It’s always interesting to me how a story takes shape. Interviewers always ask me where I get my ideas and it’s rarely a simple answer. It’s rather like making a cake. You take flour, sugar, eggs, milk, flavoring, whisk them all together and something delicious is baked. That’s the way it is with my stories. I get a snippet of inspiration from here, and idea from there, a person I’ve wanted to spend time with and voila, I have my story.
Or perhaps it’s more like creating a baby. It starts with the tiniest of seeds. It attaches itself, won’t go away, and starts to grow. I work and nourish it. It takes its time and the story won’t come until it’s ready to go ahead. And then, after several months, it is born.
The Rose Arbor was conceived when I read an article a few years ago about the village of Tyneham on the south coast of England. It was one of the villages requisitioned by the British military during WWII to use to practice invasion tactics. One day in 1943 the military arrived at Tydeham and told the occupants they had three weeks to leave their homes. Trucks would be provided to transport their belongings and accommodation would be found for them if they had no relatives to go to. There was no means of appeal. In the war the army had complete power. So the inhabitants had to leave homes they had lived in all their lives, and their fathers before them. They nursed the hope that they could return one day after the war, but that was not to be. The invasion exercises involved live ammo. Houses were reduced to rubble.
Even the manor house of the village was not spared although the army promised it would not be touched. Only the church was left intact. And the village remained off limits to this day. Army property, too much live ammo still lying around. Recently it has been opened to visitors one day a month and a service is held in the church once a year for descendants of the local people. Visitors will see a main street full of pot holes, damaged walls covered in creepers, weeds waist high in the churchyard, trees growing up through the remains of cottages. Nature has taken back its own. It was this image that made an impact on me and sowed the seeds of a story.
What happened to those people whose lives were disrupted? And then, being a mystery writer, I started to wonder what if something terrible had happened there during the war, but was never discovered because the village remained off limits?
And so my heroine is a newspaper reporter in 1968. A child has vanished from a park in London. The whole country is searching for her and there is a report of a child resembling her seen on the south coast. My heroine is in disgrace, having dug into a seedy politician’s life, only to find he was a pal of the newspaper owner. So she needs this scoop. This could have been a straightforward story about finding a missing child. But I had other ideas lurking in my head. One was about children being evacuated during WWII. The whole process was so random. Mothers brought their children to the railway station with labels around their necks and put them on a train. The train stopped at stations in the countryside. Children were off loaded. Farmers volunteered to take one or two. Record keeping was shoddy or non-existent. Children were given a postcard to send home, giving their new address. But what if some never arrived, or were never heard from? How would a parent know where to start looking?
So this becomes a story line going through the book. Is this current disappearance connected to missing girls in WWII? The same policeman is assigned to the case. Does he know more than he is telling? And why does he volunteer to be involved again?
And then the personal aspect creeps into my stories. In the 1960s I was working for the BBC in London. Swinging sixties, Mary Quant, white boots, Vidal Sassoon haircut. I was one of those girls about town so I experienced the change from Carnaby Street chic to the rise of the hippies. I knew people who took over an abandoned warehouse, who dropped out, smoked pot, or wanted to go green, save the planet. Long hair, flowing robes. A complete about face. And I was there. I experienced it so my heroine does too.
Then I thought: what if this becomes personal for her? What if she stands in that abandoned village and realizes she has been there before. But how? Impossible. And could it be in any way linked to missing girls? It was a complicated story to write, like filling in the pieces of a puzzle, but satisfying in the end. One fact we learn about one aspect of the case will fill in one small thing we need to know about another aspect until we have the complete picture. And of course, being me, there has to be a touch of romance.
The Rose Arbor is published by Lake Union in hardcover, ebook and paperback on August 6 and in audio format by Audible. Follow Rhys on Facebook, Instagram and sign up for her newsletter.
An investigation into a girl’s disappearance uncovers a mystery dating back to World War II in a haunting novel of suspense by the bestselling author of The Venice Sketchbook and The Paris Assignment.
London: 1968. Liz Houghton is languishing as an obituary writer at a London newspaper when a young girl’s disappearance captivates the city. If Liz can break the story, it’s her way into the newsroom. She already has a scoop: her best friend, Marisa, is a police officer assigned to the case.
Liz follows Marisa to Dorset, where they make another disturbing discovery. Over two decades earlier, three girls disappeared while evacuating from London. One was found murdered in the woods near a train line. The other two were never seen again.
As Liz digs deeper, she finds herself drawn to the village of Tydeham, which was requisitioned by the military during the war and left in ruins. After all these years, what could possibly link the missing girls to this abandoned village? And why does a place Liz has never seen before seem so strangely familiar?
Suspense | Thriller [Lake House Press, On Sale: August 6, 2024, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781662504228 / ]
Rhys Bowen is the New York Times bestselling author of more than forty novels, including The Venice Sketchbook, nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; The Victory Garden; The Tuscan Child; and the World War II-based In Farleigh Field, winner of the Left Coast Crime Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel and the Agatha Award for Best Historical Novel.
Bowen’s work has won over twenty honors to date, including multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards. Her books have been translated into many languages, and she has fans around the world, including over 60,000 Facebook followers.
Her Evan Evans series, set in Wales, is currently being reissued by Joffe Books in the U.K.
A transplanted Brit, Bowen divides her time between California and Arizona.
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