their dogs), and the other people and places they encountered. It’s everything from what the Queen’s desk looked like (messy, but she knew where everything was), to what she was doing on a given day, to where the bomb damage still was twelve years after the war. Then I let my imagination run wild. How did she feel giving her first live, televised speech bilingually in Canada in 1957? Nervous, I should think! Philip was good at relaxing her, though. 

I try to make sure that all the books can be read as standalones. Each story is unique, and they don’t assume the reader already knows the details about the regular characters. As a reader, I often find myself picking up a book that happens to be part way through a thriller or mystery series, and I appreciate it if that doesn’t matter, so as an author I work on doing the same. 

That said, if you want to read about the Queen forming a relationship with the woman who helps her as a sidekick, then it’s best to start with The Windsor Knot for the books set in 2016, or A Death in Diamonds for 1957. I’m currently working on the sequel to that one, which is set in 1961 – at the heart of the Cold War and the Space Race. Both feature heavily in the book. 

Q: What lessons & emotions do you hope the readers learn after reading the books?

A: I write more for entertainment than teaching lessons. I was very grateful for the books that let me escape my day-to-day problems and anxieties when I was growing up (authors like Jackie Collins, Len Deighton and PG Wodehouse), and those are the kind of books I try to write. That said, I find myself writing about women working together to overcome lots of inbuilt prejudices and structural inequalities, so I think those aspects will resonate with a lot of my readers. They also seem to appreciate the immense research I do into the period, people and places I’m writing about.

 I hope that you will really feel as if you could navigate around Buckingham Palace, with its buckets collecting leaks and its elderly swimming pool, or that you’ve lived through London and Paris in the fifties. You can also wonder about what it’s like to try and be a decent human, with normal relationships, when everything you do risks being on the front page of the papers every day. 

Q: How does it feel that New York Times Bestselling Author Ruth Ware called A Death In Diamonds A PITCH PERFECT MURDER MYSTERY? 

A: Ruth very kindly said that about The Windsor Knot, when I was starting out as a mystery writer. Of course I was thrilled! Like me, she used to write young adult fiction before turning to crime, and I remember how delighted I was for her when I read her first thriller, In a Dark Dark Wood, which was absolutely brilliant, and watched it race up the charts. Since then, she’s written so many bestsellers, all with a new set of characters, problems and settings. It’s extraordinary. For her to appreciate my writing means a lot. 

Q: Are you currently writing the next book in Her Majesty The Queen Investigates Series, the beginning of a new series or a standalone novel?

A: Sort of all of the above! I’ve finished The Queen Who Came in From the Cold, which is the next book in the series, but I still have the editing process to go through before it comes out in November. It’s set partly on the royal train, and partly on the Royal Yacht Britannia when the Queen visits Italy in 1961. I’ve spent a lot of time in Italy, so it was a joy to go back to Venice for research. The book features a classic detective mystery and a spy plot, so I’m excited to share it with readers. 

Meanwhile, I’m thinking about a new non-royal, non-real detective. I’d like to think this idea might become part of a new series too, but we’ll see where it takes me. I hope I can put all the lessons I’ve learned about mystery writing into the new plot. Writers often say it gets harder with each book, because you set yourself a new set of challenges, and that’s true – but I love this part, when the book has infinite possibilities. Off we go. 

Q: If BBC or Hollywood were to make your books in a tv series, would you use some of the cast from the Crown to play the historical figures or would you cast new actors this time around?

A: I haven’t watched The Crown since the first two seasons – partly because it entered territory I remembered from my own lifetime, and also because by then I was writing my own series and wanted to tell the stories my own way. However, I adored Claire Foy and Vanessa Kirby in those first seasons. And I’ve liked what I’ve seen of Helena Bonham Carter as Margaret later. I once read an interview where Helena said she couldn’t play Margaret exactly as she knew her to be, because the director wanted something different – so I’d love to be able to cast her and let her do it how she likes. 

Overall, though my stories are a different take, so I would definitely want different actors – or maybe some of the same actors in different roles, given that it used up most of the British acting profession at some point! I love hearing readers’ suggestions about who would work best. 

One of my favourite British actors is Roger Allum, who was Fred Thursday in Endeavour, as well as being in many films and other TV series. The policeman Fred Darbishire in A Death in Diamonds gets his ‘Fred’-ness from that part. I’ve always said to my agent that Roger could have whichever part he wanted. I’d love him to be the Queen’s private secretary. 

I’m also very grateful to Samantha Bond, who reads all the UK audiobooks – including A Death in Diamonds for the US. She was Miss Moneypenny to Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond, and Lord Grantham’s sister in Downton Abbey. There are various roles she’d be wonderful at throughout the books. 

I think Felicity Jones could do a great job of playing the younger Queen in A Death in Diamonds. I don’t have anyone in mind yet for Joan, but I always loved the idea of Michaela Coel for Rozie, or possibly Lashana Lynch, who played Eddie Redmayne’s nemesis in The Day of the Jackal recently. Dream casting is always fun. 

Q: Which scenes were your favorite to write? I think my favorite was the Queen revealing the mystery. 

A: Thank you very much. I loved writing that scene, and especially Prince Philip’s small part in it. I always enjoy writing the scenes with him. 

In fact, I would say my favourite was the scene not too long before, when the Queen and Philip have the heart to heart they’ve been needing since the beginning of the book. I hope it captures some of the love and the personal vulnerability they must both have felt at different times. Writing dialogue is one of my favourite things, and Philip’s sharp wit lends itself to some snappy lines. 

Another scene that springs to mind is Daphne du Maurier’s arrival at Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Daphne was a friend of the royal couple in the fifties, and she did indeed visit Balmoral, though not necessarily on that occasion. When she went, she hated it! She liked the Queen and Philip, but not the stuffy formality around them and the constant need to change clothes for different activities. A friend whose father worked for the Queen for many years told me that his room at Balmoral was miles away from the main rooms, so he was always running up and down corridors to get changed. I was thinking of him when I wrote about Daphne that day.