You can read a talk I gave at the
Barbican by following
this link
THE MYSTERY WRITER
Allison and Busby, £14.99 hardback, and £7.99 paperback.
I started writing The Mystery Writer while I was still working on Out of Harm's Way, which is a non-fiction book telling the story of the overseas evacuation of children from Britain during the Second World War. I was one of those evacuees myself but remember nothing at all about my early childhood in Canada and America so the information is derived from other peoples' memories and documentary research. The natural tendency of a novelist is to make things up but in writing Out of Harm's Way I resisted that temptation and stuck firmly to the facts. Some of those facts are the basis of this story. Turning them into fiction left me free to invent and embellish, bringing together history and imagination, actual places and altered ones, real people and others who never existed, though the only real name I have used is my own.. The Mystery Writer contains some truths and some untruths. In literature, as in life, it is not always obvious which is which.
The Mystery Writer was the Book Club Choice for June 2009 -
see the publisher's website
for readers' questions and my answers.
To read the review by Maxine Clarke in Eurocrime follow
this link
The Sunday Telegraph 16/04/06
Kate Chisholm reviews The Mystery Writer by Jessica Mann
When Jessica Mann published a newspaper article about the sinking of the SS City of Benares by German torpedoes in 1940 while on its way to Canada with a cargo of child evacuees, she received such a torrent of mail that she realised there was a long-repressed Second World War story to be told. She turned her original feature into a bestselling book, Out of Harm's Way, but there was still, she felt, much more to tell. She herself had been evacuated, aged two, and there were loose ends and hidden emotions which she wanted to explore without being constrained by the documentary format.
The Mystery Writer, her latest novel, begins with a bracingly realistic account of the shipwreck of the Benares through the eyes of two of the children, both from Trevena, a village in Cornwall. They grew up, however, in very different worlds: Jonathan Hicks was the pampered son of the posh family living at the big house of Goonzoyle, while Ted Johns came from below stairs. Both boys were reported to have died in the shipwreck, but in truth one of them survived. Which one?
Enter Jessica Mann, with her crime-writer hat on, and her recollection of a nightmare day in 1976. She was living in Cornwall with her archaeologist husband and young family, and one afternoon while on a hunt for 'worked' flints near Trevena they came across a dead body. Mann, despite her backlist of 18 crime novels, was more shocked than intrigued by what she had seen, and tried to forget it. But then while working on Out of Harm's Way she received an email from the sister of Ted Johns and arranged to meet her in London.
From there, rather surprisingly, we find ourselves not in a moving study of lost relations and displaced persons but enmeshed in a murder-mystery that takes us from Trevena to New York and back, via several disappearing women, and a teenager traumatised by something she has seen but is unable to recall.
Blurring the boundary between fact and fiction usually makes me feel queasy, as if I'm walking on quicksand. But Jessica Mann controls her material so cleverly that even when she comes up against her fictional characters there's a seamless transition between the two worlds. I've still no idea who is real and who isn't; how many murders were actually committed? But this does not seem to matter. The essence of Jessica Mann's tale feels true, and it's a gripping read.
THE TIMES April 2006
Kate Saunders calls The Mystery Writer
‘A warm, pleasurable read and not too hard on the grey cells.’
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In June 1940 Britain expected enemy invasion. Despite Churchill`s determination to fight on the beaches, many parents made desperate efforts to send their children abroad to safety. Thousands left for America, Canada, Australia and other distant countries. In this revealing new book, Jessica Mann, herself a wartime evacuee, looks at the experiences of those who were sent away to a foreign land including their dangerous journeys across U-boat-ridden oceans, and asks how they coped with being away, and also how they found life back in the UK on their return. Drawing on extensive original research and memories of many former evacuees, including Elizabeth Taylor and Shirley Williams, Jessica Mann builds up a moving portrait of a lost generation.