I always intended to be a writer – and to begin ‘tomorrow’. Tomorrow took a long time coming and meanwhile I worked as a director in a London publishing firm, William Kimber, editing military, theatrical and other memoirs together with a fiction list of ghost stories and romances. I learned a lot about the world of writing there, but not much about what it was actually like to be a writer – I was too busy being a publisher.
Tomorrow did eventually come. I married my American husband James Myers and for some years we had a commuting marriage between Paris, where he then worked, and London, where I did. Crazy looking back on it, but it seemed a good idea at the time – particularly as it was there that I dreamed up my first series detective, Auguste Didier, a half French, half English master chef Victorian and Edwardian times. His cases are now available as ebooks. I’m now a full time writer, and I’ve returned to the kitchen with my Nell Drury series. Nell is chef at Wychbourne Court, a stately home in Kent; she’s working over twenty years later than Auguste though, in the 1920s, in an England greeting the future while still licking its wounds from the First World War. Her third case, Death and the Singing Birds, is now available, as is Tom Wasp and the Seven Deadly Sins, the third case for my Victorian chimney sweep Tom Wasp and his apprentice, young Ned.
And Harriet? She unexpectedly came into my life when I needed to differentiate between my crime writing and my writing of sagas, historical novels and suspense. She took me by surprise, but grew to have a much loved identity of her own. She was saddled with two sisters in the way of pseudonyms, too, Alice Carr and Laura Daniels. But the changing times have brought about changing names too, Alice and Laura have almost disappeared and Harriet herself is resting on her laurels with her first five books now in ebook form, and now I use Amy Myers for all my writing.
I also write reviews of crime novels for Shots, the crime and thriller ezine. If you don’t already know this wonderful site, visit www.shotsmag.co.uk
Times have certainly changed since I first dreamed up Auguste Didier. So have publishing and writing. I haven’t the slightest idea where either of them is heading, but I know where I’m heading now. Back to see how Marsh and Daughter are doing with their latest case, The Maid of Kent Murders.