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An Interview With Jacqueline Jacques Author Of 'Colours Of Corruption'
"Although Wales is where I was born, I feel such an affinity with Walthamstow, London, where I grew up, that the town features in most of my books."
AmeriCymru spoke to Jacqueline about her previous work and her current novel ''The Colours Of Corruption'' and about her future writing plans.
Buy The Colours Of Corrution here
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AmeriCymru: Hi Jacqueline and many thanks for agreeing to this interview. You currently live just outside London and were raised in Walthamstow. What is your original connection with Wales?
Jacqueline: I was born in Wales on a wild and snowy night in February. My father was an army instructor in Anglesey and he and my mother set up home on a pig-farm in Ty-Croes. I went back in my mid-forties to try and trace my roots and there they were: a hearth stone in the middle of a field! I still have relatives in Llantwit Major, Mumbles and Cowbridge.
AmeriCymru When did you first become interested in writing?
Jacqueline: I knew from a very early age that happiness lay in books. I was one of those very shy little girls, tucked behind my mother’s skirts or sat in a corner, sucking my fingers, watching and listening to the grownups’ chatter and storing it up for the future. Or I’d be reading ...
I could read at two-and-a-half and devoured stories of every sort. When I was ten or eleven I discovered the marvellous Louisa May Alcott and her book ‘Little Women,’ and identified immediately with Josephine March. I knew then I was going to be a writer. In fact, when the Beatles wrote ‘Paperback Writer,’ I thought they’d written it just for me! One of these days ...
But it wasn’t until my own children had grown up and left home, and my mother had died without fulfilling her own writing ambitions, that I finally decided that it was now or never. I joined a Creative Writing class and discovered that I could write short stories and articles and get paid for them. I even won competitions. The tutor said – ‘I don’t know what you’re doing now but give it up and write!’ Eventually, I did just that. I took early retirement from teaching and haven’t looked back.
AmeriCymru : We learn from your biography that most of your novels start as short stories and develop from there? Do you also write short stories and if so are any available in anthologies?
Jacqueline: I don’t write short stories now. I took a tip from Beryl Bainbridge who said she didn’t waste ideas on short stories when she could write novels. I need scenes where I can ‘act out’ the plot (I wanted to be an actress at one time), wallow in the words and show the development of the characters. By the end of any book the characters must have changed in some way and a short story doesn’t give them enough scope, in my view. I do have a story in Luminous and Forlorn , an anthology published by Honno Modern Fiction and in ‘ The Smell of the Day ’ (New Essex Writing) and in various small press publications that were around at the time (some 20 years ago, when I started my writing career.)
AmeriCymru : Your latest novel Colours of Corruption is set in Victorian Walthamstow. This was your first foray into the field of crime fiction. How did you enjoy the experience? Can you tell us a little about the book?
Jacqueline: A few years ago, I won a place on a writing scheme run by the Writers’ Centre, Norwich, called ‘Escalator’. The ten winners were awarded an Arts Council (East) grant which enabled us to have ‘writing time’, to do research and to have mentoring in a new fictional genre. My then agent had advised me to ‘go darker’ on the strength of two earlier novels (one still unpublished) so I decided on crime fiction. I have to say I didn’t read ‘crime’, though I loved watching it on TV with my husband, who is addicted to the genre. I didn’t want to write yet another formulaic book about ‘police procedurals’ or private detectives or forensics. There are other writers who do it better than I could, who have more experience of modern policing methods. I wanted to write from the point of view of ordinary law-abiding people caught up in criminal activities through no fault of their own. I love History and I love Art and I love Walthamstow so it was easy to combine the three in a story about a Victorian police artist, Archie Price.
This is Archie ( see gallery below ) – a photo by Julia Margaret Cameron. She called him ‘Iago’ but clearly he is Archie Price, an artist from the Valleys. If he hadn’t painted he’d have gone down the mines or followed his father into the butchery business.
Archie is quite taken with the looks of Mary Quinn. See above another photo taken by Julia Margaret Cameron:
Mary is a poor Irish cleaning woman, widowed and childless. After drawing, from her description, a man she claims to have seen near the scene of a vicious murder, Archie invites her to sit for him, thinking her an ideal subject for his new ‘realistic’ style. Reluctantly she complies but, in selling the finished portrait to a rich and portly ‘entrepreneur’ , Archie manages to involve them both in a web of intrigue, involving murderers, thieves and sexual predators and Mary is forced to flee for her life.
This is how ( see bove gallery ) I imagine Lizzie Kington, Archie’s first love, who chose instead, to marry Archie’s friend John, a tile-maker and the steadier of the two. Since receiving a head injury, however, from a couple of thieves, three years before in Epping Forest, John is now addicted to laudanum and making life miserable for his wife and their toddler, Clara. In trying to help the Kington family Archie inadvertently exposes them, too, to the gravest of dangers.
I certainly enjoyed writing the book, doing the research, exploring the characters, their secrets and failings, and plotting the story, deciding who was to live and who die, and bringing it all to a believable conclusion, helping Archie to solve the crime, in fact, with a little help from his friends.
AmeriCymru : Your first novel, Lottie was described by the New Welsh Review as being - "...something of an oddity, and all the better for it." How would you describe the book?
Jacqueline: They say a novelist’s first book tends to be autobiographical and ‘Lottie’ is just that. The characters are mostly people I knew at school and the story is based on a pact we made (and never kept) about meeting up in London every eleven years when the day, month and year were represented by the same numbers – 6/6/66, 7/7/77 and so on up to 9/9/99 and the new millennium. In the story the pact turns out to be cursed, and Fate (or the supernatural ‘Lottie’ named for the allotment where the blood-pact was made) makes serious trouble for any girl who fails to keep the appointment.
I tried to imagine the turns a woman’s life might take, given her personality, her ambitions, her loves, loyalties and superstitious fears. This story turned out to be a cross between a crime story and a fantasy, but ’incredibly prophetic’ according to one friend who recognised herself as one of the characters. The others aren’t speaking to me!
Yes, it is an oddity, not following the accepted format of any known genre. As such, booksellers found it hard to slot onto any particular shelf. And, though Beryl Bainbridge, Bernice Rubens and Ruth Rendall all liked its quirky character, had Honno not spotted its potential I doubt it would have been published.
AmeriCymru: Your 1997 novel Someone To Watch Over Me was a great success and led to a publishing deal with Piatkus for two sequels. Care to tell us more about this experience?
Jacqueline: I was thrilled to bits when Darley Anderson, the agent, agreed to represent me, on the strength of ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ and got me a two deal with Piatkus. I couldn’t believe my luck having , a few months earlier, had Honno publish ‘Lottie.’ ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ was the first (of three) books about the psychic Potter family and their experiences during and just after the Second World War in Walthamstow and in Newcastle-upon-Tyne where I did my degree and met my husband. I loved doing the research for these novels, learning such a lot about clairvoyants, psychic healers and mediums, and imagining the joys and pitfalls of being able to see ghosts and read people’s minds. In the last book about the Potter family, ‘A Lazy Eye’, I tried to put myself into the shoes of a little girl ‘with a third eye’ who finds it all so puzzling and upsetting.
Imagine my disappointment when the book-covers (in which I had very little say) reflected none of the trials and tribulations of being clairvoyant but showed sweet and pretty Mills and Boon girlie-girls. I felt I wasn’t being taken seriously at all. These covers were such a mistake, so misleading. People wanting Mills and Boon love stories would have been disappointed and people interested in psychic gifts would have passed the books over, thinking they were romances. Little wonder, then, that I went as dark as I could for the next book, so there could be no mistake about its subject.
AmeriCymru : Your 2004 novel Skin Deep is certainly a science fiction thriller with a difference. How did you become interested in cryogenics?
Jacqueline: There was a lot of interest at this time about freezing body parts for transplantation into bodies that needed, say, a new heart, a new lung, a kidney or even a face. I actually met a woman and her husband who have elected to be cryogenically frozen when they die in the hope of being resurrected when a cure is found for whatever killed them. It set me thinking about brain transplants. Who might benefit from them and who would have had the opportunity for such grisly experiments? Questions like these took me back to the war and the Nazi labour camps.
AmeriCymru : What are you working on at the moment? Can we expect another novel soon?
Jacqueline: I am writing a sequel to ‘The Colours of Corruption’ in which Archie confronts the combined problems of Victorian pornography and the miseries of being stalked. I also spotlight the question of euthanasia.
I do have, ‘in the bottom drawer’, so to speak, a contemporary crime story about a woman teaching art in prisons and her gifted student who has his own agenda. This is a finished novel but needs some work to make it publishable.
AmeriCymru : Any final message for the readers and members of AmeriCymru?
Jacqueline: I would urge any reader of AmeriCymru who is contemplating a writing career to get on with it. Don’t leave it, as I did, until you have more time. Make time. Put down your knitting and rug-making and write. Stop playing games on your Ipad. Write. Publishers like to invest in young authors. Experiment with the different genres early on, choose one and concentrate on that. Life is shorter than you think.
