PW: What is the relationship between your works of fiction and your career as a historian?
CO: I did my doctorate at Columbia on Josef II of Austria, but most of my subsequent research has been on the French Enlightenment. I did work on a particular group of reformists within the Catholic church called Jansenists. In my first novel, Mute Witness, one of the historical characters is the Abbe de l'Eppe, who was the founder of deaf education. He was a Jansenist who had been sidelined by the church, but felt called to some kind of ministry and decided he would minister to the deaf.
PW: What about your current novel, Black Gold?
CO: I did research on the slave trade, and through that kind of reading began to wonder how the slave trade affected not only the slaves but the people who sold them and transported them.
PW: How did you become a novelist?
CO: For 30 years I was a teacher and researcher, but in 1994, as I retired from the classroom, I wanted to make another career, but still keep my interest in history alive. I decided to be a historical novelist at that point. I retooled my mind to think as a novelist, to have my characters experience events, rather than me describing them.
PW: Was the transition to fiction writer hard?
CO: It took three years of training with a colleague in an independent study format. The hardest thing I had to do was back away from academic kinds of writing and into true fiction, and write a thriller instead of a research paper.
PW: Do you use specific events in history to provide a structure or framework for your mysteries?
CO: I was more interested in making the social history of the time accessible to readers, rather than exploring specific historic events through my fiction.I set out at the beginning to do a series that would bring me into the French Revolution. In the three or four years prior to the Revolution, things were changing rapidly. I knew that there were certain specific episodes that I could draw into the story that would illustrate the trends of those years, such as the Affair of the Queen's Necklace. This badly discredited Marie Antoinette and also illustrated the rather free-wheeling financial operations of the time.
PW: How did you come up with your heroine, Anne Cartier?
CO: I wanted a woman who could be a sleuth, to some extent, but with reasonable limitations. I looked at people I knew from history. I looked at Sadler's Wells in London and found female acrobats and slack-rope dancers and thought, if I want an active woman who can move around and look after herself, what better background than a music hall entertainer?
PW: Your novels are enriched by descriptions of genuine 18th-century artworks.
CO: Something I enjoy doing as a novelist, and I hope the readers enjoy it, too, is to bring in the art and architecture of the time. The Clark Art Institute, near where I live in Massachusetts, has one of the greatest collections of Huguenot silver in the country, and I plan to work with that at some future date.
PW: What does the next mystery featuring Anne Cartier and Col. Paul de Saint-Martin hold for us?
CO: In Noble Blood, the novel I'm working on right now, I bring in another historical episode. Marie Antoinette was in an intimate relationship with a Swedish count, and that reaches a high point in May and June of 1787. It shows how boxed in the queen was; she didn't have a single friend. The count carefully destroyed the most interesting part of their correspondence in the early days of the Revolution, but I can use my imagination to at least indicate that there was a secret correspondence—and that it was important to some very nasty people.
