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S.J. Bennett, "The Queen Who Came in from the Cold" (Crooked Lane Books, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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- [01:31]
S.J. Bennett
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
C.P. Leslie
Hello everyone. I am C.P. leslie, the host of New Books in Historical Fiction, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I'm speaking with S.J. bennett about the Queen who came in from the cold, number five in the Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series. Like many people born in the UK at any point between 1953 and, say, 2010, Elizabeth II will always be the Queen, not a queen. She ruled for so long that most of us can't really imagine any other contemporary person in that role. So I approached this series from that standpoint, coupled with a certain admiration that anyone could turn Elizabeth into a solver of crimes. But as you can see from this excerpt from the latest novel, it's all done with great respect and a sense of humour. Isn't Mrs. Jones vile? I loathe her. I just hate her to the depths of my being. I want awful, disgusting things to happen to her. Is that terrible of me? I have visions of her stripped of that gaudy dress and dragged through the streets. You should have been there, Pav. I'll have her rendition of let's Fall in Love going through my head for a week. She deserves rich punishment for that, at the very least. Pavel Mikhailovsky listened to the disembodied voice coming from the speaker he had rigged up to the telephone receiver in his basement flat. Pavel was good with wires and technology. He had been building radios since childhood. The speaker, combined with a microphone borrowed from the BBC, was a neat little technological solution to the problem of staying in touch with loquacious friends and demanding clients while getting on with the task at hand. He still had work to do tonight. You love her. Admit it, he said, picking up a stack of bills and glancing through them. You're just jealous. Oh, Tony, are you joking? The man is tiny and outrageous and so bourgeois. And now please join me in welcoming S.J. bennett. Hello, Sophia. I look forward to talking with you today.
- [03:30]
S.J. Bennett
Thank you very much for having me. Carolyn, how did you get started writing.
- [03:33]
C.P. Leslie
Fiction and this series in particular?
- [03:36]
S.J. Bennett
It's something I wanted to do since childhood. I really. I've always been a reader, but I particularly fell in love with books the age about 8 or 9. Wanted to do it since then, but I was too scared to try. So I've done various jobs. I've been a management consultant and an academic and things. But I finally got the courage to write when, just before Harry Potter came out and I read about the American deal that J.K. rowling had, and genuinely reading that gave me the courage to quit my job and try and become a writer. And I was a children's writer for a while, and I actually had J.K. rowling's editor, Barry Cunningham, who discovered Harry Potter, so that was very exciting. And I worked with him for about seven years, and then I shifted into crime fiction because that's what I'd grown up loving, particularly Dorothy Sayers and Rex Stout, I would say, were my two favorites. And I didn't have a detective. I was trying to think of a really good one and it wasn't working. This was back in about 2018, and then I just suddenly had the idea that Queen Elizabeth ii, who was alive and well at the time, in her 90s, could have been a brilliant detective if she'd wanted to be. She was curious and clever and obviously very, very well connected. And as soon as I had the idea of her being my detective, then really the whole thing took off. And I've been doing that ever since.
- [05:10]
C.P. Leslie
That's great. Not all the books are historical. In fact, the first three are all set in 2016, when the Queen is 90. Could you give us a quick summary of those novels and how Queen Elizabeth gets involved in solving them?
- [05:22]
S.J. Bennett
With pleasure. When I had the idea, I still vividly remember the evening when I began to think, oh, my goodness, here is somebody who not only has the observational curiosity to solve crimes, if she wants to, but she lives in these incredible settings. And so I thought, oh, I know what I could do. I could set a murder at Windsor Castle and another one at Buckingham palace, another one at Sandringham where she stayed for Christmas, another one in Balmoral in Scotland where she stayed in the summer. And the first three books are therefore set in those first three places. And the place is really set the tone and the style of the murder for me. So the Windsor Knot, the title came first and it was my husband who said, well, if it's called the Windsor Knot, like the tie, then it really should have somebody who is strangled or hanged. So we start off with somebody who is found with a rope around his neck. And it looks as though maybe there's Russian involvement and MI5 think Putin might be behind this, but the Queen doesn't think so. And so she gets her fairly new assistant private secretary called Rosie to help her find out what was really going on on the night of the murder. I like to think of it a little bit. It's sort of a locked room mystery, but with a thousand rooms in the palace. And then. So that's set during the Queen's 90th birthday celebrations and it's set very, very much day by day around what the Queen was really doing in April 2016. And then the next book is set in Buckingham palace and that's to do with the Queen's art collection. And as soon as I discovered that there was a swimming pool in Buckingham palace where the Queen learned to swim, I thought, okay, that's where my murder is going to take place. So a housekeeper is found dead beside the swimming pool and that takes place in the summer of that year. And then at Christmas, the Queen has just got to Sandringham by the sea in Norfolk for a very well earned rest and family Christmas. And a severed hand is washed up on the beach bearing a gold signet ring. And it's the Queen herself who, from photographs, recognizes the signet ring and recognizes the owner of the hand. And she's off again solving that crime.
- [07:52]
C.P. Leslie
To you, I'm glad you mentioned Rosie Oshodi, because I absolutely loved her. I was almost sad to see her go. Although we'll get to Joan McGraw in a minute. She's a wonderful character too. So tell us a little bit about her and then we'll come back to the Queen's relationship with Prince Philip, which is another thing that I really enjoy with this series.
- [08:09]
S.J. Bennett
Thank you. I'm so delighted you asked me about Rosie, Carolyn. I knew that I couldn't write the book until I had my sidekick sorted out. And as I said, Rex Stout and the Nero Wolf mysteries are something that I've loved from childhood. And I really adored the character of Archie Goodwin. And so for listeners who don't know, Nero Woolf sits in his brownstone in Manhattan and he doesn't really move, he just likes tending to his orchids and eating really, really good meals. And he sends out Archie to sort of tramp the streets of New York and do the actual investigating. And the Queen, for very different reasons, can't tramp about London asking the people that she needs to talk to. And so she needed a sidekick. And I wanted it to be a woman. And I wanted that woman to have the role that I interviewed for in the 1990s, actually, in Buckingham palace, which was the assistant private secretary. So there is the private secretary who is the man who really organizes the Queen's schedule and her political life and is very, very important in the palace. And then working for him directly, there's somebody, obviously a bit more junior who particularly works on the diary and things like that. And I wanted this to be a woman of color because I was teaching writing in London at the time. I live in Tooting in South London, and my students were largely women of color and the people around me, my neighbours, largely are. And I just wanted it to feel like a real London contemporary story. So in the end, slightly inspired by one of my students, actually, I came up with Rosie, who is the granddaughter of immigrants from Nigeria who came two generations ago. They were very poor. Her grandfather worked in morgue in London washing the bodies, which was a job that a lot of immigrants had in those days. They didn't get to do much. And Rosie has. But like the Queen, eldest child, eldest daughter of parents with high expectations. She's done very well at school, she's joined the army, she's become a captain, she's fought out in Afghanistan and she became a sort of poster woman for the British army, a successful black woman, but she didn't actually like that role very much. And now here she is working at the palace and it's through her eyes that the reader sees what it's like being at court and how complicated the Queen's schedule is and that kind of thing. And Rosie is brave sometimes to the point of foolhardiness. She's very curious too. She's very, very discreet. And the Queen very quickly learns to tr. And so they end up really solving the mystery together. I'd say the Queen always makes the final deductions that actually solve the crime. But Rosie contributes 50, 50 as she's going through talking to people and observing things that the Queen might not necessarily be around to see.
- [11:09]
C.P. Leslie
I actually didn't mind Rosie's risk taking behavior. It's a thing of mine. I hate it when I'm reading a novel in some, you know, child out of the parlor in say, oh, I don't know, 18, 15 or something, goes racing down alleys at midnight and surprise, runs into the murderer. But Rosie actually knows what she's doing. I mean she's, she's got that military background and she can defend herself and she, it just seems to be part of her personality.
- [11:35]
S.J. Bennett
Oh, I'm glad you think that. I mean that's, that's certainly what Rosie would tell you. It's like, yeah, I'm a trained military officer so, you know, just because I've been told not to do this because it's dangerous doesn't mean to say I shouldn't. And one of my favorite scenes, I know a lot of readers favorite scene. There's a particular scene in one of the books where Rosie is being followed by somebody on the London Underground and you start to see it from the follower's perspective and she's in real danger. And I love it when that scene turns. I had fun blocking it out with my father. I always try and block the action scenes out with somebody who knows more about it than I do. And it involves Rosie knowing her self defense techniques. That was a really, really enjoyable chapter to write.
- [12:23]
C.P. Leslie
I remember that one. Yes, it was fun to read too. So the Queen's royal status imposes certain limitations. You've mentioned the fact that she just can't, you know, leave the palace and go out and do things. But there's more to it than that. I mean she, she can solve mysteries but she can't be seen to have solved them. And I thought that was a really interesting twist.
- [12:41]
S.J. Bennett
It does feel like a particular quirk of this series. And I have to say I've made life very difficult for myself because we watch as readers as Rosie, we watch the Queen solve the crime, but we then have to watch her choose somebody else to take the credit for it. Because as a constitutional monarch, it's not her job. And she's very aware of what she is and isn't kind of allowed to do. It's the police's job or MI5's job to do that. So she has to find somebody, always a man, usually somebody he's actually been very antagonistic in the process. And the Queen has to find a way of making him think he solved it. And I have some fun chapters where he mansplains to her how it was done. But we know that he only knows because the Queen has set him up to take the credit for this. Yeah, it's difficult, but it's really enjoyable to create that kind of structure.
- [13:34]
C.P. Leslie
And there's quite a lot of mansplaining, actually. I mean, one of the reasons that the Queen ends up relying on these female assistant secretaries, assistant private secretaries, is because half the men in her life are busy shielding her from the realities that she's perfectly well capable of dealing with.
- [13:52]
S.J. Bennett
I feel very mean about that because, as I say, with my interview for the role and the fact that my father worked with the Queen, sort of met her several times because he was in the army. I have met these men and I know them and they are charming and they are not mansplainers. But there's an element of comedy in the book, and I have met many a mansplainer in my time, in my working life. So I've borrowed. Borrowed some of my experiences from there and given it to these poor people who are fictional characters in the book. They're not based on the real men. But, yes, I wanted. In the end, all of these books end up, I think, having quite a strong feminist core because they are about women in a man's world. And I was watching the news while I was writing them, and the G20 would meet and there would be two maximum three women among the 20 people. And I talk about skirts in the sea of trousers. I think we still live in a world very much where women in positions of real power are vastly outnumbered by men. And the Queen from her generation has had to find a way of navigating that. And actually to antagonize the men doesn't work. It causes more problems than it soul. So she's found that to let them think that they have more control than they really do, that seems to work for her. I think Rose is a little bit more annoyed by it, but she lets the Queen obviously decide how it's gonna work.
- [15:20]
C.P. Leslie
One of the things we see, especially in the book set in 2016, is We get these lovely insights into the Queen's relationship with her family members, especially Prince Philip, whom she describes as her rock. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that, because I have this mental image of the photograph that appeared in the Times at his funeral, where she is just sitting there alone in the church, looking lost. And you can really sense her sense of grief there in a way. It's one of the most human pictures I think I've seen of her. So could you talk a bit about their marriage as you perceive it and explore it in the series?
- [15:58]
S.J. Bennett
Absolutely. It's been a. One of my greatest pleasures to write. And if ever I'm stuck on a scene and kind of wondering how to get the story moving, I always think, oh, just bring Prince Philip in. That will move things along nicely. Before I do, it's interesting that you bring up that photograph and I know that we'll discuss this later, but I think this photograph encapsulates it. At the time it was lockdown and there were very, very strict rules on who was allowed to go to funerals, and it was very few people. And that the tragic stories that we heard over and over again were awful. But Boris Johnson was our Prime Minister and he had said to the Queen, look, you know, you can do your own thing. I mean, Boris was very much one for, you know, people in power can break the rules if they want to. But he said to the Queen, you know, it's different for you. You can have more people, you can do it differently. And she had said, no. And this is the Queen that I write about. You know, that picture is there because she said, I, I am not going to do anything differently from what my people have to do right now. And if that means that this man who's been at my side for 70 years, you know, if, if he, if he has to have this very, very, very quiet burial, if I have to sit alone while he has it, then that's what we're going to do. So that photograph really sums her up for me. And the fact that, you know, even after all of the service that she could in the country for such a long time, she, she still operated that way. I thought that was pretty amazing. But in terms of their marriage, when I got that, that's when I finally found the style of the books, which is humorous but respectful, I would say. There's not everything about the monarchy that I respect, but their marriage I did. So it's based on long term marriages that I've observed that are very successful, where the man is an alpha male and the woman has learned how to kind of let him have his head while she, she still carries on and gets things done. So there's a lot of times when Philip is loudly complaining about something and telling her how to fix it, and she, as we know, is in the process of already fixing it, but she lets him think that it was his idea. And they kind of, they tease each other a bit and they get on each other's nerves a little bit, but whenever she is really vulnerable or sad, he notices and he is the one who will comfort her. And I think that was very true. And he's the only person, of course, who just treats her like a normal human being. And he calls her cabbage and sausage, which she likes. And he's affectionate that way. And yeah, it's a very human marriage and I've really enjoyed that kind of give and take between them.
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S.J. Bennett
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S.J. Bennett
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S.J. Bennett
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C.P. Leslie
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S.J. Bennett
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- [20:34]
C.P. Leslie
Yes, I like to underline that the book is exactly that humorous. The whole series is is humorous but respectful. I mean, I, I think this probably isn't as common anymore, but I, I actually grew up in the UK and my mother was a Queen Elizabeth wannabe. Right? She, she had the style, she had the. And And I was raised to think that you never write about the. The royal family because they can't fight back. Right. So. So I. When I first was pitched these. This series, I was kind of like, wow, I'm gonna. How am I gonna handle this? But as soon as I read it, I. I was just completely taken. Really handled it very well, thank you.
- [21:13]
S.J. Bennett
I'm very aware that they can't fight back. And I did think for ages, can I do this? Should I do this? But I realized, I mean, I had been thinking about the series, the Crown, when I first had the idea. I think the first two seasons were out by then, and I felt, oh, I know the Queen better than Peter Morgan does. There are lots of little aspects of her character that I would like to include. Her sense of humour, I don't think was ever fully captured by the crown, her sense of mischief sometimes, and mimicry. Peter Morgan has been doing this for years. And in fact, Alan Bennett, who I'm sadly not related to, but the playwright and comic writer, he has written a couple of plays about the Queen and a book, the Uncommon Reader, which is very popular, and various other authors have as well. There is a British tradition of writing about the Queen. And I thought, oh, I'm just kind of writing in that tradition, really. But at the same time, I did feel I'm writing about real people who. Who can't fight back, and I'm not going to write cruel things there. If I disagree about something and there are things I disagree about, then I'm just not going to include that. What I did want to do is just is capture this woman who remained surprisingly humble and who thought of herself as being a kind of a servant of the people rather than the other way around. So I wanted to capture that and at the same time, the absolute glamour of living in these palaces and traveling around between them. So, yes, there was a lot that went into it and I haven't been told to stop. And I know that they know about the series, so I think they're fine with it, as far as I know.
- [22:51]
C.P. Leslie
Yeah, I think you handle it very well. As I said, I was really impressed. So let's get to the historical novels now. I mean, I can understand that only so many things can happen to the Queen in one year without people starting to wonder what's going on. I often think this about mystery series, in fact. I mean, do people normally run into dead bodies once a month?
- [23:12]
S.J. Bennett
I know. I mean, Jessica Fletcher, if we think about her, she was running into them all the time.
- [23:17]
C.P. Leslie
So with Book four, Death and Diamonds. The novels go back in time to 1957, in fact. Why did you pick this particular year?
- [23:25]
S.J. Bennett
I had always decided that once I'd written my first four novels, in the end it ended up being three, set in more or less contemporary times. I was going to go back and I had a long reign to write about. So I wanted to do some set in the 50s and 60s, some in the 70s and 80s, some in the 90s. And for the 50s and 60s, I thought, well, I'll go from the middle of the 50s to the middle of the 60s. And I was born in 1966. So I thought, well, I'll end there. And I had thought, I'll start in. In 1956. And that was the year the Queen met Marilyn Monroe. And I thought that would be really interesting. But the more I read about 56, the more I kept on hearing about 57. And in 57, the Queen was sent to Paris and Copenhagen and Ottawa and Washington and New York, all in that year by the government to try and build bridges with our allies. Because after the war, our alliances had got a bit shaky, and the Queen was our kind of big diplomatic tool. So there she was, as you say, she was a relatively young woman, just turning 30, and she was still feeling her way as Queen because her father had obviously been a man among men and he taught her how to rule. But it was different for her. You know, she was a young woman among men who didn't necessarily always take her seriously. And the country was coming out of austerity, and. And as I say, its alliances were shaky. And all of that really reminded me of where we were when I was writing. So we too were coming out of austerity and our alliances were shaky. And it just. It really resonated with me. So I thought a. I've got all the wonderful places that the Queen travels to that I can write about and indeed do. Starts in Paris, pretty much ends in New York. And also I can sort of have this flavor of a nervous UK kind of wondering what its place in the world is. Which was the country that I was. I wanted to describe.
- [25:32]
C.P. Leslie
The assistant Private Secretary Here is Joan McGraw. You mentioned in your author's note that Joan is based on your two grandmothers. So what should we know about her and the woman who inspired her?
- [25:43]
S.J. Bennett
Well, when I was coming up with Rosie Ashodi, I wanted a woman of color and I wanted a woman from a Commonwealth country who would kind of represent that side of contemporary life. And going back in time, that wasn't just. It wasn't realistic to think that somebody like that would have been allowed to have such a role. But I wanted a working class woman. And that's when my grandmothers came in. One was a secretary in Manchester to start with, and my father's mother was a nanny to a wealthy Scottish family. And then she did smocking piecework after that and then brought my father up. And it must have been amazing for my grandmother Jessie to go from, as I say, nannying for a family to her son guiding the Queen round the Tower of London one evening at a dinner. It's amazing to think in those days how one could kind of change one's social position. But yes, my grandmothers were both clever women, underestimated, and they didn't work at Bletchley Park. But I do think that had they been put there, they would have absolutely thrived in that kind of code breaking wartime environment. And they were that age. So Joan is like that. She did fantastic war work, not only at Bletchley park, but other places. She stayed true to her principles. She was punished for it. And then after the war, she couldn't talk about what she'd done because nobody did if it was secret. And the Queen finds her as a typist in the Buckingham palace typing pool. But she happens to be multilingual and has a photographic memory and is very, very discreet. And as soon as they find themselves in a lift together, the Queen thinks, oh, here is somebody that I can get on with. And Joan thinks, oh, wow, here's somebody I can get on with. And Joan becomes the first of what turns out to be this kind of secret society of assistant private secretaries who help the Queen solve crimes.
- [27:47]
C.P. Leslie
The Queen who Came in from the Cold, as its title suggests, takes place in 1961, during the Cold War. Again, why that particular year?
- [27:55]
S.J. Bennett
Well, it's so interesting that particular year, purely at the time, because it was halfway between 1956, where I was gonna start, and 1966, where I planned to finish that trilogy. And I didn't know much about 1961 and goodness, it was a fascinating year. So in my first trilogy of books, I would say the place is really the sort of the third character in the book. So be it Windsor Castle or Buckingham palace, but in the Queen who Came in from the Cold, I would say that the year is the third character because it is the time of the Bay of I need to get my dates right, but it's the time of the Bay of Pigs. Ian Fleming has started writing the James Bond series. John Le Carre is about to start writing about George Smiley and his series. The Russians are winning the Space Race. Yuri Gagarin is about to go into space. There's a lot going on and we're on the cusp of the world really changing. So I'd really describe that post war, slightly down at heel world in 1957 in a death In Diamonds, which is. It's a book, a story about a dead escort and her client. It's quite seedy. And in 1961 we're moving towards the UK becoming more sexy and glamorous and powerful. So it was just a particularly interesting year to write about. And it's a story that starts off as, I think, I would say, a classic detective story that could be an Agatha Christie, slightly based on the 450 from Paddington and then it shifts into more spy thriller territory halfway through.
- [29:43]
C.P. Leslie
Yeah, I think that's a very apt description. The Mrs. Jones of the opener is not exactly who she appears to be. What's the context there?
- [29:52]
S.J. Bennett
That was fun. And it starts off with a journalist complaining to his friend over the phone about a miserable evening that he's had with Mrs. Jones and her husband. And Mrs. Jones is actually Mrs. Armstrong Jones and she is Princess Margaret, who has recently married Tony Armstrong Jones. So that was her name. But yes, the journalist is a friend of Princess Margaret and he just found the evening insufferable and, and is complaining to his friend about it. And it is Tony Armstrong Jones and his connection to the vixen that will kind of drive the first half of the plot.
- [30:28]
C.P. Leslie
Right. The mystery, as you hinted with the 415 from Paddington reference, starts with this trip to Scotland on the royal train, one that includes Princess Margaret, Tony Armstrong Jones and then the unexpected arrival of one Sandra Pole, whom I assume is fictional. Before we get to the mystery itself, could you set the scene for us, please?
- [30:50]
S.J. Bennett
As you say, my editor said he wanted a mystery set on a train and certainly it starts off that way. So we start with the royals heading north with their staff, including Joan. And there is this very annoying character, Sandra Poe, who we'll talk about, who is a very unreliable witness. And she sees, she thinks, a body being kind of tossed into a heap on in a field, but nobody else sees this happening as the royal train is passing and nobody really believes her and she has disgraced herself in the evening in question and got very drunk. So we have this unreliable witness and this possible murder mystery, but nobody seems to be taking it seriously to start with. Meanwhile, a photographer friend of Tony Armstrong Jones has gone missing in London and we as readers know that something bad has happened to him.
- [31:57]
C.P. Leslie
Fair enough. Joan McGraw is back in this book and so is Hector Ross, whom we didn't talk about from Death in Diamonds. What can you tell us about him and them and their relationship at this point in time, which is four years after we first meet them?
- [32:11]
S.J. Bennett
Joan was accidentally billeted with Hector during book one. Well, so book four in the series during a Death in Diamonds. And there was a plot to try and discredit her during that, but it didn't work. She and Hexa. Hexa is very senior in MI5 and they get on tremendously well and they are now an item, but kind of a secret one. And Hector is in charge of trying to manage the various spy scandals that are coming out. It's thick and fast. And also the victim seems to be involved with Russian Soviet defectors, and Hector is in charge of sort of trying to find out what's going on there. And Joan seems to always be one step ahead somehow because it's connected to the royal family and she keeps on finding out useful information. I love writing about their relationship because, again, two intelligent people very much trying to obey the rules and not talk to each other about their jobs, which are both very secret. But there does come a point when Joan decides that enough is enough and they should really just talk to each other because if they combine forces, they can be much more successful. So there is a moment where Joan does her hair and cooks him a lovely dinner and tries to see whether she can use all her feminine wiles to persuade him to let her help out a bit more obviously with what's going on.
- [33:55]
C.P. Leslie
So, as the title suggests, and you yourself have suggested, the action reflects Cold War tensions, but one of the fun parts of these books for me is watching the Queen herself develop, especially in these earlier books. Is there anything you'd like to say about that?
- [34:10]
S.J. Bennett
I really enjoy doing this. I mean, it's interesting now that there's the real Queen and there's my fictional queen, who is slightly adjacent, who is a cross between the real Queen and lots of Golden Age detectives, really. So Lord Peter Wimsey. I'm a huge Dorothy Sayers fan, as I've said, a little bit of Nero Wolf. And in those days, the detectives tended to be tended not to make mistakes, you know, tended to be these kind of glorious golden figures. So there's an element of that. My queen is. Is very ethical, very moral, very considerate. She. She's the one who notices if if somebody is going to suffer as a result of political decisions that are going to be made and, and who wonders whether that is. Is fair or right. She doesn't want anyone to suffer as a result of her own personal decisions. And I do feel sometimes maybe I am just kind of imposing that on her because it suits me as a writer. Although the more I read about and hear about, my research shows up about her that does tying very much with the Queen that people who knew her well also knew. So that's really nice. But I put her in all these moral quandaries where what she should do with the information that she has is go to the police or go to MI5 and tell somebody what's going on and get them to fix it. The problem for her is if they do that, it will cause problems for her, publicize things that she doesn't want people to know about. I'm being very careful here for plot reasons. So she has to walk an incredibly fine line between protecting things that are really important to her and doing the right thing. And I really love writing those scenes. There's also a moment towards the end of A Death in Diamonds. So the book before where it turns out that there's a plot, there had been a plot involving a young Prince Charles who had just gone off to school, to boarding school as a young boy. And it's being kind of bandied about that, oh, there was this plot that would have caused harm to Prince Charles, but it's fine. And the Queen's knees buckle underneath her and she needs to sit down. And I try to portray her as, you know, as a real woman, a real mother, a real wife, desperately trying to juggle all these real feelings while at the same time seeming to float above it all, because that's what the general public and her advisors kind of expect of her.
- [36:55]
C.P. Leslie
I have to say that in addition to her family relationships and the kinds of things you were just talking about, there are a lot of corgis and racehorses in these books. And they kind of humanize her as well, I think.
- [37:07]
S.J. Bennett
Well, I mean, that's where she was at her most relaxed. And I mean, you can imagine she was famous from birth. She was very much like Charlie Temple, I think. Real similarities. Both of them also seem to retain their sense of humanity throughout their very, very famous lives. But, you know, super famous. And animals don't care whether you're famous or not. Animals just they behave if they're going to behave, they don't if they're not. And I imagine she found Tremendous peace in that also. She was extremely good with them. If she hadn't been Queen of England, she could have been a horse trainer, she could have been a dog breeder and dog trainer. And she was really very good at it. So it's lovely to see her. There's a lovely story that a surgeon tells called Sir David Nott, who worked in Syria when the bombings were really going on, and he was working in hospitals, trying to save children's lives while under attack. And he would go out and then come back to London in one of his times, coming back. So this was when the Queen was in her 90s. He sat beside her at a lunch, I believe, at Windsor Castle. And she was sort of saying, what do you do? And he was telling her, but somehow, because it was her, he was more overwhelmed than he normally was. And it's happened a lot to her. You know, people became overwhelmed. And he found himself just. He couldn't talk, thinking about what he'd been going through. And the story, the way he tells it is the Queen just said, oh, let's feed the dogs. And she sort of motioned to a footman and he bought some dog treats. And during lunch, they didn't really talk so much. They just fed the dogs together because that's what he needed to do. And he found that empathy really extraordinary. So, yeah, the Queen and Animals is definitely something that I thoroughly enjoy bringing in, and I know readers enjoy it, too. What would you like people to take.
- [39:01]
C.P. Leslie
Away from the Queen who Came in from the Cold and the series as a whole?
- [39:04]
S.J. Bennett
Above all, a good read, I hope. A book that they really wanted to put down so that they could get meals cooked and go to sleep, but that they kind of found that they couldn't do that because they just needed to know what happened in the next chapter. So above all that, because that's what I love about what I think of as a good book, a good book that makes me, yes, a little bit less efficient in my own life, because I'm just drawn into the story, but also the time. Everybody I know finds the times that we're living in dark and scary. And the people who are in charge of us don't always seem to know what they're doing. I don't always seem to have the best of entertainment. And so I like to create a little shelter of a world where the person in charge does know what she's doing and does have the best of intentions. And it may be slightly fictional, but it is based on somebody real and a woman, somebody who exerts her power with discretion and, as I say, with empathy. And yes, I think if readers can take solace from that or inspiration from that, that would be lovely too.
- [40:22]
C.P. Leslie
And what if you Are we going to get Queen Elizabeth 6?
- [40:27]
S.J. Bennett
It's written already, so the 1966 book that I've been referring to. I looked up what the Queen was doing then and she was on tour in the Caribbean in 1966 on board Britannia. So we've got five weeks of her sailing from island to island, but inevitably there's been a death on board early on and as usual, nobody seems too worried by this apart from the Queen. So yes, she and Joan have to set to work again and work out what happened. It's quite fun because as the series goes on, I mean, I didn't really say but in A Death in Diamonds, a 57 book, the Queen has to solve the crime because Prince Philip's alibi for the night in question is not good. She is it, and she knows that he wasn't with her, and so that's why she's got a personal stake in it. And in book six, the one that's coming out next year, Joan is the person who is known to have disliked the victim more than anybody else. So this time the Queen really needs to help Jane get out of a hole.
- [41:39]
C.P. Leslie
I'm glad to know that. I'm looking forward to it. I've really enjoyed the first five. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us today.
- [41:45]
S.J. Bennett
Sophia, thank you so much for having me. It's been lovely.
- [41:48]
C.P. Leslie
And thank you for listening to our podcast once again. I'm C.P. leslie, the host of New Books and Historical Fiction, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. And today I've been talking with S.J. bennett about the Her Majesty the Queen Investigates series, of which the latest installment is the Queen who Came in from the Cold. Find out more about her and her books@www.sjbennettbooks.com. like us on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok ewbooksnetwork. You can find out more about me and my books@cplesd.com, where I blog about the interviews and in general discuss history, historical fiction and the rapidly changing publishing industry. Goodbye until my next conversation about historical fiction. On the new book. Sam.