A Body in the Bayou blog tour is through Rachel’s Random Resources and includes an author guest post. Share, comment, and follow Sarandipity’s.
Book Details
A Body in the Banjo
It’s November 1958 and Dagenham is excitedly awaiting Bonfire Night. Cissie Partridge isn’t too keen on fireworks but she generously donates to the local children doing Penny for the guy. Cissie is content with her lot. She loves her husband Harold. She shops, she cooks, she reads at every opportunity and she volunteers at the Dockland Settlement. Observant and sharp, she gets on with all her neighbours. Then, one morning, she finds a body…
Purchase Links
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Body-Banjo-Cissie-Partridge-Mystery-ebook/dp/B0G1KZ52TK
Author Bio
Elaine Spires is a novelist, playwright and actress. Extensive travelling and a background in education and tourism perfected Elaine’s keen eye for the quirky characteristics of people, captivating the humorous observations she now affectionately shares with the readers of her novels. Elaine also writes plays and her short film Only the Lonely was made by Dan Films and won the Groucho Club Best Short Film Award 2019 and two Silver Awards at WOFFF 2019.
Social Media Links – Facebook.com/ElaineSpiresAuthor
X @ElaineSWriter.
Instagram @elainespiresauthor
Author Guest Post
Writing About What You Know
When asked about what advice they would give to would-be novelists, established writers will often say, “Write about what you know.” I’m not going to argue with that. My novels have always been set in a world or place that I know well.
My first novel started out as a stage play. It’s called What’s Eating Me — available as are all my books on amazon.co.uk for Kindle or paperback — and it was performed in London at the (then) Anna Scher Theatre and also at the Edinburgh Festival. Once the performances were over I couldn’t let go of Eileen, the heroine, and so I decided to turn the play into my first novel. Eileen lives in Romford — an area I know well — and she’s an obese woman, a compulsive eater. The world of compulsive overeating and everything that goes with it is one I know well, having been a compulsive eater for most of my adult life.
When I moved onto my next books, I had been working as a tour manager taking groups of single tourists to various worldwide destinations and it seemed logical to write about singles’ holidays. It’s a fascinating world. It’s a world full of diverse, interesting characters, many with problems and baggage that they take away with them, and added to all this, they’re single! Many are looking for love — not all of them. Lots of them just find themselves travelling alone for a myriad of reasons — timing, business responsibilities, holiday allowance to use up, recently bereaved, divorced or separated or simply those who want to visit a certain part of the world and are happy to go with strangers. And strangers soon become friends. A lot of my friends are people who I met through being their tour manager. They’re all wonderful and I love them dearly
Then there are the locations, which become another character in the book themselves. I wrote six books in the Singles’ Series all set in different locations, including one, Singles At Sea, on a cruise ship on the Norwegian Fjords, and they were places I’d been to and knew well, especially Antigua and Ibiza, which had both been my home at one time.
You might think that writing the four novels in the Dagenham Story Series would be easy because I am a proud Dagenham Girl. Well, writing two of them was — The Banjo Book One and The Banjo Book Two — because they cover 1950s — 2020 and I was alive then and so much was based on my own personal memories plus recalling the many stories and memories my parents shared during those Sunday tea-times when we all sat and ate together. My parents, especially my Mum, loved talking about her own childhood in Dagenham. My Dad was one of eleven and had so many tales to tell. But the first two books in the series, A Village in the Country and A Town In Essex, are set 1918-1947 when I wasn’t alive so a lot of research was involved. However well you might know the subject, location, era of your novel you will always have to do some research. For so many writers, Google has become a beloved friend. I used it a lot while writing my latest book, A Body in the Banjo, a cozy mystery set in Dagenham in 1958. I used it for things like the weather in November 1958 and the TV schedule and police procedures of that time. But there are other forms of research you can do.
Probably though, my favourite resource is people. I have found that people are more than willing to help with book research and enjoy recalling the past. My Dad’s only surviving brother, My Uncle Tony, has been a tremendous help and resource for my Dagenham Story books. Also, on Facebook there’s a group called Memories of Dagenham and members have been more than willing to chip in whenever my memory fails or I need a few extra details.
There is, of course, great satisfaction in writing about something you don’t know. It’s a challenge and must be extremely satisfying, as long as you get it right, of course. Unfortunately, I’m too much of a coward to try. So for now I’ll stick to writing about what I know, and that’s a second Dagenham-based cozy mystery featuring Cissie Partridge, which will be out late spring.
