Louise Hare’s debut novel This Lovely City met with critical acclaim. So her second, very different offering, Miss Aldridge Regrets, should have been a daunting proposition.
It wasn’t.
Hare says the writing of her murder mystery set in 1936 on board the iconic Queen Mary cruise liner was “great fun.”
A glamorous page-turner laced with issues of race and class, it features singer Lena Aldridge, a working-class, mixed-race girl who passes herself off as Italian. Abandoned by the mother she barely knew, grieving the death of her dad and dumped by her married lover, she wants to escape the seedy London jazz club where she is working when a suspicious sudden death occurs. Life is grim until a stranger offers her a dream chance to star in a Broadway show and a first-class ticket on the Queen Mary bound for New York.
London based Hare – who was in Glasgow for the Aye Write Festival last week – reveals the latest novel, like her first, began a short story as part of an MA in creative writing at Birbeck, University of London.
She told P.S: “They kept trying to make me write short stories, which I wasn’t good at. So I wrote this short tale, originally set in 1950, about a jazz singer who witnesses a murder and then has a ticket to travel to New York. The feedback was, ‘then what happens?’ So I started thinking about what might happen on the ship, how it would be linked to the murder she witnessed in the club and how it would be put together. I then thought it would be good to set it in 1936 because Hitler was in power and so many interesting things were happening politically during that period.”
Hare – who wrote the first draft in 2019 editing it during the pandemic – revealed her inspirations were in part Nella Larsen’s 1929 classic Passing, a universal story of hypocrisy, fear, secrecy and betrayal and the explosive relationship between two black women – as well as the relationship of the Duke of Sussex and Megan Markle.
The author – who is herself mixed-race of Nigerian descent – said: “I love Larsen’s Passing. I had read it not long before, and it was around the time of Megan and Harry; racism and how she looked white. I thought it was a really interesting angle to discuss. A lot of people do think racism is based on skin colour, but it is more complicated and I wanted to show that.”
She added: “Unlike my first novel, this one is in the first person and it has one main character.
“So I really got into Lena’s head, which is a bit messy, but really fun to write. I found it a lot easier than the first novel because it was more light-hearted.
“Although I do discuss issues around race and class, the murder mystery takes precedence. My research was watching episodes of David Suchet’s Poirot on TV,” she laughed.
And we haven’t heard the last of Lena. She revealed: “I am writing another book which is going to follow on, almost to the very day that the last one finishes. It will be a mystery for Lena to deal with when she is New York. I have written the first draft.”
Single Hare, 40, worked in the travel industry before she landed her two-book deal, revealed: “It came at the right time but since the Covid-19 pandemic my old job doesn’t exist anymore. Writing is my dream job.”
Miss Aldrige Regrets – Louise Hare, HQ, £14.99
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