Relative Fortunes makes its debut as #1 Best Seller in Historical Mysteries,
One of the joys of being published by Lake Union, an Amazon imprint, is that although the book doesn't come out till August 1st. there are already 188 reviews on Amazon. The average rating is 4.1
My review. Relative Fortunes feels like it was actually written in the 1920s. It's a rich, twisty story loaded with background detail. And the mystery is as serpentine as the book itself. Fabulous debut. My congratulations to Marlow Benn. I was given an ARC in return for an unbiased review.
And I am now passing the ARC on to one lucky reader. a (US Only) Sorry.
Blurb:
In 1920s New York, the price of a woman’s independence can be exorbitant—even fatal.
In 1924 Manhattan, women’s suffrage is old news. For sophisticated booklover Julia Kydd, life’s too short for politics. With her cropped hair and penchant for independent living, Julia wants only to launch her own new private press. But as a woman, Julia must fight for what’s hers—including the inheritance her estranged half brother, Philip, has challenged, putting her aspirations in jeopardy.
When her friend’s sister, Naomi Rankin, dies suddenly of an apparent suicide, Julia is shocked at the wealthy family’s indifference toward the ardent suffragist’s death. Naomi chose poverty and hardship over a submissive marriage and a husband’s control of her money. Now, her death suggests the struggle was more than she could bear.
Julia, however, is skeptical. Doubtful of her suspicions, Philip proposes a glib wager: if Julia can prove Naomi was in fact murdered, he’ll drop his claims to her wealth. Julia soon discovers Naomi’s life was as turbulent and enigmatic as her death. And as she gets closer to the truth, Julia sees there’s much more at stake than her inheritance…
Interested? Rafflecopter at the end of the post. At my request, Marlowe's publicists gave me an interview.
A Conversation with Author Marlowe
Benn
Q: Why did
you choose the 1920s and the suffrage movement as the backdrop for this
mystery? What about the time period inspired you?
A: I grew up to
the jaunty sound of my dad’s old ‘20s records, and the era has always fascinated
me. In many ways it was a more radical time (especially for women) than many
realize. Beyond finally achieving the right to vote, women enjoyed at least the
possibility of heady new social freedoms: emerging access to birth control,
fashions that defied old notions of modesty, and the opportunity to live as
independent, self-sufficient adults. Not everyone embraced these new freedoms,
or even condoned them, but the old restrictive conventions had been challenged,
if not breached.
Q: In the
afterword, you nod to the ways you borrowed from actual history to weave
together this story. Can you tell us a bit about your research?
A: It was important to me to anchor the
novel accurately in its time and place. I spent a lot of time with magazines and novels of the
era, absorbing details of everyday life (what one took for a headache, the
price of a coffee, what books people were talking about) and how people talked.
Learning the slang was great fun! I am familiar with many of these details and she did a great job.
I
also tried to blend real characters and details with fictional ones. I spent
months in university archives studying the craze in the 1920s for beautiful
handcrafted books of the sort Julia publishes. Her Capriole Press is of course
fictional, but most of the printers, publishers, and collectors she meets are
real people. Similarly, the Grolier Club was in fact the
nation’s premier private club for bibliophiles, and as Julia complains, it was
not only exclusive but was also firmly men-only until the 1970s. I had read a fair amount about these presses while researching TE Lawrence. His Seven Pillars Of Wisdom was privately printed in 1926 by one of these small presses. I have seen two copies both bound beautifully and very differently in the New York Public Library rare book collections. I was very impressed.
Q:
Wealth and status are not always symbols
of goodness in Relative Fortunes. Why
did you choose to expose the dysfunctions of the rich and powerful? What did
you want to say about wealth and its relationship to virtue?
A: While there’s no
shortage of aphorisms equating worldly riches with moral poverty, wealth per se
isn’t inherently good or evil. The problem arises because the rich often view
their wealth as natural and benign—invisible—while the poor see and feel
sharply the injustices and exploitation that wealth usually relies on and
perpetuates. That blindness can skew a rich person’s way of seeing the world:
at first, they simply don’t notice others’ suffering, which of course
translates into indifference. Julia truly understands the privileges of wealth
only when she faces losing them. Of course, eventually the rich do notice—hence
the centuries of rationales to justify and reinforce their class advantages. I
hope that Julia’s reversal of fortunes, which opens her eyes to these issues,
also helps readers see them better.
Q: Not all of the women in this
novel agree with each other on issues like abortion, suffrage, and financial
independence. Did you try to reflect a generational divide between younger
feminists and older feminists, or married versus unmarried women? Why was this
something you wanted to explore in this book?
A: I wanted to portray
a spectrum of values among the women in the book without correlating attitudes
or beliefs with any particular age, education, social class, marital status,
and so on. The youngest woman in the book, Julia, for example, ultimately has
more in common with the values of the oldest woman, Aunt Lillian, than with those
of Vivian Winterjay, who is much closer to her in age and social class. I think
it’s important to resist stereotyping according to such categories because then
we stop listening to and respecting each other, and a dangerous polarization
can set in. Our present-day world is a cautionary tale of the damage that can
result.
Q: What
inspired you to write Relative Fortunes?
A: As a
child I was fascinated by the hugely popular mystery novels from the 1920s
written by S. S. Van Dine (the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright). Wright’s
urbane and sophisticated sleuth, Philo Vance, both intrigued and infuriated me.
As an adult I began to imagine ways I’d like to “revise” him and his elegant
world. By a happy quirk of luck, those old novels are now being reissued in new
editions, so readers can consider for themselves how my Philip Vancill Kydd
might have been transformed into Philo Vance by an ill-humored writer. Of
course, it’s also true that my characters took on identities of their own quite
beyond this original idea. At first Philip was more like Philo, but neither
Julia nor I could bear spending much time with him! So Philip now shares mostly
superficial and circumstantial features with Philo. I hope the differences can
be credited to the derisive mind of my fictional version of Mr. Wright.
Q: What do you love most about
writing historical fiction?
A: For years I happily wrote nothing
but carefully researched and argued cultural history. Now with fiction I can
begin where the archives end. It’s like turning old black-and-white photos into
a full-color video. Research reveals the past; fiction puts it in motion. And
once history comes to life, it’s clear that people then wrestled with troubles
a lot like our own.
I love writing mysteries because they’re
ultimately about justice, and what’s more complicated than guilt and innocence?
I especially relish writing about crimes that pit the law against my
characters’ moral code. In the end justice is often about power, and the
struggle over who gets to decide what’s right or wrong makes for great stories
in any genre. Historical mysteries are a great way into the life’s most meaty
stuff.
Q: What authors do you most enjoy reading?
A: This
list is a long one, and it’s always getting longer. Kate Atkinson is firmly at
the top. Other authors who’ve rarely let me down are Alice Munro, Meg Wolitzer,
Amor Towles, Siri Hustvedt, Jesmyn Ward, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Penelope
Fitzgerald, and Amanda Cross. On a different day, you might get a different
list.
Q: Have
you made any good literary “discoveries” lately?
A: Absolutely!
Terrific books published in the past few years that deserve to be better known
include Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing
With Feathers, Graham Swift’s Mothering
Sunday, Danielle Dutton’s Margaret
the First, and Jess Kidd’s Himself.
Older books unjustly overlooked, I think, include Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, Muriel Sparks’s A Far Cry from Kensington, and Barbara
Neely’s Blanche on the Lam. I could
go on and on.
Q: We have to ask—what are you working on next? Anything that you
can tease for readers who are looking forward to your next book?
A: I’m
working hard on the next Julia Kydd novel, tentatively called The Passing of Miss Pruitt. It’s May
1925, and Julia is back in New York. Eager to launch her Capriole Press, she
quickly makes friends in the publishing world—authors, editors, illustrators,
publishers. Soon she’s caught up in murder and the theft of a new novel
manuscript claiming to reveal explosive truths about the Harlem cabaret scene.
She’s drawn into the
exhilarating yet treacherous world beneath the Harlem Renaissance, where notions
of race, sexuality, and power are slippery, and identities can be deceptively
fluid.
Wishing you all a wonderful week full of good things. My first good thing was Maybe This Time is now a finalist for the Raven Awards in Contemporary Romance.
