An interview with Jacqueline Winspear, creator of Maisie Dobbs mysteries

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Research, not surprisingly, plays a big part in the writing life of Jacqueline Winspear, creator of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series, which is set in 1930s England.

“The way I look at it, research is an iceberg,” Winspear says. “Only seven percent should be visible above the surface.”

Lucky then that for “An Incomplete Revenge” (Holt, $24), the series’ fifth installment, Winspear could rely on her memories as well as those of her parents. Private investigator Maisie, still reeling from the devastation she has seen as a nurse during the war, sets off to the Kentish countryside on business and ends up probing petty crimes in a village still haunted by a Zeppelin attack. Meanwhile, ugly tensions are brewing between locals and seasonal workers in town to pick the hops harvest.

“In some ways, this is a tribute to the county I grew up in,” says Winspear. “I absolutely love it. Hop-picking was the big event of the year, with a whole culture around it. It doesn’t really exist much anymore in Kent, sadly. The oast houses are luxury homes now, but it was a thing in the `30s, and all the East Enders who wanted a holiday went down and picked hops. No one had paid holidays then.”

“An Incomplete Revenge” also deals with virulent prejudices against Gypsies in the `30s. Winspear’s parents, however, were befriended by a tribe after World War II, and the memory fueled Winspear’s vivid descriptions of the Gypsy camp.

Such serious topics - Winspear also touches on class struggles, economic hardship, staggering grief and the struggle of a nation to pull itself together after a terrible war - lend her novels a welcome edge. And though Winspear now lives in California, “An Incomplete Revenge” allowed her to celebrate what she holds dear about her beloved Kent.

“In some ways,” she says, “I must have been researching this book all my life.”

Why does this time period appeal to you?
It was a time of enormous change, social and technological change, and I wonder: What happens to ordinary people in extraordinary times? The lives of women were changed. This was first modern generation of women to go to war. Imagine, in 1913, there you are in your corset, and there were some women in the workplace, but you pretty much expected your life to be like your mother’s and grandmother’s. Then 1914 comes along, the most dreadful war in history, you could argue, and you go off to do war work. Women worked as munitions workers, code breakers, ambulance drivers. ... They had to go into the workplace to allow men to go to the battlefield. That changed what they wore, overalls and looser clothing. You had to cut your hair, so out came the bob. ... Women became used to a lot of freedom. But it was so bittersweet, winning their freedom. They lost brothers, fiances, young husbands. They lost cousins, the boys they grew up with.

`A generation lost,’ I’ve read.
Yes, there were magazine articles at the time about the problem of surplus women. Women had known grief but had been given tools to have some degree of independence. They had to be responsible for their financial security. They had to build community, or they’d become invisible. Many floundered, but others, as we would say, stepped up to the plate. They traveled, fought for pensions for single women and moved in public life as never before.

I remember women on our street who were single. Batches, they were known as. When I was a kid I was often invited for tea, because I was a child in the area, and they nurtured the children. I think an archetype was born at that time. She turns up again and again in literature - the doughty English woman, no nonsense, extremely opinionated but with a heart of gold. You see her in Miss Jean Brodie and Miss Marple. It’s no surprise this was the great age of the British woman novelist. It’s a great job, one you can do at home with no training.

What was picking hops like?
It was a family affair. My grandparents always went down for hop-picking. They had their special bedding, and they took on the train, the hopper special. You lived in a hopper hut about 10 by 12 feet if you were lucky, and there was a central cookhouse ... but then of course not so many Londoners wanted to come down because everyone got better heeled. But the smell that just hung in the air, there’s nothing else like it. It’s very peppery, a peppery, musty smell.

How did your parents end up living with Gypsies?
After World War II, for Londoners it was hard to get somewhere to live because every place was bombed. ... They found a Gypsy caravan for sale and bought it and refurbished it and took it to a farm in Kent. My dad’s family had always been part of the exodus of East Enders who went hop-picking. They found work at a farm, but in those times there was a level of prejudice against Londoners because they weren’t locals. The people who extended a hand of friendship to them were a tribe of Gypsies. ... They shared their lives for four or five years with these people. Twenty years later people were doing that sort of thing, and everyone said, `Well, they’re just hippies!’ But at the time it was unusual.

Have you learned anything surprising in your research?
I don’t think there was anything that made me think, `Oh, wow, I didn’t know that,’ but I always find out things that touch me deeply. I have been to the battlefields of the Somme, and I’ve traveled to northern France with experts, ... but what I’m interested in is what happened to the ordinary people in these places. I can’t remember all the generals and dates or the military background, though I’ve learned it. What I’m interested in is the impact on the men in the trenches and the people at home. I have little ah-ha! moments, like when I learn that soldiers used crushed garlic to cleanse wounds, something the French used to do. But mostly I am repeatedly emotionally touched by what these people did.

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Connie Ogle is The Miami Herald’s book editor.