Guest Post - Allison Montclair

Please welcome Allison Montclair to M&MM.  She grew up devouring hand-me-down Agatha Christie paperbacks and James Bond movies. As a result of this deplorable upbringing, she became addicted to tales of crime, intrigue, and espionage. She now spends her spare time poking through the corners, nooks, and crannies of history, searching for the odd mysterious bits and transforming them into novels of her own.

The Marriage Bureau Idea
For the past two and a half years, I have been living in 1946. I am the author of The Right Sort of Man, the first of a new mystery series set in post-war London, featuring Miss Iris Sparks and Mrs. Gwendolyn Bainbridge, the proprietors of the Right Sort Marriage Bureau.

This came about when Keith Kahla, my editor at St. Martin’s Minotaur, alerted me to the existence of a real-life marriage bureau that was set up and run by women beginning in 1939. The idea of a marriage bureau was a novelty, and a business founded by women was even more so. It was not a time and place with which I was overly familiar, but I am someone who likes diving headlong into eras in search of the odd and the obscure, so the prospect of tackling this was intriguing.

I knew immediately that I wanted to shift the time to the period after the war. I didn’t want to have a war-time setting, with our intrepid heroines sneaking around after curfew, tiptoeing through the Blitz and so forth. The post-war period was a fascinating time, particularly for women in England. Many had taken over for the men in a variety of settings, and while some would cede their new lives to the lads returning from demobilization, enough did not or resented the prospect so as to mark another step in the long march to women’s equality. There was also a shift in the political climate of the country, which brought in Clement Atlee and a Labour Party government, and of European politics in general with the Cold War picking up where the shooting war had left off.

I wanted both of my ladies to have come through the war damaged. Not much is written about the aftermath on the women of WWII. Many British women died for their country, and many more lost loved ones. I wanted Iris and Gwen to find each other as friends, and for their fledgling business to be a source of strength and healing. And when it is threatened by the murder of one of their clients, allegedly by the man they had set her up with, for them to draw on hitherto unsuspected resources in finding the truth.

The research has been great fun. Rationing, a fact of life back then, played a major role in this first book, and the myriad ways it affected daily life were fascinating. I have also enjoyed learning about the fashions of the period, and how designers worked within the limitations placed on the amount and types of fabric used, the ornamentations, and so forth. I also learned that no man knows the meaning of the word “peplum,” but all women do!

The second book is written and turned in. The writing of the third has commenced, and I have been signed for a fourth. I look forward to see what happens to Iris and Gwen next.

And I look forward to 1947!
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THANK You Allison.  I will have a review coming shortly to this unique new mystery series, so stay tuned.