Religious Transition in Tudor England Revisited: An interview with Nancy Bilyeau about The Crown

In January, I first interviewed Nancy about the release of The Crown, her Tudor-era mystery novel to positive critical reviews and even an award nomination.  As her publisher just re-released the book in paperback, Nancy and I talked briefly about her debut novel experience and her upcoming sequel.

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1) For those who didn't see the first interview or haven't had a chance to read your book yet, tell us a bit about The Crown.

It’s a historical thriller set in 1537 England, written in the first person from the perspective of a 26-year-old Dominican novice at a priory in Dartford. Sister Joanna Stafford learns that her favorite cousin has been condemned by Henry VIII to be burned at the stake for treason in a rebellion. Defying the rule of enclosure, Joanna leaves the priory to stand at her cousin’s side. Arrested for interfering with the king’s justice, Joanna, along with her father, is sent to the Tower of London. She is forced to return to her priory as a spy: to save her father’s life she must find an ancient relic—a crown so powerful, it may possess the ability to end the Reformation.

2) The Crown has been out for nine months and now is going into paperback. It's well-received including some awards nominations. Please tell us a bit about that.

I’m extraordinarily grateful for the response. I didn’t know what to expect, truly, and you know the first review I received was not so good. I was crushed: I slept three hours that night. Then more reviews came in, some mixed and some positive, and then some more positive ones. I think the good reviews from Oprah and Kirkus and Entertainment Weekly gave the biggest boosts. But I try not to get caught up in it, because you start to feel confident about the writing after a good review and then crushed all over again by a bad review. It’s not a great way to live your life. The award nomination—the Crime Writers’ Association’s Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award—was a surprise. I opened the email first thing in the morning—because of the time difference between London and New York, I sometimes have emails waiting for me when I wake up—and it was one from my editor at Orion Books, telling me about making it onto the short list for the award. I didn’t end up winning but I was ecstatic to get as far as I did.

3) Not every debut necessarily goes well. Timing, subject matter, and the ebb and flow of trends can work against authors. Are you surprised at how well your story of a curious nun drawn into religious and political turmoil has done?

Yes! While I was writing it, I was filled with doubts about it—should I have written in the first person? Will people be turned off by a nun protagonist? I had no idea if I could get an agent, much less sell it in America and nine foreign countries. I tried to write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself. I really love historical thrillers.

4) Some authors do nothing but look forward. Authors agonize over every perceived mistake. Your reviews, overall, are quite positive. That being said, is there anything you wished you could have done differently?

I wish I had written it five years earlier. This is a volatile time to be a debut novelist. I just have to hang in there, and hope that no matter what, people do like to read stories, and I need to work hard to deliver the best stories I can.

5) Your sequel isn't out until spring of next year, but can you give us a little sneak peak about The Chalice?

It’s a darker book than The Crown, it’s less of a murder mystery and more of an international thriller. But also there is more romance.

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Thanks, Nancy.

If you'd like to see more from Nancy, please visit   www.nancybilyeau.com. 

Here is a trailer for The Crown:

Here is also a three minute video interview with Nancy:

The Crown is now available in paperback at all major bookstores and online at all major vendors including Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Some Wounds Never Heal: An interview with historical thriller author Tim Ashby

Today, I'm talking with Tim Ashby. Tim's had a varied career including working as a counter-terrorism analyst and assisting in privatization projects in Central and Eastern Europe.

His novel, Devil's Den, is a nested historical thriller taking place in the 1920s but also including elements from the American Civil War.

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1) Tell us about your book.

In Devil’s Den, the 1923 murder of a Civil War veteran leaves a trail of conspiracy, cover-up and corruption stretching from the Battle of Gettysburg to the halls of the Harding-era Congress and the fledgling Bureau of Investigation (precursor to the FBI). Someone is killing elderly Civil War veterans and BI agent Seth Armitage must discover what links the victims in order to find the killer, unaware that the investigation is being manipulated by the Bureau's corrupt director Harry M. Daugherty (real-life Attorney General in the tainted Harding Administration) and a shadowy member of the Senate. Providing a Machiavellian counterweight to the plot is the BI's ambitious assistant director J. Edgar Hoover. The case draws Virginia-born Armitage, haunted by his memories of World War I France, to the site of the bloody battlefield where his grandfathers fought for the Confederacy. Armitage uncovers a conspiracy that goes to the highest levels of government. Devil’s Den shows the absurdity of Prohibition, the violence and racial injustice of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and the unparalleled corruption that pervaded the Harding government. As such, the "Devil's Den" of the title works on two levels, referring both to the rocky corner of the Gettysburg killing fields and Washington of the Roaring Twenties.

2) When people think of thrillers with political elements, they tend to think of more modern settings, not the 1920s. Even the core canon of the hard-boiled detective genre is a bit more contemporary than your setting. What drew you to this time period?


The decade of the1920s was a time of great social and technological change, and was a fascinating “bridge” between America’s (and the world’s) agrarian past and the “modern” era. The decade is filled with famous and infamous characters, as well as a number of real “history’s mysteries” which my hero, Seth Armitage, will investigate.

3) The juxtaposition of the 1920s and Civil War elements is unusual. Why did you choose to intertwine the Civil War in your plot?


My family has strong ties to the Civil War and northern Virginia (where scenes of the book are set). I was influenced by childhood stories from relatives whose parents and grandparents served in the conflict. The interlocking conspiracies in Devil’s Den – separated by 60 years – are based on real events. Many Civil War veterans were alive in the 1920s, and some were still active in the US government and business.

4) Often when doing historical research, authors stumble upon something they didn't expect. Did you have any experiences like this?

I had not previously grasped the magnitude of corruption within the Harding administration, or the national extent and power of the Ku Klux Klan - which was not confined to the Old South. I was also struck by the rapid growth of new technologies. We think that we live in an era of rapid technological change, but between 1918 and 1923, telephones, radios, motion pictures, and automobiles were adopted at exponential growth rates. Closed cabin passenger and cargo airplanes were also in use – I feature one in Devil’s Den!

5) Even if one ignores the over-the-top technology one occasionally sees on some television police procedurals, it's hard to escape the association of forensics and advanced data mining techniques with investigation. Did you find it challenging to explore investigation in this story absent many of the technologies and procedures now taken for granted by law enforcement?

In Devil’s Den, I show the resistance to new forensic investigatory techniques. For example, my protagonist, Seth Armitage, an advocate of using fingerprints, clashes with a rural sheriff who considers such methods akin to witchcraft. Throughout the book, I demonstrate the Bureau of Investigation’s use of 1920s “leading edge” forensics techniques. Regardless of what one may think of J. Edgar Hoover – and he is portrayed as a Machiavellian character in the book – I give him credit for being a staunch advocate of such investigatory technologies.

6) Hartley declared that "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." That being said, it's often striking how little we moderns do differ from our ancestors. Although no one can deny that striking changes have taken place in the United States over the past ninety years, there are many aspects that seem to have changed little if not at all. In what ways do you think 1920s America was the same, if not very similar, to modern America?

As I have discussed on my author blog at www.timashby.com, xenophobia was widespread in 1920s America and it seems to be returning today. In the USA of 90 years ago, young people were similarly fascinated by technology, cars, airplanes, fashion trends, movie stars and sports.

7) People often tend to grow attached to the protagonist in mysteries and thrillers. Should we expect a sequel?

Yes. Devil’s Den is intended to be the first in a series. The sequel, In Shadowland (the title is from a popular 1925 son), is my current work in progress.

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Thanks, Tim. If you'd like to see more from Tim, please check out his website  http://timashby.com/.

Devil's Den can be purchased in physical or electronic form from Amazon or physical form from Barnes and Noble.

Religious transition, mystery, and adventure: An interview with historical fiction author, Nancy Bilyeau

Today, I am talking with Nancy Bilyeau. Nancy is a long-time writer and editor who has worked at a number of magazines including InStyle, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly. Her debut novel, The Crown,  has her tacking mystery under the backdrop of religious transition in Tudor England.

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1) Tell us about your book.


The Crown is a historical thriller set in 1537-1538 about a half-English, half-Spanish Dominican novice named Joanna Stafford who gets caught up in a conspiracy and quest to locate a hidden object of mystical importance.

2) English history is filled with fascinating chapters and episodes. What caught your interest about the period covered in your novel?


Ever since I was 11 years old, I loved the 16th century, I suppose for the high drama of the personalities. More recently, I’ve wondered if our fascination with the Tudors goes beyond the obviousness of “Divorced/Beheaded/Died/Divorced/Beheaded/Survived.” Thanks to Holbein’s portraits and the chroniclers of the age—among them some wonderfully snarky ambassadors--the central cast of characters leap out at us. They feel close in. Much more so than the Plantagenets earlier. And as time went on, and Parliament became more important and governmental movements and issuances, the royal family was not quite as directly responsible for what happened to ordinary people every day. Henry VIII, while flailing about trying to divorce Catherine of Aragon for Anne Boleyn’s flashing dark eyes, would ride out and people occasionally shouted, “Back to your wife!” Even now, we feel as if we have a front row seat to the show and people feel emboldened to shout at Henry or Mary or Elizabeth. They have some sort of stake in it all. Also, there is something intoxicating about the mix of the time—the medieval world shading into the early modern age. I love the writers of the time: not just Shakespeare but Erasmus and More and Henry Howard.

3) The overall Tudor period, particularly in recent years, has been a popular period for fiction, but a lot of this fiction has primarily focused on key royal figures and those closely associated with them. Although there are a few famous faces in your book, your protagonist is a Dominican novice, someone pretty far from the hallowed halls of power. What went into your decision to focus on this sort of protagonist?


I felt that the royals of the 16th century had been quite well covered. I’ve always been curious about the more “ordinary” people of history. I wanted to write a story that thrust a character into the heart of the most compelling conflicts of the time. Because religious conflict fascinates me, I thought a person who had taken vows to follow a monastic life would inevitably be part of the turmoil. I wanted to write a female main character, and so I came up with a novice in a Dominican order. The order existed: Dartford Priory, in Kent.

4) Though this book is set during a time of great religious transition, it is, at its heart, a suspense-filled mystery focused on a lost artifact. Did you find it difficult to balance the mystery elements and the historical elements?


No, I loved it. I found that the history of the time lent itself to mystery and suspense without much effort on my part. I’m writing a thriller set in Tudor England, rather than a historical story that happens to have a mystery in the plot.

5) What was the most surprising thing you learned in doing research for this book?


The audacity of the manipulations that allowed the government to dismantle the monasteries. It was done ostensibly for reform, yet there was no reform. The abbeys and priories were closed, the people living inside ejected. And then these beautiful buildings were often stripped down to the lead. All that remains of the Dominican “Blackfriars” monastery in London, a complex of magnificent buildings that stretched between the Thames and Ludgate Hill, is a four-foot-long piece of stone wall. I’ve seen it. No, this was a financial initiative, no question. At various junctures, resistance would be met with incredible savagery. Monks were starved, tortured, beheaded. Abbots were executed and pieces of their bodies were displayed in public. This did a lot to deter others from resisting! Yet there was a popular uprising—the Pilgrimage of Grace—in large part to the common people’s outrage. Of course nothing stopped it in the end.

6) This period is filled with countless fascinating figures. Is there anyone in particular that you found particularly compelling?


Bishop Stephen Gardiner, my antagonist, was such a complex man. He was one of the legal minds behind the divorce from Catherine of Aragon—he was brilliant, everyone agrees. Yet as the country moved more and more toward Protestantism, he tried to halt that. Such irony in his struggle.

7) Arguably, the primary appeal of historical fiction is letting a reader experience, in some small way, a past they will otherwise never know. At the same time, people still are interested in fundamental storytelling aspects such as plot and pacing. How did you balance the detail necessary to turn your novel into a time machine without overwhelming the reader?


I tried as much as possible to weave in the historical detail as part of the action. I don’t like it when writers come full stop to describe a ceiling—gosh, having said that, I hope I didn’t do it. I find writing in first person helps in this regard—everything is through the eyes of Sister Joanna Stafford. By the way, what I’ve done in writing a first-person thriller set in the 16th century is not common. There are murder mysteries written this way. But thrillers are often split it into two time tracks—modern and the past, with the two plots intertangling. I broke ranks, so to speak, because I just felt this was the way for me to tell a story.

8) HF authors are knowingly creating stories and details they know may not have existed, but they can't risk deviating too much from the known history without risking losing the very appeal of their subject matter. At the same time, some aspects of the past can be so alien to modern readers that they are difficult to communicate well in novel. Did such thoughts influence your choices concerning what historical details to emphasize or include?


I revel in details and behavior that may seem alien today! I tried as much as possible NOT to force modern perceptions and standards onto my characters. I think when someone selects a book such as this to read, that person wants to explore a different mindset. But I don’t use dialogue that is accurate to Tudor England, people would find it heavy lifting. Here is an excerpt from Mouzell for Melastomus (do you like that title?), which was written by Rachel Speght, the first printed defence of women, in the early 1600s: “Thus if men would remember the duties they are to performe in being heads, fome would not ftand a tip-toe as they doe, thinking themlfelues Lords & Rulers, and account every omiffion of performing whatfoeuer they command, whether lawfull or not, to be matter of gret difparagement, and indignity done them.” I think you’ll agree with me it’s best to find a middle ground.

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Thanks, Nancy.

If you'd like to see more from Nancy, please check her out at www.nancybilyeau.com.

The Crown is now available at all major bookstores and online at all major vendors including Amazon and Barnes and Noble.