Exclusive interview with author Judith Flanders discussing her new murder mystery in the Sam Clair series
By Gabrielle Pantera
“Women, particularly middle-aged women, are often overlooked,” says A Howl of Wolves author Judith Flanders. “I could use that overlooking as a jumping-off point. If nobody notices you, then can you do things, see things, that, as a central character, with everyone looking at you, might not be possible.”
In this fourth book in the Sam Clair Mystery series, Samantha Clair wants to support her neighbors and goes to see the play in the West End, accompanied by boyfriend Jake Field and a Scotland Yard detective. The play is quite gruesome. At the beginning of the second act there’s a dummy hanging from the rafters. But it’s not. It’s the director of the play Campbell Davison.
The actors are horrified. Who killed Campbell? Jake starts investigating. Sam can’t help but investigate too. As she learns more about Campbell she finds out the director was not well liked. The suspect list is long.
“The inspiration for the series as a whole was the idea of a woman whose business is stories, an editor in a publishing house, becoming part of a story herself,” says Flanders. “The inspiration for A Howl of Wolves wasn’t dissimilar. It was the idea of being at a play, in the audience, being a spectator, and suddenly becoming part of the story.”
“We have this default notion that ‘detective’ = ‘man’, and that when it’s a woman detective, we need to have that descriptor – ‘woman’ – in front of the word,” says Flanders. “If I were writing about a policeman, and it were 1897, then that would be true, but it hasn’t been the case for a very long time, so I think, as women do in every job every day, I should just get on with it.”
“I did work in a publishing house,” says Flanders. “And, I did get to go to a Paris fashion show, as Sam does in the first book of this series. It was so wild, so outside anything I had ever experienced, that I wanted to write it down. Then I realized I was, instead of editing a story, telling one. What I am doing with Sam is putting in the centre of the picture a person who conventionally is depicted on the side.”
Flanders says she likes to pretend her research is arduous. “In reality, I have lunch with my publishing friends and listen to them talk. I haven’t quite reached the stage of writing things down under the table, but it’s come close a few times.”
For A Howl of Wolves, Flanders read books on stage management and talked to many people working in theatre to learn the process of getting a play from script to stage.
“With all of the books, one of my big concerns is getting the vocabulary right,” says Flanders. “I know when I read about publishing, or about writers, it’s often not the broad outlines that are wrong, but a turn of phrase, a word here or there.”
Flanders works as a historian writing about daily life in 19th-century Britain, and sometimes ranging further afield. “I write social history, the history of daily life, mostly about 19th-century Britain, but sometimes ranging further afield,” says Flanders. “So, in a way, it’s the same job: I listen, I read, and I tell stories about what I’ve read.”
Flanders was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award for her first book, A Circle of Sisters, for the British Book Awards history book of the year for The Victorian House, the Los Angles Times history book of the year for The Victorian City, and for the CWA non-fiction Gold Dagger for The Invention of Murder.
Flanders is based in London, where she was born. She grew up in Canada.
Website is judithflanders.co.uk and you can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.
A Howl of Wolves: A Mystery (Sam Clair) by Judith Flanders Series: Sam Clair (Book 4)
Hardcover, 304 pages, Publisher: Minotaur Books (May 15, 2018), Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1250087836, $26.99
