Show notes
Rhys Bowen’s books sell in the millions around the world. She enjoys popular and critical acclaim for both her Royal Spyness mysteries and her bestselling historical fiction. But she says it’s the surprising, heart-warming feedback she gets from her readers that means the most to her.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today Rhys talks about the unexpected rewards of being a top international author – the stories she hears of how her books have helped readers through the loneliness of pandemic lockdown and other dire emergencies. Like the woman in Texas who sat in her car watching flood waters destroy her house, listening to a Rhys Bowen audio book for comfort.
And on a personal note I can attest to Rhys’s kindness. We had done a whole 30 minutes of our interview before I noticed I’d failed to push “Record”. I fessed up and Rhys generously agreed to repeat the whole thing over again. And she even refused to accept some NZ wine as a overwhelmingly grateful thank you!
Twelve Days of Christmas Giveaway
I’m delighted to say Rhys’s Royal Spyness book The Twelve Clues of Christmas is one of four Christmas books featured in our Twelve Days of Christmas Giveaway that starts this week.
ENTER THE CHRISTMAS GIVEAWAY
Every week for the next four weeks we’ll be giving away our four book Holiday Reading Bundle as our Christmas gift to you for supporting us all year.
That’s four Holiday Book Bundles, each consisting of four books – two contemporary and two historical. If you enter once, you’ll be automatically entered for each of the four weeks so you have four chances to win!
Enter online at https://thejoysofbingereading.com/giveaway/ or on the Binge Reading Facebook page.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
How Rhys knows so much about royal protocol
Where the highly popular ‘Royal Spyness’ series came from
Queen Victoria’s fascination with Nice
Balancing historical accuracy with #MeToo sensibilities
The pandemic in America
Spoofing a romantic suspense classic
Where to find Rhys Bowen:
Website: https://rhysbowen.com/
Facebook: @RhysBowenAuthor
Instagram: @authorrhysbowen
Twitter: @Rhysbowen
Email: [email protected]
Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/rhys-bowen
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/202867.Rhys_Bowen
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But now, here’s Rhys.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Rhys, and welcome to the show second time around. It’s so good of you to be here.
Rhys Bowen: Hi Jenny. Good to see you again.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it is again, because we spoke in May 2018 last, when you had a Royal Spyness story out about weddings. You are still going strong on your Royal Spyness series. You’ve got The Late Mrs. Summers out this year as well as one of your new historical mystery, Above the Bay of Angels.
Tell me, how have you been faring during the pandemic?
Introducing Rhys Bowen author
Rhys Bowen: It’s been very scary here. You have been doing so well in New Zealand and I’m very envious of what you’ve been doing. Everybody seems to be on board and pulling together to bring this thing to an end, which we don’t have here. We have been very good about isolating and wearing masks and seeing people outside at distance only. I’ve been doing everything one is supposed to do, but it’s hard to be stuck at home most of the time. The other day my daughter said, I went to the store, and I said, store, what is this word? I do not know what it means.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, perhaps to clarify for listeners, you are in California. You’re speaking from California, aren’t you?
Rhys Bowen historical mystery author
Rhys Bowen: Yes, I am. California has been doing quite well, but the rest of the United States has been doing really horribly. We still have cases mounting all the time, which is very sad.
Jenny Wheeler: When we last talked, I referred to the wedding and we had a bit of a laugh because Meghan was about to marry Prince Harry at that time. We joked that your weddings book was likely to get a bit of a boost. Who could have seen that just two years later, they wouldn’t even be considered Royals any longer.
An unforeseen Royal ruckus
Rhys Bowen: It’s something I certainly didn’t see coming. Everybody was so excited when they married because everybody was saying, now we can relate to the Royals because she’s multicultural, she’s one of us, she’s fun.
Then suddenly everything went wrong, and I don’t really know what it was, whether she didn’t take into account what being a Royal meant, whether she liked the idea of being a Royal but then when the reality struck, she realized that she wouldn’t have one minute of freedom. Who knows? It’s very sad because I think he’s given up more than he ever intended to give up.
Not quite the ending we expected…
He was not the heir, he was the spare, as they say, but it meant a lot to him, his army connections and his military connections and all all the charities he did connected with the military. He has had to give all those up. I don’t know if he’s regretting it now. I don’t know what she wanted either, whether she just wanted the fame.
It’s kind of hard because I know someone who was connected to her before and knew her quite well and she was lovely according to them, so I can’t really judge. But I feel sorry for them now, because they are stuck in LA in a life they probably don’t want.
The Royal Spyness series
Jenny Wheeler: We have talked about the Royal Spyness mysteries and they are very relevant to this conversation, because your heroine Georgiana is a penniless aristocrat who’s 35th in line for the throne of England, but she’s also flat broke and struggling to survive in the Great Depression.
The books poke gentle fun at the British class system and the way the upper classes govern. How did you find Georgiana? How did she come together, and was she the first thing you ever wrote?
The latest Royal Spyness mystery
Rhys Bowen: She came really because I had been doing two other series, Constable Evans series set in Wales, contemporary, and then I did the Molly Murphy series, which is about a young Irish immigrant in New York at the turn of the 20th century. But my publisher kept saying to me, we can’t really break you out unless you write us a big, dark standalone novel.
I kept thinking, what’s a standalone novel? Child molesters, serial killers. Then I thought, wait, do I want to spend six months in darkness with these people? No, I don’t. What would be the silliest, most unlikely sleuth I could come up with?
A penniless royal between two wars
Then I thought, how about if she was royal? She’s royal, but she’s penniless and it has to be the 1930s because what a fun time that was – poised between two World Wars with Mrs. Simpson and the Prince of Wales and Noel Coward and Hitler – all these extreme and wonderful stories to tell. I sat down and started writing almost stream of consciousness, in Georgiana’s own voice.
I sent it off to my agent and she said, this is such fun, we have to do this. We sent it off to my editor who went no, no, this wasn’t what we wanted at all. So my agent sent it out to bids elsewhere and it was bought by somebody else and it started doing really well. The first publisher had to grudgingly say, well, in that ‘other’ series.
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It’s been delightful for me to see it doing so well because I was right to start with, and it’s a lot of fun to write them because they’re funny and they’re poking gentle fun at the British class system and so they are very therapeutic to write, especially in tough times like this.
A publishing coup
Jenny Wheeler: Did you stay with that second publisher or do you now have two publishers?
Rhys Bowen: I actually now have three publishers. The first one has done the Molly Murphy series up to now, and I may be going back to Molly fairly soon. Penguin does the Royal Spyness series, but then my standalones are done with Lake Union, which is Amazon’s big book publishing house. So I’ve got three different publishers, which is very nice because they all have to work hard to please me because I’ve got three of them.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s a great place to be in. We were talking about Georgiana. You have quite an insight into the way the upper class system works in Britain, because you have family connections that go way back. Tell us a little bit about how your insight in that area might have developed.
The distant royal connections
Rhys Bowen: My husband’s family is upper-class and has several royal connections way back. They used to own the stately home called Sutton Place, and still have a couple of lovely houses. I live in California, so when I’m over there, I think I’m very good as an observer.
If I lived in England, I might take all this for granted, but I love listening to them talk and someone will say, do remember that joke we used to play on the butler, and I scribble it down in my little notebook.
Malice at the Palace – Rhys Bowen
I notice that there is still this class feeling in England. Someone will say, I met this man the other day who does so and so, and immediately someone else will say, where did he go to school? That’s exactly putting him in a box. If he went to the right school you can talk to him, if he didn’t, you can’t talk to him. It seems very silly to me living in California, but that’s still how it is in England.
And with William and Kate, before they became engaged, they broke it off because her mother was deemed too common because she used the word ‘toilet’ instead of ‘lavatory’. It was huge in England. They had these huge newspaper headlines saying ‘Toiletgate’ and it almost broke them up. Luckily, they got back together again, but it just goes to show you, it’s very important in England.
A Downton Abbey world
John’s family still has the cousins with silly nicknames. He really does have a cousin called ‘Fig,’ another one called ‘Dude’ and a very distinguished older lady called ‘Puff’. It’s quite fun when I’m over there and someone says, this is Puff coming over and they take it for granted. It seems really funny to me. I enjoy putting these things in books.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s a little bit like Downton Abbey, isn’t it. Why do you think that period and the class system is so popular with the ordinary folk?
Rhys Bowen: I think because it’s something we can’t have. Downton Abbey, the lovely costumes and the fact that the servants do everything for you in a hundred bedrooms, it’s almost like waking up and finding you turned into Cinderella or something. It’s so different from our life that you think it must be very glamorous.
I think it’s the same with the Royals. We are fascinated with the Royals because their life is almost a fairytale compared with ours.
A fascination with monarchy
Especially in America – New Zealand’s got a queen, you’re lucky, but in America, we don’t have Royals, so I think we waste an awful lot of energy on pomp and circumstance because we love that. I think in our hearts we’d really love a Royal too. We are fascinated with it.
Jenny Wheeler: When you said that, I jokingly thought, you’ve got Kim Kardashian.
Rhys Bowen: We also have Mr. Trump, who’d like to be a crown something.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. In more recent years, you’ve turned your hand to doing standalone historicals, and you’ve had tremendous success with those – both sales-wise and with critical acclaim, but mainly they have been World War I and World War II period. The newest one, called Above the Bay of Angels, is another international bestseller and it’s going back to Queen Victoria’s time. Tell us why you chose to give the World War period a rest and go back a couple of generations.
A Nice vacation sparked inspiration
Rhys Bowen: I didn’t intend to write about Queen Victoria. I like writing both World War I and World War II. You’ve got this heightened emotion, heightened danger, and of course, terrible tragedies and great bravery. You’ve got all the makings of so many good stories.
Nice – Queen Victoria’s favorite
But I was in Nice on vacation once and we were up on a hill and we saw this beautiful white building up there. There was a gardener, working in the garden and I said to him, is this a hotel? He said, no madam, it used to be a hotel, but now it’s apartments. He said, it was a hotel that was built for your queen. I said, oh, Queen Elizabeth? And he went, no madam, Queen Victoria.
I hadn’t known until then that Queen Victoria, in her later years, used to go there for her winters and spend three months or so in the South of France and they built this beautiful hotel for her. They gave her a whole wing to herself and she would come down from England on her private train, bringing everything with her – all her maids, her footmen, her ladies-in-waiting, all her own cooks and all her bedroom furniture, and added to this a regiment of Highland Pipers.
Lady Balmoral, if you please . . .
Then she would say, I don’t want anybody to know I’m the Queen and you are to call me Lady Balmoral. Well, of course, you come on your own train with a regiment of Highland Pipers – it’s probably a dead giveaway. I thought, this is very interesting and I started looking into it and I thought I’d really like to write about this.
Then something struck me, and I thought, this is someone who’s coming to a big, beautiful French hotel and she’s bringing her own cooks. What was she thinking of? Someone is going to make some boring English dish when she could have French cuisine. I started thinking some more and of course, the more I looked into it, I found there were scandals and there was an assassination attempt and things like that. I have to put all this into a book.
The Queen in disguise – of course noone was fooled
So I made my heroine a young girl of good family who has come down in the world and has become a cook for Queen Victoria and is taken to the South of France with her, where all these dangerous things happen. It was a really fun book to write. I had to go back to Nice, naturally, for a summer and do lots more research there, suffering for my craft every day when I tried out a new bistro.
A girl of good family down on luck
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely and no less a novelist than Louise Penny has praised the book as being warm and gripping and full of mystery and excitement. I know that Louise is the most wonderful novelist herself, but I gather she is also a good friend.
Rhys Bowen: She is. She’s a very close friend of mine and we live very far apart. We keep in touch through email mostly, but we usually see each other in the summer in London. She rents a flat there and we go over and have a wonderful time where we laugh all the time. Of course, this year, that wasn’t possible. She went to London, but I didn’t. I’ve been stuck here.
A monument to the Queen in Nice
Jenny Wheeler: Isabella in Above the Bay of Angels is a trainee chef and there is a lot of food in this book, as there is in your other books. There are details about the meals the Royals ate and what Queen Victoria’s particular likes and dislikes were. Was that fun to research and how did you go about that?
Rhys Bowen: I love writing about food, and I love researching food. People have said to me so often, are you a keen chef yourself? No. I’d love someone else to cook my meals. I’d actually like Mrs. Patmore from Downton Abbey to produce my meals for me. I do like to eat well, and I like good food.
Blackbird pie and other oddities
For this book, I found the recipe book put out by one of Queen Victoria’s personal chefs, so I know exactly what she liked and what she ate for her meals. You would not believe some of the things she used to eat. There really was a blackbird pie with 4 and 20 blackbirds in it and things like that that you just wouldn’t think of. And so elaborate. I mean, just amazingly, awfully elaborate and awful in the true sense of the word too.
It was fun to research that, and to put it into the books.
Jenny Wheeler: I don’t suppose that book is online?
Rhys Bowen: It is. If you go under Queen Victoria, chef, and I can’t remember what it’s called, but it will come out. He’s got an Italian name, which will come to me in a minute. He was her favorite chef when Albert was still alive.
Francatelli’s Cookbook
Jenny Wheeler: It’s amazing, isn’t it, what is online now. I did ask that because I thought it very likely could be.
A sub-theme of that book is also the way junior female staff had to fend off unwanted approaches from men of much higher status than them. I wondered about writing about that topic in a Me Too era when obviously, in their times, they regarded it as being one of the perils of the job. In this book you’re worried about Isabella. Is she going to lose her job by rejecting the approaches, or is she going to have to capitulate to keep her job? How did you handle that?
Accounting for Me Too in historicals
Rhys Bowen: In the era of the Me Too movement, this was a delicate thing to write about, but one that was very much on my mind – the fact that if you were a servant girl in those days, you had no power at all. If you didn’t comply, you’d lose your job and if you did comply and got pregnant, you’d be kicked out anyway. It was a very unfair situation, but it was one that girls faced all the time, especially the attractive girls. Obviously very repugnant to a lot of readers.
In my new Royal Spyness book, The Last Mrs. Summers, which is a complete spoof on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, we have the same thing. We have a couple of occasions in which a man of higher status has taken advantage of a young girl, and my editor was very concerned about writing about this.
Rebecca – spoofed in The Last Mrs Summers
She said, I think you’re going to offend a lot of people. I said, well, it really happened. So she made me write a foreword in which I say, you will particularly find one of these characters really repugnant, but this was something that happened all the time. It was up to these girls to stick up for each other and try and be a safety net for each other at a really bad time. It is something now that we’re very aware of.
How times have changed
Jenny Wheeler: Yes but I think it’s good for people to realize what it used to be like too. It probably gives them a little bit more understanding about some of their own family history, if they have an appreciation, in some cases.
You’ve had an amazing career gathering both popular and critical acclaim. What is the thing in your career achievements that has given you the most satisfaction? I notice you’ve got 113,000 followers on BookBub, which is pretty remarkable, and In Farley Field, one of your recent historicals, gathered a whole sleuth of critical acclaim and awards. What’s the thing that’s given you the most satisfaction?
Rhys Bowen: First of all, I consider myself very lucky that I’ve been able to keep on writing as long as I have. So many people who were up-and-coming writers at the same time as me wrote really good books, got really good reviews, and suddenly their publisher decided they’d had enough and just dropped them and they went into oblivion.
I’ve been lucky that I’ve managed to keep going. I’ve had good reviews all the time, I’ve won awards, my sales have been going up, so all of that is really nice.
Stories that bring comfort
One of the things that never crossed my mind earlier if you said to me, what’s a big satisfaction, is that I get letters all the time from someone who says, your book helped me through chemotherapy, your book helped me when my mother died. And this year I’ve had, your book has helped me to keep going when I’ve had to shelter in place by myself in this pandemic, your books have been a great solace to me. That feels wonderful.
There was one particular occasion that really touched me. A woman wrote to me and said, I want you to know that all night I’ve been listening to one of your Royal Spyness books in my car where I’m watching my house flooding. I wrote to her afterwards and said, did you lose everything?
Historical fiction – Rhys Bowen
She said, yes, I had your books before, but everything in the house has gone. And I said to her, when you’re settled in a new home, write and tell me, and I’ll send you a signed copy of each of the books. She did write and tell me later on and I sent her a signed copy of each of the books.
The year after that, I was on book tour and I was in Houston, Texas, and she came up to me and she said, I’m Laurel, and we hugged each other. That was an amazing moment. It never crosses your mind when you start to write. You think, I’m writing books that people will enjoy reading, but you don’t think, I’m writing books that actually might help people. That’s a really good feeling.
The Twelve Clues of Christmas
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. For those who might like to discover Royal Spyness mysteries right now, you did do one that was a Christmas mystery which I gather is still very popular every Christmas. Tell us about that. Was it The Twelve Clues of Christmas?
Rhys Bowen: Yes, The Twelve Clues of Christmas. It’s a Lady Georgie book at a big country house and obviously it’s based on the twelve days of Christmas. It was fun to write, but really challenging, you know, how am I going to kill somebody with geese? Each day somebody dies in a way that ties in with the song, and you don’t realize this to start with. I want the reader to go, long before Georgie does, wait, isn’t this something to do with the twelve days of Christmas?
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It was a fun book to write and it’s been quite popular. Now I’ve been asked to write another Christmas book, so I’m just starting out writing that one too. The new one’s going to be called God Rest Ye Royal Gentlemen, which might indicate that there’s a few royal gentlemen who are going to come onto the pages of this book.
Jenny Wheeler: Perhaps some of them as dead bodies.
Rhys Bowen: Maybe, yes.
Wintering in Arizona
Jenny Wheeler: You are now splitting your time between California and Arizona, when you’re not traveling the world, doing your research. Tell us how you organize your life around those two points.
Rhys Bowen: We now go to Arizona in the winters, because the winters where I live in California, normally it’s quite wet and cold. I have friends who live in places like Minnesota who would laugh their heads off when I say it’s cold, but it’s cold for me, very similar to New Zealand temperatures, when it’s wet and dreary sometimes.
A favorite read by Jenn McKinlay
We bought a house in Arizona. We have a daughter in Arizona so it’s lovely to be close to those grandchildren because they’ve been growing up. We go there for the winter months, and one of the reasons I like going there is, my life isn’t quite as involved there, so I can have peace and quiet just to sit and write. And we live in a place that’s surrounded by mountains, so I have these lovely views out of the window, and we love walking in the lovely sunshine and fresh air every day. It’s a great escape in the winter.
Jenny Wheeler: Were you affected by the fires in California recently?
Rhys Bowen: The nearest fire was about 20 miles from us, so we weren’t in danger this time, but the air quality was awful. We had two days when you needed all the lights on at midday and the sky was bright orange. It was the most spooky thing you’ve ever seen. We couldn’t go outside for several days to do our walks because the air quality was in the dangerous level. Everything smelled of smoke.
Luckily, I was able to get an air purifier online for my bedroom, so I had that running day and night, but we have a daughter who lived within two miles of the fires. I was worried for her.
Jenny Wheeler: Terrible to have that poor air quality when COVID is around as well.
Rhys Bowen: Yes, absolutely.
What Rhys is reading now
Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Rhys as reader. We’re still The Joys of Binge Reading, we still like to recommend and introduce people to books they may not be aware of. Who are you reading at the moment and who would you recommend?
Louise Penny latest Gamache mystery
Rhys Bowen: The funny thing is that other writers I recommend are people who are my friends. I don’t know which came first, but Louise Penny is a very good friend, and her new book has just come out, All the Devils are Here. All her series with Gamache in Quebec are absolutely wonderful books.
My friend Deborah Crombie has a series set in England with a married couple of detectives in the police force and her latest one called A Bitter Feast was all about the Cotswolds and a wonderful restaurant there, so I really enjoyed vicariously visiting the Cotswolds in that.
The book I’ve just finished and enjoyed was called Paris is Always a Good Idea, and it’s a complete romp about a young woman who’s been a career woman and suddenly decides she’s given up her whole life for this career and goes off to rekindle the romances of her youth in Ireland, in Paris, in Italy. It’s very light, a lot of fun and just the sort of thing I can handle with this pandemic.
Coping with difficult times
I don’t know about you in New Zealand, but here in America where the pandemic is so very frightening, we still have huge numbers and you worry about going out and the people who won’t wear masks and all this sort of thing. I find you’re keeping fear at bay a lot, which means I don’t want to tackle books I normally would, that have violence, that have too much darkness in them. I have to have something that’s light and cheerful at the moment because that’s all I can handle.
Jenny Wheeler: How do you set up your working day? What’s your working process? Do you have certain hours that you sit at your computer or how do you do that?
Deborah Crombie – latest Duncan Kincaid- Gemma James mystery
Rhys Bowen: I’m a professional writer. I write two books a year. I don’t have time to wait for the muse to flutter onto my shoulder. I’m quite a morning person. I wake up quite early and I read my emails and things. These days, my day has been eaten into because we’ve been taking two long walks.
We obviously can’t go out as much, so we have a morning walk and then I go down and do my writing. When I’m doing a first draft, I have given myself to write five pages a day, so I have to do that much. And that depends – sometimes I do that in two hours, sometimes it takes me three, four, five, but I will not let myself stop for the day until I’ve done my five pages.
Rhys’ writing process
I have to go all the way through until I finish the first draft and then I can go back and do polishing and editing and things. I don’t feel the pressure as much because I know I’ve got something down on paper. Then in the afternoon I find there’s a lot of secretarial work. Someone will want me to answer questions for a blog, someone will want me to set up this and that, so there are lots of these smaller things.
And I’m a member of a blog called Jungle Red Writers, which is a fabulous group of women and we have to write these blogs all the time, so there’s a lot of busy work as well as my writing work that I have to do every day.
The Venice Sketchbook – coming next year
Jenny Wheeler: Your five pages a day, how many words would that translate into?
Rhys Bowen: About 1500.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s great. What are your projects for the next 12 months? Tell us what you’re working on now.
Rhys Bowen: I’ve just finished a book that I absolutely loved writing. It’s set in Venice which is one of my favorite places, and it’s called The Venice Sketchbook. It’s another of these books like The Tuscan Child that I wrote, that is set in different time periods. T
his one’s set in three different time periods and it has to do with finding out about some person’s secret life that nobody has known about. It is the sort of book I love to read, where you’re going between two people’s stories and getting a little bit of one and then you get a little bit of the other and one furthers the other all the time.
The Venice Sketchbook
They are really fun to write. The Venice Sketchbook comes out in April in America. I don’t know when it will come out with you, but if you can go on Amazon and see the cover, it has the best cover I’ve ever seen in my life. My goodness, if you saw this across an airport, you would rush and buy it because it’s such a gorgeous cover.
My second book for the year will be the new Royal Spyness I’m just starting to work on called God Rest Ye Royal Gentlemen. That will come out in time for Christmas in November, I believe.
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned The Tuscan Child. That has had quite remarkable international success, hasn’t it?
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Rhys Bowen: This has been my best-selling book to date. I think it’s sold 750,000 copies in print, but that’s not counting the audio and also, in all these different languages. I get these covers from Bulgaria and Lithuania and all these places. You try and imagine people sitting and reading The Tuscan Child in the middle of Syria or somewhere or China. It’s quite amazing.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that is remarkable. Where can people find you online? You’ve got an international audience. How can they find you?
Where to find Rhys online
Rhys Bowen: The easiest way is to go to my website, which is www.rhysbowen.com. There is a little button to click on to email Rhys, and you can also sign up for my newsletter that way, where you get news from me all the time. If you want to know my day to day news, like what I had for breakfast and all that thrilling stuff, how I do my laundry, go on to my Facebook page, which is facebook.com/RhysBowenAuthor.
I do post on that almost every day, sometimes quite trivial, sometimes quite thoughtful, but it’s my daily news and musings, I suppose. I’m also on Twitter and I’m on Instagram, both of which I haven’t quite seen the reason for, but my publishers tell me to do it, so I obey.
Jenny Wheeler: You post on Facebook quite regularly. That’s terrific.
Rhys Bowen: Yes, pretty much every day. And another thing – I’m talking about doing something good. I realized early during this pandemic that there were a lot of women who are my readers who are stuck sheltering in place, and they were on their own and they were lonely.
Keeping readers close on Facebook
So I started doing an awful lot of very trivial discussions on my Facebook like, now it’s autumn I’m going to start to make soups. What’s your favorite soup to make? Then I get 200 replies in an hour. I make this, I make that. And, what’s your favorite comfort movie at the moment? People love to be part of that, so I’ve been doing that very regularly.
Jenny Wheeler: Sounds very canny. Your readers obviously feel close to you.
Rhys Bowen: The people on Facebook really feel they’re my friends, which they are in a way, but if I wrote on Facebook, I cut my finger today, I can guarantee that in an hour I’ve got a dozen people volunteering to type my manuscripts for me.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. Rhys, thank you so much for your time. It’s been great to talk again and I look forward to these new books next year. The Venus Sketchbook sounds wonderful. We will wait for it with bated breath. Thank you so much.
Rhys Bowen: You’re very welcome. Thank you, Jenny. Bye.
The amusing aftermath story
(When I discovered I hadn’t recorded the first interview….)
Jenny Wheeler: I’m so sorry to have put you through that. Can I take your mailing address to get some New Zealand wine to you because I really would like to make sure I say thank you.
Rhys Bowen: Absolutely not necessary. By the time you paid for the postage on it – I would drink in your honor, but you don’t need to send it.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s sweet of you.
Rhys Bowen: These things happen. When I was in Australia, when I was getting married, I was living in Sydney and sharing a flat with a woman who was a premiere radio broadcaster for the ABC. I was working with the ABC at the time and she volunteered to record my whole wedding. At the end of the wedding she realized she hadn’t turned the recorder on. So that happened to her.
Jenny Wheeler: I don’t feel so bad now.
Rhys Bowen: Everybody made the joke that John had bribed her to not to turn it on, so we had no witness to the occasion.
Jenny Wheeler: Well, thank you so much, Rhys. The recording is still going, so we got that last little story, which is brilliant.
If you enjoy Rhys’ historical fiction you might also enjoy Fiona Valpy’s World War II French romance.
LISTEN TO FIONA
Thanks To Our Technical Support:
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